12 days

in the end, 10 days of brunei became 12 days, thanks to kalimantan. oh wells, the past 2 days have been ultimate "sian-ness" and slacking around doing nothing at all. anywayy the stupid delay of my flight made my memories of socjot fade even quicker.

wad picnic in the jungle, strollin the park. it was all bullshit! it was much tougher than that! instead of a navigation exercise, it should be called mountain climbing or something. i think there isn't a single piece of 1m by 1m of flat land in that jungle of brunei! At certain parts we had to use our four limbs to bring us up the steep slope with no friction at all. At one point in time i even almost died from slipping down. U noe how scary it is to look back and see the slope turns down forever and ever.

Btw, the place that we went is called Temburong, which is separated from the main cities of brunei darrusalem. And we had our exercise at Zebu and Temada area, which is basically just jungles and more jungles and no end to it. Our first day was fine, just walking around finding the checkpoints and i was still able to contribute a bit to the navigation. Then night falls, and our second day started with our morale low cuz of the rain in the morning. we took really long to find out first and second checkpoints and by the time we left the Zebu area, all the other teams have alreadyy proceeded to Mt Biang.

Oh well, i shouldn't dwell too much about wad we did cuz firstly, it will be too boring and secondly, it's supposed to be a classified exercise, isn't it? Anyway the camp where we stayed in (Lakiun Camp) was pretty much like a long house int he kampong with 90 over ppl squeezing in one long house made of wood. there were two rows of double decker beds lining up. It was pretty dirty at first but we got used to it fast enough. Then the cookhouse! i had a pretty bad impression abt it at first cuz it smelt bad. Then i thought it wasn't that bad cuz the food was good, but before my impression turned for the better, I sat down on the bench and saw flies crawling about on the table. Oh my goodness. and my soup which started off clear, ended up with flies swimming in it when i finished my food. How gross! anywayy i must say that the food is really not bad.
Brunei is a funny place, with many big funny insects flying around.
THen showering time. the shower tap is really terrible. It DRIPS water instead of pouring down and we take really long to bathe, waiting for the slow stream of water to wash awaythe soap on us. In the end, some of us resorted to water hoses to bathe.

Next, onto Brunei jungles. One thing in brunei jungle which we don't have in singapore's is THORN PLANTS, the terror of all. Have you ever seen a plant with stem full of thorns? Well, i haven't. so i was really impressed by it at first, then disgusted by it when i first grabbed it accidentally as i was falling. sometimes the thorns are so small that u can't see it and when u brush past it, ur uniform gets stuck to it and it's not easy to take them off. Another terror of the jungle is BEE/ WASPS HIVES. i've never seen such BIG hives before that i was really afraid any slightest touch will activate the raid of the bees. but thankfully we were spared from that. The biggest i've seen was as big as a 2-year-old baby.

anywayy one thing i've learnt from this trip, and that is WATER IS PRECIOUS. i almost died when i ran out of water on the third day, and damn was i so happy to see a stream and all of us started filling our water bottles by the stream.

all in all, it was a GOOD experience but i really wouldn't want to go through it again.