While folks are either celebrating Hari Raya or just bumming around during the holiday, I went on a hiking trip with 8 others. 2 days 1 night trip from Gopeng to Cameron.
This trek starts from the Gopeng fruit orchards through the palm oil estates cutting pass the orang Asli villages and through Kinta forest, passing another orang Asli village and climb up to Tahan Rata in Cameron Highlands.
This trip was a real leechy experience for me and thought me not to under estimate the power of leeches. You might think "Heh.. it's just leeches, bite, then let it bite lah" well that was what I thought too. I had a total of 41 leech bites when I completed the 35km trek. If you think that is a lot, my trek buddies topped me with 50+ bites. Salt, alcohol, tobacco, insect repellent and even Bygone did not help much… Kinta forest was laughing at us. I can hear Kinta’s soul mocking us “all those are kids play, welcome to the real deal” HAHAHA ok… it’s dramatic but honestly I can’t find another way to describe the experience.
I can continue for pages, raving and ranting on the Kinta forest (I call it leech valley), and all the back to back bad luck that we faces, but this is a food blog… I'll get to the more stomach filling portion of the trek.
Taken from my Facebook description...
"Can't cross the swelling river, raining heavily, freezing cold, wet clothes, LEECHES EVERYWHERE, no tent, and I was thinking to myself...I CANNOT sleep here with the leeches...HOW HOW... stand and sleep? Then this was the part where I wore my poncho even when I was already wet (too cold ma) and sat on a tree root. I felt the leeches up my body, arms, legs, neck... I lost it. My low low lowest point during the trek.
...then there's fire! AMEN!"
Alang, one of our guides "saved" us with building up a fire. When it stopped raining, we collected water from the river using bamboos. Crumpled leafs were stuffed in the opening of the bamboo to make sure nothing gets in and also to keep the heat in while the water is boiling. The water filled bamboo is placed against the fire and let boil.
20 minutes later, hot water and cooked noodles. I popped an egg into my noodles and Korean instant noodles have never tasted so good. The small tray of eggs which was carried in a recycled paper tray were still perfect. None cracked. (Don't spend your money on plastic egg carriers, those pasar malam recycle paper trays works the best.)
The night was cold... and leechy... so many stories to tell... but fast forward to the next morning.
The Campbell Mushroom soup with oats I made wasn't as delicious as the noodles last night. Maybe because I knew I would be out of leech valley in an hour and am really not interested in anything other than crossing that darn river. We had to sleep in leech valley because the last river that we were suppose to cross before we reach the orang Asli kampung was at least a grade 3..maybe 3.5. From the looks of it, I wouldn't even want to raft on it, definitely a big No No if you are asking me to cross it.
I had the soup at about 6am, along with crackers and a peanut butter and jam sandwich. Should have eaten a heavier breakfast because my stomach started calling out to me. Breakfast didn't even last me for 2 hours.
While taking a break, there was this bunch of orang Asli kids making fire. Very interesting because when the fire was big enough, they emptied their bags which was filled with tapioca! I was so so so tempted to ask for a piece but ... hehehe shy la. The tapiocas was skinned and thrown into the fire. Alang mentioned that they were armatures in burning the tapiocas. The white surface turned all black very quickly from all the ash and coal. The elderly orang Asli would have been able to burn the tapioca but still able to maintain the “whiteness” of the tapioca.
It was another couple of hours walk until we reached Bharat tea farm in Tanah Rata where it started to rain again!... but everyone was just glad we made it out of leech valley in one piece.
Email me at eatfirstthinklater[at]gmail[dot]com or
Drop me a message here =)
