Some of you may have heard that on the weekend of Sep 27th, I went for a weekend trip to Endau Rompin national park in malaysia with some of the ex cpos. myself included. chee peng, sook, adel, aaron, lilian bok plus adel and lilians' husband made up the group together with my daughter kelly.

They volunteered to do this UAT for me. I wondered if i can bring people into the jungle starting saturday morning and coming back by 9pm sunday evening and pack in enough activities so that it would feel more than just a 2 day getaway.In the end, we enjoyed the trip. We took a train, malaysian railway, to kluang where we had the famous ya-kun equivalent railway kopi. then it was a ride on a 4 wheel truck followed by a 45 min boat ride into the middle of the national park.We reached there by lunch time. We had twin sharing chalets with attached toilets and fan for the night.
By mid afternoon, we were out trekking and spent time feeding river fishes, hanging out at waterfall and swimming and horsing around in a deep jungle dive pool.

Night was spent eating BBQ jungle style, skewers were made of bamboo poles. and chatting, and looking for nice place to sleep- ie for those who did not want to sleep in their respective rooms(adel and sook).

Next morning was a 3 hour kayak (downstream)and swimming in the river till lunch
time where we ate in an orang asli village . We ate asli food.hung around the village, took our showers and then made our way back to the railway station. i heard no one took leave the next day.so its not too tiring. only some leeches were quite irritating.

So if any of you need a weekend getaway, i can help arrange for you. 8-10 pax is ideal. But please dun take my word for it that its fun, check with the UAT testers first!!

I heard venkat , my successor, is already in office today. He will be starting work proper on monday.. please give him all your support!!I'm off to Laos tomorrow and will meet him when i get back. make sure he will only have nice things to say about all of you when i meet him!!

Added more Pictures of my trip

hi. I 've heard from some of you that you did read my updates on krakatau although no comments were posted.
In any case,I will briefly update you on the rest of my trip in java. climbing merapi, bromo and ijen.next update will be on my weekend trek with chee peng and
gang last month and then my 3 day fishing trip which was last weekend.

After krakatau, i went to jogjakarta and visited the famous borobodur . Did the mainstream tourist thing by hanging around the complex for both sun set and sun rise.
At sun rise, i could see merapi in the distant.Thats the next big active volcano
that i was going to climb.

Merapi is considered dangerous but the local guides convinced me its a safe period.
unfortunately, I had bad indigestion during the midnight climb . I was hoping to climb through the night and get to summit for sun rise.Must have been the satay i had for dinner. Too many flies on the meat before it was cooked . I stopped to take po chai pills but it didnt help. I continued and was then caught in thunderstorm.
It was dry season, no rain for 2 months. So I think the signs were telling me not to
go on. I aborted my climb.

Next was Bromo in east java. beautiful place with nice hotel overlooking the volcano. Most tourists goes there to see sun rise and then hurry off to Bali.
I stayed on to explore the villages and the crater after the tourists left. Its
beautiful.

Then I moved on to Ijen which is almost at eastern tip of java. This volcano is
active and have a sulphur mine inside the crater. Men will go into the crater to carry out basket full of sulphur plates.Each laod is about 70kg. hard work plus the sulphur fumes are certainly not good for health. sulpuhur dioxide(fumes from volcano)
+ H2O(saliva and tears)= sulphuric acid. think of what it did to my eyes and throat!Sobering experience to watch this people work.until I got a call on my hand phone on my way down.. it was one of our customers.. having problem with his internet banking. I politely told him to call june /jerry then realised that it was a saturday afternoon after I hang up!! I smsed june to contact CM. Think leonard
eventually reolved the issue.CM did not even thank me.. even though he knew i was overseas and i told him i left citi!!

The photos will be uploaded later.
wc