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Bukit Gasing (somewhere in August!)

City folk in Malaysia are mostly a deprived lot. Weekends are spent mostly in the air-conditioned comfort of any of the shopping malls, contributing to the economy and the waistline (we love food!), so for those who seek other type of activities, Bukit Gasing seems to be one of the few logical options.

The 3 cm high 'anak sungai'

We started the hike slightly after the sun had risen (groping with torchlights in the darkness should probably be left to the pros) It had rained the night before and it was slightly slippery, and occasionally raindrops found their way from the treetops to the top of our hatless heads. The thing about Bukit Gasing is that it has quite a number of trails with different levels of difficulty - by chance, I guess. I found a map on another website, which was helpful but didn't exactly prevent us from getting completely confused (both the sister and I have a bad sense of direction - it runs in the family)

We tried the 200 steps route first, but skipped checking out the observation tower. We'll attempt that on future hikes. Later on we moved downwards towards the route labelled as "Anak Sungai" I was imagining crossing/wading through a knee high river, which turned out to be a miniature brook, bubbling happily along. It was about 3 centimetres deep! The route was pretty alright as it was mostly downhill, And you could see the morning mist obscuring vision a little bit here and there. 

As we moved further along, both of us were unsure which way to head to. As we stopped at a spot to check out a map, we encountered a bunch of people. They probably sensed that we were new there (the map being a big giveaway, I suppose) and asked if we were looking for the way out or in. Naturally as it had only been a short while, we wanted to explore the other routes and said in. The lady pointed out the route she wanted to take and asked if we'd like to follow them. It was an uncomfortable decision to make, but we said yes anyway.

Yay for good samaritans!

The suspension bridge - with a stranger on it

Our good samaritans led the way out into a safer, more popular route. According to them, the route we seemed to be heading to was slightly dangerous, as only earlier this year there had been an incident. We passed by several interesting spots including old abandoned housing when Bukit Gasing was a rubber plantation. There was also lovely smelling mangrove pandan leaves which reminded me of nasi lemak as we climbed up the hill!

We parted ways with the good samaritans a little while later after they had led us to the intersection which either leads us out or towards other trails. The sister and I decided to explore even more and we took the trail towards a suspension bridge. We crossed over to the the other side of the hill and went on climbing.

The unknown track.

By this point, the  map once again seemed to have lost all relevance as we could not gauge where we were - after all, the map was a rather simple one, drawn by someone who goes hiking there on his website (see link attached above) We suspect, we had entered the area marked as the unknown track. Someone must have known about it, though... seeing that it had wooden steps to prevent enthusiastic hikers from slipping and falling down. However, after torturing the quads, for like what we felt as forever - (actually, it was only about 30 minutes!) we finally reached the exit.

And in typical Malaysian style, after all that hiking, we drove back to our area and had a big, wonderful hearty breakfast of chicken char siew rice.