Climbing Mount Yong Yap With My Students

Mount Yong Yap Trip, 18-24 December 2015

18 Dec

It had been a hectic week of exam processing and report preparation. At the same time, I was preparing for Club Apex year-end trip to trek and summit Mount Yong Yap in Perak. Additionally, I was making final preparation for my family trip to Tokyo. Fortunately, this time round, I had a lot of help from Saifudin as the co-leader for the Club’s trip and the student leaders too. For the family trip; Raihan and the 2 big boys have been very helpful.

So eventually came the evening of 18 Dec. The students were supposed to gather at 6pm. But as usual, they were late. They were supposed to be there so as to have a lesson on packing their bags in a most efficient and comfortable way. By 7pm, there were 10 of them and we started to do the packing. There was the distribution of the team items at that time too. It was mostly ok.

The rest of the students started arriving by 8pm except for Zhen Yu who had an event to attend. By 8.30pm, it was time to have dinner. At 11pm, once all had arrived except for Zixian – who had slight fever and requested to join the following morning. I had a feeling she won’t be able to make it. It’s not gonna be easy to recover in such a short time. But I spoke to her dad that I will wait till 9.30am at the bus interchange for her to join us. But I cautioned that if her temperature was above 37.5’ that she should give the trip a miss.

19 Dec

We were ready by 7.45am for the local pick-up to send us to the bus station. Everybody was in high spirits and looking forward to the day. Most of us have been training for 4-5 months. Most have been with me since February 2014 as part of the Club and YEP Medan 2014. Only 2 were not from YEP Medan alumni. The year-end trip has been positioned as the culmination of their 2 years training with the Club. So everybody was looking forward to the trip.

Taking a picture before we depart for the bus station and on towards Ipoh from there.

It’s 9.30am; we’ve had our breakfast of prata and it’s time to go but no Zixian. I received a phone call from her father that her temperature was 38.1’. So I said it’s best she stayed at home to recover. We started our journey.

It's 10.30pm. We just finished our dinner at a sidewalk food area. This came after 12 hours of journey. We were kinda late. We were supposed to arrive at Ipoh at 6pm and then do our marketing but we reached at 9pm and did not have enough time to do any marketing for our supplies. We’ll need to do it tomorrow morning. It would set us back a couple of hours. But things happen for a reason. The congestion at the Causeway really set us back and so did the congestion in KL. Apart from the congestions and reaching late, the rest of the journey was ok. We’re here safe and sound…that’s what counts.

Having our dinner at a roadside café in Ipoh at almost 10pm.

20 Dec

I was up by 6am. The bus is picking us up at 7.30am. So need to get ready and go for breakfast.

At 7.30am, the students started putting the bags up the bus. It’s a local bus that would bring us to Kampong Raja where we would buy our food supplies, repack and drive to the trailhead.

Buying our food supplies before we head off into the jungle and the mountain range.

We reached Kampong Raja at around 9.30am and then we started buying our supplies. There we met our mountain guides, Kay and Mai. A pair of guy and gal. They look their part with their gear and all. They were also carrying branded gear as compared to the guides at Bukit Lawang. From the first impression, they looked professional and that gave me confidence.

Our 2 mountain guides on the left and the right side.

The trek started OK. We went through the first 2-3 hours quite OK. We reached lunch point at 3pm. The guides were damn cool about being late. They even gave us 1-hour lunch break. We had our lunch and some of us even did our zuhur & asar at that point. So I thought nothing of it.

At the beginning of our trek and climb.

We were quite fortunate as the rain came down the previous week and as such the water level at the river was low enough for us to cross over with no problem.

The river may have been merciful but the the jungle was merciless.

That night we reached our campsite at 9pm. We trekked for 2 hours in the darkness with just a bit of the evening light. It was my first night trek – deliberate. My first ever night trek was at Gunung Ledang in 1996. That time I was with Hamzah and his friends. We were “lost” at that point of time. We started late in our trek and took a wrong turn and therefore did not reach where we wanted to go. By 8.30pm, all the trail looked similar and I made the decision to stop where we were and just sleep where we stopped. But back to the Yong Yap climb; so on that first day of trek, we started late. The plan was to start at 10am but we started at 1pm. We were 3 hours behind time. So what were we expecting?

One of the few pictures that I managed to capture of the night trek with the dusk light. By 7.30pm, it was too dark to take any pictures.

21 December 2015

We slept quite late on the first day of the trek. By the time we settled down, set-up camp, had our dinner, clean ourselves; it was already midnight. Then we went to sleep. The following morning at around 8pm; I had a short discussion with Saifudin and the guides and we decided to activate Contingency Plan 3. This is to summit only 1 peak and leave our things in Camp Y before our summit.

When we broke that news to the students, they were relieved and didn’t hide their pleasure. They must have been waiting for me to make that announcement. Anyway, Day 2 trek was quite easy compared to Day 1 and we reached comfortably before 6 pm.

Preparing breakfast on the second day of the trek.

Stopping for lunch on the second day. Picture with Saifuddin.

A quick picture before moving out for the campsite of the night.

22 December 2015

On the 3rd day we were up by 6am, had breakfast and by 8am, we were ready to summit. The summit climb was nice and cool because as we go higher, the air got cooler. However, the ascend was quite challenging. Fortunately our training at Blk 54, New Upper Changi Road had definitely prepared us for the summit climb. There was no incident during the summit climb except for a short while at the beginning when one of the student was hyperventilating for a short while. But after 10 minutes rest, it was all good!

Getting ready to move out for the summit climb.

Taking a breather before th final push for the summit.

We reached the summit after about 4 hours…approximately at 12.30pm. We were rewarded with a stunning beautiful clear day view of the Titiwangsa mountain range. But in my opinion, the journey for the destination is always more important and memorable than the summit. Of course, when we climb mountains, we want to summit but at the summit itself, it’s usually an anti-climax. We stayed at the summit till about 2pm and took the time to have lunch and took many pictures. I was most happy because everybody summitted. I’ve been to 7 mountain climbs before and there was never a time that everybody successfully summitted. So this trip gave me another first i.e. all summitted. This is rare!

The view of the mountain top was spectacular.

At the summit.

We then descended and took between 2-3 hours; depending on the fitness of the students. Those that were earlier and faster were tasked to de-camp and pack the tentages. By 6pm, we were ready to move out again and headed to the main camp Agas. This was our second night trek. This time round, I noticed that everybody was more confident and spirits were high even though we were walking in the dark and had to do river crossing several time. The students helped each other, mostly, and moved briskly and were sure of themselves. The success of the summit had a positive impact on their morale.

We reached the main camp Agas at 9 and set-up camp, cooked and had dinner, cleaned ourselves and went to sleep.

23 December 2015

Our final day came and by 8am, we were ready to trek out. It was a 14km trek and we had to do it in 8 hours. We did just that with no incident. Along the way, we stopped a short while for a couple of treats, had lunch and played a bit at a waterfall. That day also, I drank lots of spring water because we were out of bolied water by 11am. It was a hot day!

Breaking camp in the morning of the final day.

Time to head out of the jungle and back to civilization.

Collecting water from one of the natural springs.

Just before we heading out to the trail head, we rewarded ourselves with a quick deep at a waterfall.

The successful team!

Anyway, we reached the trail head at around 6pm to exit and went back to the Temple to freshen up and by 7.30pm, we were on our way back to Ipoh for our 9pm bus back to Singapore.

All went quite smoothly and we reached Singapore at 8am and CE at 9am, the day before Christmas. We cleaned-up, cleaned our gear, had brunch and then I did a debrief together with Saifudin. At 1pm on 24/12; the expedition was over. After almost 6 months of training and preparation, the Mount Yong Yap trip ended successfully.