My hometown friend/classmate, Amanda and I have been here for more than a year, and we have been asking our friends to come Terengganu even before we came. After more than a year of waiting, we finally had visitors! Whoo-hoo!
So our Zimbabwe friends, Francis and Trymoe arrived before 10pm, and because of the landslide that happened a day before, the bus I took from KL had to make a detour and that caused me to reach Terengganu so much later than expected and I was only able to meet them after 11pm. I suggested that we could go hiking up Bukit Keluang but told them that they had to wake up as early as 3am to catch the sunrise. I thought they wouldn't want to, but maybe they loved nature enough too to be willing to sacrifice some of their sleep. Haha!
I had never been to this place, and my classmates' description of the route was sooo vague we really had to depend on using a navigator. "Start climbing when you see a flight of stairs." Goodness. How to find this flight of stairs was more of what I was asking about -.- Never mind. So it was a midnight driving without the windows down but with two navigating systems up! Waze lead us onto a route on which we hardly saw any cars around. For me, it was a pleasant drive! Hehe.
So what happened was, Waze lead us to this MARA campus as our destination for "Bukit Keluang". We asked the security guard for directions but didn't quite understand the directions given and so we decided to ask for directions at Bukit Keluang Resort which we passed by earlier on. We went to the reception and saw this guy who had fallen asleep, lying on some chairs. We didn't really want to disturb him but we had no choice because we couldn't see a single soul around. So this poor guy got all startled by us and woke up with red eyes looking as though he had conjunctivitis hahaha. He told us to go straight and turn right at a junction, then we would see a "wakaf", from where we could start hiking up Bukit Keluang. I didn't know what a "wakaf" was, not to mention my African friends here, so I thought I'd just look out for something that was human-made haha.
We came to a place where we spotted a shelter on a small piece of empty land that opens out by the road. "Maybe that's the human-made thing that guy mentioned," I thought. We stopped our car in front of the shelter and came down to have a look around and see if we could find "a flight of stairs". It was very dark. I looked up, and whoaaaa, the sky was clear and I could see stars spread across the sky, sparkling! That was really beautiful! If we had not come for the sunrise, I could just sit there and stare at them until daylight haha!
Shining our way with our phone torches, we walked a few steps and found a road that winds down and behind the shelter, so we got back into the car and drove down that road. Well apparently the car lights were so much brighter that as we drove down, we realized that the road was just alongside waters on our left! That really scared me a bit. We saw a flight of stairs ahead the road and that got me excited, "We found the place!" I thought. There was no place for parking so I had to make a three-point-turn, a careful one so that we wouldn't fall into the water, and drove back to the shelter to park our car. We walked to the stairs and started climbing, thrilled. The stairs ended after a few steps, and you know where? Back up to the empty land where the shelter is. Haha! Whaaaat! We just made a marry-go-round... That felt stupid hahaha.
Sigh, the wrong place, Oh wait, we saw a path further straight up from the shelter, we could try that, we said. So we walked down that path with our torches. We were walking alongside waters on our right (this path is in the opposite direction of the road behind the shelter just now), and on our left was a hill which we were quite sure was Bukit Keluang, we just had to find the stairs to climb up. We couldn't see any stairs, but came to a part of the hill where there was a big, dark cave carved into it. "Err... I think we have to go," Francis said. Haha okay! It seemed like the path wasn't right anyway.
So we went back to the car and drove back. Back at the junction, we saw some human souls in a car! I flashed at them and asked if they knew how to get to Bukit Keluang, they said they were heading there too so I asked if we could just follow them. Hahaha well finally! Thank God!
The hike up Bukit Keluang didn't take quite a long time. But because we lost some time earlier on and I always had this "mountain sickness" sort of issue, the sun began to rise as we were halfway up.
Halfway, the sky started to light up.
Francis reached the top before us, and called us saying that the view was amazing and hurried us. So I pushed on! After all, we came all the way for this!
Tranquility :)
Here we are!
Hello from us! :D
Hello from the other side :p
I'm thankful for the safe trip there, especially when I thought of how quiet the road we took was and how dark the place we wrongly went to had been that there could be some bad guys hiding somewhere waiting to pounce on anyone who comes by. And I thank God for the fine weather! The sky was so blue so pretty! I would have stayed longer if not for my friends who probably were already hungry xD
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