Wednesday, June 16, 2004
[[
*gimme a pump! I said, "PUMP ME QUICK!"]]
That was a phrase oft heard during my three day kayaking expedition... God, I don't ever want to see another godforsaken Southern Island or choppy waters for some time to come. Don't get me wrong okay? The experience was worth it no doubt, but I won't wanna be repeating it anytime soon alright? Anytime in the near future...hmm...future...hmm...make that
distant future...
::echoes::
Day before expedition [Sunday 13th June]
Went out with Gughan,
again, to play some LAN, get our asses thrashed, and to talk about some serious shit problems in our lives over Big N' Tasty and cheese burgers. Wanted to get some studying done with him, but as usual, time didn't allow...I really gotta stop such outings.. They're eating up my studying days! By the time I got home,
viola, I only had the night to pack my stuff for the expedition. So
like Donovan, packing and doing things at the last possible minute. *smirks* Amazingly, I could fall asleep without much hassle...probably was due to the fact that I slept only at one plus after finishing packing...
Day 1 of the expedition
Arrived early at the Big Splash to repack my bag and stuff all my stuff into Ziplocs provided by kind ol' Gabriel. We set off after leaving behind unnecessary stuff. First thing i noticed about the expedition: the distance we trained for in the training sessions were like probably, 1/5 of the daily amount of kayaking we had to do as we island hopped. This was bad news, considering I considered training tough. I got quite seasick on the first day as when we rafted up together, the waves pushed at our boats and caused our boats to slam against each other, which really ends up in quite a bad experience if you end up with headache/seasickness like me. Afterall, I DID eat a breakfast meal at Macs and drank a large Coke before setting off. My partner was a canoeist called Joyce. We came late to the beach, and had to settle for the salem (is that how it's spelt? it's sure pronounced the same as the cigarette brand though) which meant we had no luggage compartment and it was unstable and not really suited for expedition purposes. And it wasn't even
our boat to begin with! Orry stole ours...the normal expedition one..leaving us to ask friends to help stuff in OUR luggage into THEIR boats. Hmph. We found out just how unstable the salem was after taking it out to sea in choppy waters in the shipping lanes. Every ten minutes the water level would rise to our thighs, then we would pull over and pump out the water like mad. (Pido: You would have laughed if you saw us, the up-down motion of the cylinder like pump...with water jetting out of the nozzle at the top.. haha!) After pumping out water, we found out we were the last in the group with the rest
far ahead. Paddling as fast as our tired arms (from pumping *smirk*) would allow, we caught up to the bunch of them rafted up ahead. And yet we were granted no quarter or rest! Minutes after our arrival, the instructor began leading us to continue again! And trying as hard as we could to keep up in the choppy waters, after ten minutes the kayak started filling with water again. And thus repeated the process for the whole of our kayaking experience for day 1. After what seemed like an endless session of kayaking, we reached our destination: Saint John's Island. Quite a nice island actually, with quite a view of the city skyline at night, but alas, it lacked sorely in ventilation with little or no wind at times. Pasta was on the menu for dinner and after showering and eating, we settled down to a night of starlight sky and truth-or-dare (though we did only truths, sigh) with Jon Chan, Eddie, Joy and Esther. We fell asleep after that, though the heat was enough to wake Joy up several times. Jon himself knocked me awake once, and after that I sat awake, looking across the water and the sky for an hour or so.
Day 2 of the expedition
Woke up to a nice morning. Found out that with sleeping in the open, sunlight tends to wake you up earlier. Usually light only filters into my room by 11, thus you get the idea what time I wake up at. Anyway, after a sluggish start with breakfast and washing up and packing up the campsite, we dallied somewhat until 10 plus. I took the time to set things straight with someone I needed to set things straight with for a long time. After breakfast while waiting for the expedition leaders to call the shot to leave St John's, I took a nap. Just as I was really starting to sleep, Joyce shouted for me to get up.
Sigh I knew another day of hard paddling awaited me. Trudging to the beach we set off. We had lunch at Pulau Jong, a mysterious 'hamburger' island in the middle of shipping lanes. It was little more than a rocky island with a beach that could be measured in feet, with an abrupt rocky wall with lotsa vegetation on top of it. There, after lunch, we set off. My salem had problems launching off with the violent waves lapping at Pulau Jong and eventually got caught between two rocks. Knowing how fragile the fibreglass boat was, I quickly hopped out and pulled the salem out from the rocks with my partner still in the backseat. The wave then sucked out the boat further and the hull of the boat then crushed my leg onto some hidden rocks at the bottom of the water. I fell and threw out my hand onto what I thought was sand only to find I had placed my hand on another bit of sharp rock! Thank god I was wearing gloves. I lifted up my leg from teh water to get into the canoe and what looked like minor scratches leaving white lines later started bleeding until the whole area was blood red. When I saw it I got a shock and used sea water to clean the wounds.
Ahh, so shiok I then hitched a ride on the bumboat to the next destination: Pulau Hantu Besar, as an invalid. Once we reached Pulau Hantu I unloaded my stuff from my friend's canoe and again proceeded to wash up, set up camp and eat dinner and slack around. I found out that my handphone and mp3 player short-circuited due to seawater despite Esther's double Ziploc bag... ah well. Got round to a
fantastic shower (remember the cuts?) and slacked around waiting for dinner. Dinner was nice too, with rice, curry vegetables, potatoes and sweet-and-sour fish. Jon and I went back for seconds. After dinner we had astro lessons and I discovered people I could talk about blackholes, singularity, wormholes and Superstring theory without them going
huh? We had a talk-cock/tell-joke session around a bunsen lamp and later, without, with Jon, Orry, Adrian, Joy and Eddie. Hilarious fun at night with the wind like a fan constantly set at level 3. All kinds of jokes were told: racism, religious and blondes, not to mention lame ones. For some reason the others had to leave, leaving me only with Joy...
*idiots abandoned me! you'll pay i swear... After they came back we tried to tell somemore jokes but to no avail and eventually settled for sleep on the grass near the beach. This time the wind was simply fantastic and with the nightsky clearer than the previous night, our attempts at another session of truth-or-dare failed and I dozed off when we were supposed to ask Joy a question. I was awoken later by Jon to move to the ferry area to sleep. The conversation went roughly like this:
Jon: Don! I turned on your phone. It works! It asked for a PIN. We gotta go man.
Dono scratches stomach
Dono: Hmm..
Dono goes back to sleep.
Jon whacks Dono, and he awakes with a start.
Dono: Wha..? What's happening?
Jon: Gotta go la, canoeing captain said must evac to the ferry.
And so I 'evac-ed' to the ferry, grabbing my sleeping bag and shuffling to the ferry. I found out later that there was a sighting of a centipede on the grass of the beach and the captain ordered all to sleep at the ferry where there was concrete ground. Bah. I woke up at 4am and found Eddie shifting to sleep next to me and asked him to accompany me to the toilet which had no lighting. Surprisingly, the island didn't live up to its name and no
hantu confronted us. And so ended the second day without further events happening.
Day 3 of the expedition
Opened my eyes at 7. Finally awoke at 7 plus. Talked with friends as we packed up our sleeping bags. Found out that we could sleep till 8. Fell back asleep till 8. Got up for breakfast which was fish and coleslaw. Took group pictures before warming up again for the return trip. Took back my stuff from Esther and put it into a Ziploc bag and took my 4 packages of luggage and decided to dump them on the bumboat instead of the kayaks. We set off for a grueling long distance kayaking trip from Pulau Hantu all the way back to Singapore. At this point I guess I was pretty used to kayaking long distance and the motions of the waves so getting seasick or really tired wasn't much of a problem, though my arms and side abs started hurting since I was twisting to row more efficiently. We had to cross the shipping lanes again, which I was really starting to curse, seeing that how lousy the salem was in trying to control the direction in such choppy waters. Can't be helped, really...since the damn boat's so light. We rowed. And rowed. And rowed. And rowed. And rowed. By now my lovely cuts were still hurting and so I decided to tap into the pain sadistically. I agreed to 'sprint' with Joyce, using the pain as motivation. As a result, every so often, I would be screaming a warcry and
chiong ah! and we would paddle 5 to 10 hard, fast and long strokes and the salem would leap forward, provided it was on rather still waters. However, this monotonous tune changed at about 2 plus when we reached the waters of Sentosa. We were supposed to kayak around it but there, the currents and waves were really treacherous with a slightest current pulling us nearly 40 degrees off course and the waves really high, threatening to capsize us. We survived ten to fifteen minutes in those waters before one really high wave took us down. We were the first to capsize but not the last. Thank god the salem had no luggage inside and all my stuff was on a bumboat. We hauled up the salem onto the bumboat and sat there, spending the next hour or so rescuing other boats from the water and also recovering others who did not capsize at all since the expedition leader aborted the expedition halfway. We were already running late at 4.30 recovering boats and stacking them on the bumboat. Believe me, things are heavy and hard enough to load onto the bumboat without the sea waving up and down. We proceeded back to Singapore via bumboat with about 7 or 8 kayaks loaded up onto the boat. Even with the motorboat, the journey took fairly long and Matthew and I were shocked at how much more had to be covered after rounding Sentosa... No way would we have been able to cover such a distance back and it would have definitely been late by the time we beached up at East Coast. After reaching the East Coast, we proceeded to launch the boats back into the water and kayak back to the shore. The last three: Benny, Orry and I ended up swimming back to shore for lack of boats. After that we hosed off at Paddle Culture and helped to hose off the boats and equipment as they came backin batches. I recovered my wet and sandy luggage and found out that my handphone and mp3 player was wet again! This time, my handphone didn't work again and seawater even went behind the damn screen! I found out later that the phone was irrepairable. God, I really should have listened to my parents and not bring it to the trip. Idiot. I didn't stay for debriefing. I showered, changed, and left for home withmy dad waiting for me at the carpark at Big Splash already. Came home, unpacked my stuff, soaked my dirty clothes and proceeded to blog down my experiences. I still felt as if the floor was moving! After finishing with abit of the experiences I decided I needed my sleep and went and hit the sack.
`donovan. |11:00 PM|
