Gua Batu Maloi

As soon as we arrived at Gua Batu Maloi, Aurelius jumped up of the car and immediately started cutting bamboo with his brand new parang like the consumate parang junkie that he is..." why you need such a long parang" a voice is heard a stone throw away. It is the voice of Mr. Nazri, our guide for the day.

He immediately explains our journey...

1)The cave is part of a living natural world.So if the weather changes,the river in the cave would quickly swell.Should that happen, he would need to evacuate us fast so do try to remain atentive and keep safe.

2)The caves are about a kilometer long and some parts of the caves dip down as far as 25 feet (about 2 storeys underground).

3)Believe it or not, these caves are occasionally the dwelling of orang bunians or orang halus(jungle spirit) and once we did lost a trekker. It took 70 policemen a few days to find her when she was just right there all along. Everyone believes that she was in another dimension.She claimed she had tea with some short people. So please keep respectful and aware.With that...on we go with our journey.There were three trekkers with us. Two of them were form four students on a school break but as Mr. Nazri assured us, they been trained by Jabatan perhutanan. The three trekkers would serve the following purpose. A leader to show us the way. A sweeper to ensure nobody gets left behind. A watchout above(Mr.Nazri himself) to ensure should any weather change occur he will signal for an evacuation.

Knowing there was such precautionary measures in place, I just set out to have fun...and straight upon the first stream...I jumped straight in immersing myself entirely...we are going to get wet anyway so might as well be wet from the start.There was a small jungle trek to start off the journey.It was quite a fun trek and wasn't a flat out walk. We had to negotiate terrain where we were required to jump in small pools, climb up on roots, hang alongside a root system on the side of a rockwall,cross sand pits which we took the opportuinity to wrestle and 'sand' each other, climb up slanted rocks, slide down slanted rocks. Within minutes, I realised my slippers were useless as they kept getting caught in rocks so I did the barefoot thingy. I advice anyone to do this trail barefoot. our blonde ai ling pole dancing....

The terrain consist of mostly sand and pretty well rounded rock that if anything prove to be a nice reflexology and free to boot.As we negotiate boulders after boulder...we suddenly became enveloped by darkness and that's where our cave journey began.Gua Batu Maloi is not so much a cave as in a carved out tavern in a monolith or mountain with thousand year old stalagmites but more like boulders falling on top of a river system that created this passage where you had to climb, duck,crawl and at some bit swim to cross. The water was cold and fresh. At some points we had really small crevices to squeeze through which gave us loads of hamster like fun while other pints small waterfall formation that stirred the water into natural jacuzzi formations that were just so nice to sit and relax or indulge in the real hobby of the trekking group - cam whoring.The group this time comprises of perpetually happy faces like eddie, legally blonde ai ling =P , the damsel in occasional distress audrey (who made us more experienced trekkers feel a little macho trying to help her) the sturdily built chow pinn, the lady li chiang and her man maxx, ken and chelsina our good organisers, aurelius our camwhoring kungfu panda wannabe, crazy cave vixen valerie, dennis our order shouting commando wannabe, myself the crazy loud frog, yet another dennis, moon, boyfriend and the rest of the gang.

After we finished the cave and everyone feeling fresh and elated...Gua batu Maloi had one more thing to please...a big rock...the batu maloi...it was fun as some of the more adventurous raced one another scaling up the rockface clinging to wines and roots...

But alas...it was finally time to go back...

Here's the sour note...As we started on the walk back,I actually asked the group to pick up any rubbish that they see on the way out... It was sad to say that while I was sweeping behind the whole group, there were still rubbish...and I actually saw some members of our party just conveniently walked pass it as if too good to clean up our jungle... one of them was dennis khing. I felt so sad as I thought more of him as a friend. Sorry dennis, you sorely disappointed and pissed me off...I actually had to call him to pick it up...What pride is there not to pick up rubbish and have things dirty....How shameful if we have the nerve to dirty but not the grace to pick up rubbish... malaysians and our damn third world mentality.