My Trip to Paong, Ulu Baram (Part 1)

15/12/2009

The last day before going off for my work travel assignment. Me and my friends went to our favorite food stall no. 7 at Taman Selera to eat seafoods and drank 'liu wei'. My favorite choices are the Tom Yam Fish and the popular fried chicken wings. I don't know how the cooks did it but it's damn good. Later on we went to the local cinema to catch Stormriders II. That movie kinda bored me start from the beginning and I was already tired that time. After 15 minutes, I spent one hour plus sleeping in the middle throughout the movie then woke up to watch the last 5 minutes before the end credits. It was that BAD. Disappointing cin cin! Anyway, went back home packed my stuff and watched one more episode of Densha Otoko before going to sleep at 2 something AM.

16/12/2009

Today's the day. I waited at the office for the driver to come and pick us. In the meantime, I was wondering what kind of car the driver would use to bring us there. I heard the road condition is pretty bad so I'm hoping they would come with a Ninja rather than a Hilux cos I'm hoping for a comfortable ride. When it was time, we went to the parking lot AND it's a Hilux. Another bad thing was that we had to put our baggage on rear cargo area exposed.

We took off at about 8:45am. It's going to be a long 5 hours ride until the destination so I thought I should take a nap. But it's no easy, it was so hard as the road was really really rocky and bumpy. It was so bad that one of the springs absorbing the impact and supporting the wheels actually broke.

About 2 hours later we stopped by a small town named Lapok for toilet break. Actually it was more like a concrete cowboy town. No horses and gun shooting but the place is dusty and the only transports you can see here are pick-up trucks. Lots of it, Hilux, Triton, D-Max etc. I was not familiar with this place, and I spent like 30 minutes looking for a toilet. At one point, I decided to take a piss at some run-down abondoned building but in one of the rooms, I found some used syringes on the floor. Obviously to me, that seemed like a 'sacred' spot for drug addicts to do their business and I'm not gonna piss on it hell no lol.

2 something pm, finally we reached the camp (sigh~). At this point I was very exhausted, my neck and back were hurting from the bumpy ride and I felt dizzy. The driver dropped us to our guesthouse to settle down. We met with the housekeeper and she showed us to our rooms. Not too shabby. Pretty nice, they got air-cons, large size bed, Astro and all that. I spent some time checking out the place before going to the office for work.

That's the Camp Manager's house and he went on leave immediately when he knew that we're coming. He's scared I know.

The main entrance to the guesthouse known as Messhall.

The inside.

Welcoming note in Kenyah dialect I guess.

The VIP bed. My bed.

Another side in the room.

The living room. My favorite spot to chill at night watching Astro.

The kitchen and the camp cook.

After lunch, we had to go to the office to start work immediately. In my mind, I was gonna work like mad man to complete my job and go back home as soon as possible. I was motivated until we found out that the driver had went off without informing us. So no transport and there's no communication line around here. No Digi, no Maxis, and the Celcom, there's only a tiny few spots around the camp where you can only get like maybe one bar and at most two bars only. Yeah, so it was like this camp is in its own world. Damn terrible, I couldn't even contact my friends and family. No choice, we still had to work so in the end we decided to walk to the office despite the advices from security and housekeeper not to as it is very far from the guesthouse. They were right, it was a long walk to the office. The worst was walking under the scorching sun for about freaking 30 minutes. Once reaching the office, I was physically and mentally drained. At least, I got some cool wind from the fan finally. A few minutes later, the electricity went off. The generator which produces the power had been shut off (It had to be shut off from time to time to cool the heat down). Again, another obstacle but still had to work no matter what gosh.

After 5pm, we went back to the guesthouse, this time with car transport. Finally I got to get some rest and some time to check out more of the area.

The watch house behind Messhall.

Let's go check it out. You can get some nice views from there.

View in the front.

View from behind.

View from the left. Damn I love this scene.

The unique hand-made rubbish bins.

One of the pretty wildflowers.

Holy crap! I was surprised to found this little critter. I ain't never seen anything like this before. You can only get this in the wild. It's huge I tell ya. In fact, all the insects there are HUGE. One or two times bigger than the ones in the city. Not only big, there are faster, stronger and more cunning.

The underside view. Woo~ very alien.

Okay, off you go. I flipped it back with a stick XD

Then suddenly I heard dog barks. SIX dogs came along. I could feel their threats from their angry faces and barks, showing teeth and all that. I knew that they are going to eat it or something. There nothing one man can do against six hungry dogs. Oh yeah, the dogs here love to eat bugs, especially big ones.

The Messhall where I was staying.