My Little Paradise

After lingering around Gua Musang town, we continued our journey to Kota Bharu. We left the town at around 11.30am and headed straight to our first stopover, Dabong. It is here where you can find the tallest waterfall in South East Asia, the Stong Waterfall, with 270 meter tall.

As we were driving towards the waterfall, we could already see a glimpse of the waterfall from out far. I was excited to see such a magnificent view. The road leading to the waterfall was narrow. It is basically a small trunk road cutting through the thick jungle. Interesting enough though, there were a few kampung houses just besides the trunk road.

Surprising enough, this place was rather commercialized. Well, commercialized in a sense that there is a guard house at the entrance and also a resort besides the waterfalls. But I am not sure, the resort although looked quite grand, it seemed to be not well maintain. In fact, come to think about it, the resort might as well have been abandon. Not even a soul could be seen.

Anyway, back to our main subject, the waterfall. There are two parts to the waterfall. Travelers could either stay at the foot of the waterfall or hike the hill to a higher ground where they can have a closer encounter with the waterfall. Unfortunately, only the self-proclaim Lord and I decided to hike the hill. The two remaining heavenly kings remained at the foot of the waterfall.

The hike itself was not difficult. However, there were leeches all over. Yes, I have this thing about leech, I loath them. The hike seemed to be taking forever as I could see leeches eagerly waited to suck my blood. But we got lucky; our blood is safe for now.

Once we reached the end of the hike, we were presented with a magnificent view. This is really like heaven. I am not kidding. I have been to many waterfalls throughout my life. This is the best one yet. The first thing we did was to explore the area. It was pretty huge. The landscape was pretty diverse too. There was a cave, smaller waterfalls, huge rocks, streams, trees etc. It is truly a small paradise. So we chatted, drank beer, took photograph and above all enjoy the surrounding.

What really amazed me was that once we hiked back down and reached our car, it was already 6pm in the evening. It was unbelievable. I really though that we were only about 3 hours max at the small paradise. Instead we were up there for more than 5 hours. And can you believe it? In that period of 5 hours, we did not even dip ourselves in the water.

I will probably plan another trip here again. The serenity, the quietness and the surroundings make it worth the visit despite the long journey.

The second day to the unkown - Morning

After a rather peaceful and uneventful night, we woke up early to continue our day two drive. Top of the to do list was to find a good breakfast. I was hoping for Nasi Dagang, an East Coast popular breakfast. Unfortunately the store that we went to, despite queuing for 10 minutes, I was left disappointed. Anyway, this was just the start of the journey, I reckon there are many more opportunities.

After a decent breakfast, we roamed around the Gua Musang town to see what this small little town can offer. As mentioned in my earlier post, this town is situated right besides the limestone hill and besides the limestone hill, is the train station. The train station although looks pretty rundown, it does add some charm into the town. We spent about 1 hour at this train station. Walking up and down the railway tracks we did just to get that picture perfect photos. Stood on one spot for minutes we did just to get that picture perfect photos. Risk our life on the middle of the railway track we did just to get that picture perfect photos.

The first day to the unkown

The plan for our budget, photography and venture into the unknown trip is... to have none at all. Well, that is not totally true. We did do some planning. We did know where we are headed to. But what we did not know was what to expect along the way. In order words, we do not plan the itinerary along the way. What we know is what we have been hearing from our friends. None of us has been traveling using this specific route before. We sort of know there are some breathtaking sceneries along the way. We sort of know there are some astonishing waterfalls along the way. We sort of know there are some mystical caves along the way. We sort of know there are some mouth watering foods along the way. But how breathtaking? How astonishing? How mystical and how mouth watering? We have no idea. The expecting of the unexpected added some thrill to the trip I must say.

So the journey began on the early Tuesday morning 7am. First stop was to pick up two of the four heavenly kings at the office: the self proclaim Lord (who got himself a D50) and the publicly acclaimed Java guru. Then we went on to pick up the fourth heavenly king: the dark and a little (just a little ok) over sized heavenly king.

First, each of us took up RM200 and handed over to our treasurer, the self-proclaim the Lord. With a total of RM800. our first stop was to get some tit-bits. After breakfast at approximately 8:30am, we started our driving north journey.

We have planned to overnight at Gua Musang, which is our Day One stopover. We first passed by Bentong, Raub and Kuala Lipis. We stopped at Kuala Lipis for lunch. For you out there who does not know, Kuala Lipis is actually the kampung of our very own Malaysian song bird Siti Nor Nurhaliza. Our dark and a little (just a little ok) over sized heavenly king was pretty excited. He is a big fan of Siti. Well maybe not as crazy as before but still he is excited, especially when we passed by Siti old school.

After lingered about 2.5 hours at Kuala Lipis, we continued our journey up north to Gua Musang. We reached our final destination of the day at around 4:30pm. Gua Musang is not small town (if you compare it to my hometown Pekan) and yet it is not big either. It is divided into Bandar baru and Bandar lama. And yes, there is a cave in this place where the name of the town is named after. But according to the local people, the cave is no longer being visited by people for many years. This town is actually pretty amazing especially with the huge limestone hills as its backdrop.

Our first mission is to get a reasonable but cheap place to sleep. It was not difficult to our relief. We have been seeing the motel signboard, The Kesedar Inn along the way from Kuala Lipis and to get to the motel was also not difficult as the signboard is big and clear. Since we wanted to keep this trip cheap, we opted for a twin sharing bedroom with an additional bed for four of us. We kept nodding our head despite being asked few times whether the arrangement was comfortable or not by the hotel friendly staff as the room seemed to be overly crowded in her opinion. So, the room charge for that night was RM97, which was about RM24 per person. I thought it was a pretty good deal as the room come with a satellite TV (yaba-daba-dooooo!).

We couldn't do much after settling down in that motel room as it was raining outside. We went out for dinner that night and tried to explore the town a little. The dinner was average but rather expensive. We had satay, omelet malay style, veggie, tom yam, white rice and keropok as starter. The dinner cost us RM46, which is unexpectedly over budget.

The night life in Gua Musang is pretty much the same as the other small towns in Malaysia. Don't expect too much. After making few rounds around the town, we headed to our motel room and called it a day.

Not a particular interesting first day, especially with the gloomy weather. But we are lucky enough to have dry weather during the drive. The scenery along the way was pretty amazing though. We passed by numerous kampong. We passed by many rubber and palm plantations. We passed by many unique and extraordinary limestone structures. As such, we drive drive and stopped for photograph. Then, we drive drive again and stopped again for more snaps.

The birth of an idea

Some ideas behave like the titanic, they started big but due to some reasons, the ideas vanish and they eventually sink into the deep blue sea and people would talk about it every now and then, but the ideas never took off. Some ideas, on the other hand, behave like the big bang. They started small, very small. But due to some unknown reasons, which I like to call it the factor X, they exploded into something very big, huge and enormous.

The birth of the idea is conceived pretty innocently. The self proclaim Lord wanted to try his hands into photography. So the idea is to have a short photography session. However, the factor X is the destination. We lingered around that subject for a few minutes. As we were discussing, the factor X became uncontrollable.

And so, from around KL area, we started to mention the east coast and the capital of Kelantan state, Kota Bharu. And as the conversation continued further, we ended up talking about thailand and massaging. I believed if the conversion were to continue further, sooner or later the idea of driving all the way to Tibet would eventually arise. Well, maybe much sooner than you could imagine... :P

Anyway, the trip was set:
The smart and cool travelers: The Four heavenly Kings
Trip transport: My small small cheap cheap but very reliable four-wheel
Trip Date: 27th December ~ Until we are sick of seeing each other face
Trip theme: Budget, Photography and Venture into the unknown
Trip bonus: Massage, Dip in Waterfalls, Beer, Beer and more Beer
Trip route: Go north all the way to KB and make detour to Thailand and back to KL

For the next few entries I will be blogging about the trip... and how it eventually unfolded... stay tune can...

Back to blogging...

Many things happened since the last update of my blog. It is impossible to recall everything in this single entry, but I will try to pen down bits and pieces of what happened over the past 3 months in the coming entries.