Dodges and Burns

It so happened that I came across Tourism Selangor’s FB page the other day that I decided to just like it.

About 2 weeks back, I saw the following post there…

Bamboo rafting on Sg Langat… It sound awesome!!!

Without hesitation, I signed up for it… and I anticipated THE DAY with excitement…

Finally yesterday morning, we meet up at McD Jalan Telawi Bangsar at 7am (I have to wake up way before 6am but I am not complaining…). As the starting and ending point is abit far (about 5km apart as we were told), TS (Tourism Selangor) decided to get a bus to transport us there (So nice of them… otherwise, we would need to walk 5km back to our car….). In total, there are more than 30 of us. The journey to the starting point took us about 1 hour, since there aren’t any traffic in the early hour of the day.

The starting point is somewhere on the way to Kg Pangsun (where there popular Lolo Waterfall is located nearby).

Getting out of the bus, we saw our bamboo raft…

Rafts made out of bamboo…. (I was told that it takes them about 2 hours to build one. I am guessing if it is one person doing the building.

And those people on the rafts are our Orang Asli (indigenous tribes) guide. They are from the Temuan tribe.

After some briefing by both En Shaipudin, the owner of Uluhati (the operator of the bamboo rafting activities here) and Tok Batin Andak, the head of the Temuan, we stepped onto our raft and the journey started…

There was a slight disappointment in me initially as I thought that I would be “handling” the raft myself as in reality, we are more on sitting on the raft and the guide would bring us along the river… The disappointment disappear very quickly and I realized that I would be able to enjoy the journey better and I could take as many photos as I want… Another plus point is that, after asking the guide, we (my partner (will come to this in a while and I) were told that we an handle the raft later.

This is my partner on the raft (each raft got 2 person plus a guide… Her name is LiLian… You would be seeing her alot in this post coz 90% of the time, she is sitting in front of me…

While you may be thinking that it wont be very exciting since we are just sitting around doing nothing, think again… Excitement kicks in very frequently… How?

This is what happened when we hit some rocks at the bottom of the river…. The raft was like “sinking”… It was alarming at first but after a few times, you get used to it… When situation like this happens, the guide would go down into the river and pull the raft (as you can see in the above photo)…

A photo of the raft just behind us when they were actually very near to us… But for the rest of the time, we were on our own…. the other rafts were very far at the back…

Somehow, I managed to get the above photo which I am calling it as kaleidoscope effect (even though it is not) and I am very happy with it… Just to make sure, the three reflection are made on river water that comes up in between the bamboos.

This is the photo of us going thru the most exciting rapid of the whole journey. It can be classified as Class II in the usual white water river rafting but the difference here is that we are on a bamboo raft… It was at a time when the whole bamboo raft was going under water… Luckily, we managed to get thru without any problems… What I regret here is that I was not able to take photos of others going thru it.

If you dont believe that our raft is literally going down, at a look at the following photo…

So, I guess you would believe me now….

As promised by our guide, we were given a chance to “captain” the raft…

LiLian do it first…

And I follow suit soon after…

By the time we finished our rafting, we were transported to UluHati for the rest of the program.

Some of us change to dry clothes while others took the chance to bath there. While waiting for the rest to come, we rest at the chalets, watching Astro and sleep (yes, it was tiring too even though what we do most is just sit). When everything is set, we had our lunch in UluHati with all the food are from UluHati itself (except maybe for the rice). We had curry kampung chicken, catfish (ikan keli) which is very tasty and some type of fern. Lunch is really great. Everything taste really good.

After lunch, the Orang Asli guide actually provide us with a blowpipe demonstration. This may not be something new to me (I have seen it a few years back) but it is definitely something new to many others. The great thing about this demo is that we are allow to have a try on the blow pipe (Experience of a lifetime)

Tok Batin Andak giving some explanation about blowpipe…

It may look easy but it is not. Try it if you have the chance and you would know I am telling the truth.

After the blowpipe demo, En Din actually show us around the farm. We met with his two horses which is really a beauty and some other animal as well (like ponies, goats, chickens, dogs and deer. Yes, you read it right, En Din has deer in his farm and they roam the farm freely…

King, the horse in the above photo, is really a beauty.

Me with a horse. It is not often I could get near a horse!

Another experience I had there is my hand being lick by a pony…

All in all, I did have a great time there and I would like to thanks both Tourism Selangor (for organizing the DayOut) and UluHati for being such a nice host to all of us.