:: Life of a software engineer, and now a program manager ::

:: Sunday, April 20, 2003 ::

I've organized a white water rafting trip in Sg.Sedim, Kulim last Saturday. We started the journey at 7.40am, and reached Kulim Hi Tech Park at about 8.20am. Waited for the guide to bring us to Sg Sedim, but he was nowhere to be seen, so me and my friend S went to the toilet (in one of my company campuses). Unfortunately I did not bring my badge and IC, so they won't let me in. I told them my employee ID, and it was still active, but they still insisted on the IC until I belasah them properly. I mean, my company invested thousands of dollars to build the indentification system to ease the employees' verification, and there she was requesting for the IC. Sigh, in the end, after a few minutes of argument she let us in to use the toilet.
At 9.00am, the guide was still MIA, so I called him up again. In the end we managed to contact him, and only reached Sg. Sedim at 9.40am. The first thing we did was to test our bravery, and the white water confidence test was a bit too much for me. We basically had to jump down from the bridge to the river and paddle downstream. And I seriously didn't have the guts to do it as it was more than 4 meters (hrm...maybe 5). So I stood there for more than 5 minutes whereas everybody jumped down the river courageously. In the end one of my colleagues pushed me down without my knowledge...*aaaaaaaaaaaa!*. So I became the flying human that very instant and went straight into the water. Well, at least I went in...
Next event, tubing. This was the most fun event I've been thru, where we had to hike about 5 min up to the top of the river and sit on a tube to paddle downstream. The rocks hit my butt every now and then, but in the end I learned the technique, so it was kinda fun for the rest of the journey, with the fast and furious water current pushing me down the river...
Last event was the water rafting itself, and 5 of us were allocated for each raft. Apparently one of the newspaper's reporters was also there to write an article about this, and our pictures were taken. Hehe, dunno when is the big time for them to release the photos (not that I look nice in it anyway, but will find the article just for rememberance). There were a few interesting rapids, there's elbow fall, sandwich rapid, and kiss rapid. We went past them without any raft overturned. So our guide took one opportunity to kenakan us kaw-kaw. He asked us if we've seen tongkat ali, and being curious, we said no. So he asked us to ALL lean on the left side of the boat. We followed his orders, and the whole raft overturned. Five of us cursed at him and threatened to kill him...:P. But it was fun to experience that, although at first I couldn't find one of my sandals (thank God it floated).
After all the energy exertion, we went for the free lunch (well, it was included in the package). The guides were good enough (most Malays are generous) to offer us nasi lemak before our orders, and 2 bottles of gassy drinks to fill in our stomachs.
And after that heavy meal, he drove us back up to our cars. In the end we were all given a certification of participation in the full rafting training. Hehe, we're now the certified participants of white water rafting!
In a nutshell, it was really fun, and I don't mind going again, maybe to Kubu Baru this time.


:: Mich 7:37 AM [+] ::
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