Sunday, August 08, 2004
Fellow bloggers will agree with me: Y'know how its always funny how you find yourself composing blog entries in your head while you're doing something exciting/interesting/scandalous? And its at those times when the entries sound the most interesting, then you return to your computer with a chock full of these prepared interesting thought-of entries and find that there's just too many of them to remember. I should really get a journal thingie to write on to capture truly blog-worthy entries as they come, ala Tom Cruise in Last Samurai. (which, coincidentally, is the movie we watched after our End of Frame Dinner in Mei Ling Camp)
Speaking of Mei Ling Camp, let me tell you about Taiwan! (wow, notice how i smartly linked the subject of blogging to my taiwan trip? So cool right?)
Well, okay. *deep breath* where shall we start?
We did three exercises there: Exercise Red Beret, which was a navex exercise, as well as Exercise Theodore 2A and 2B, a graded section and platoon exercise respectively. Well okay. Remember when i said training in Tekong was the most shagged experience one could ever have? Well, screw all that. Taiwan takes the cake, no questions asked, money back guarantee, callers under 18 must seek parental consent. You dont need tough training to kill you, the terrain and the weather does it quite nicely.
Well, they werent kidding when they said the mountains were high. Contour lines on the map appeared in intervals of 20, and there were a LOT of lines. Then again, the map is almost always an underestimation of the real thing. Imagine bashing your way through thick vegetation up a slope so steep you need to use your hands to crawl up. Branches slapping your face and snagging your field pack, thighs aching, butt squeezed tight. You see a break in the vegetation. Yes! Its the top! Gasping for breath, you clamber up onto the grass patch and take a look at the beautiful view. Its no wonder you're tired: you're above cloud level! Its really very nice if you've got time to enjoy it, you get to see for miles in every direction. (though its mainly mountains, mountains and more mountains) Going down the slope mainly involves different degrees of sliding down on your butt. Different degrees because sometimes you're sliding, sometimes you're actually falling, grabbing branches and roots to slow your decent. Shagged right? Now imagine having to cross FOUR mountains en route to your next checkpoint for navex, or another three to our FRV during our missions, lugging our section SOPs, GPMGs, SAWs, LAWs, etc etc. Suddenly the view doesnt seem quite as beautiful as it should be.
The terrain's pretty bad.. sometimes we'd hit a cliff or a steep drop with absolutely no way of getting up or down. Or if backtracking wasnt an option, we'd use our toggle ropes to pull ourselves up, ala Indiania Jones! haha! Pretty thrilling actually, especially the experience of walking on a narrow ridge line with dead drop ravines on either side in the dead of the night. Our section was lucky in the sense that no one was seriously injured that we had to fall out. Others werent so lucky: i heard of some of my coursemates who fell, became unconcious, had nerves tugged, became physically exhausted, had to be casevac-ed down the mountain, etc. Stress stress.
The weather's extreme too. The sun rises real early, around 4.30am. Maybe cause its summer. The weather's nicely bright but cool all the way from 4.30 to 8am. Then the heat comes very suddenly, and rises frighteningly fast. The hottest part of the day is from 11 to 3, when temperatures rise to 39 degrees. No kidding! You can feel the heat emitting from your body even when you're resting in the shade. The night's are cold... really cold. Even sleeping on nice tarmac ground freezes you to death. The first night, i slept without a goretex, ended up shivering at 3am, and ended up clambering to my friends for bodily warmth. -grin-
Okay, so we didnt see a ninja van. But we saw the new and improved version: the (ta-daah) ninja scooter! This (ta-daaah) ninja scooter, knowing all our checkpoints, would scoot around with a box filled with sinfully yummy deep fried ji-pah (chicken cutlet), pao pao cha (bubble tea), and all forms of burgers. This (ta-daah) ninja scooter even does deliveries to stranded groups of soldiers. We bumped into one delivering a whole carton of 8 pao pao chas and 6 ji pahs to another group. And because i dont know if any of my commanders are reading this, there has been no evidence whatsoever that my group patronized this (ta-daah) ninja scooter. Ahem.
K i shant bore you fellas about our training there. Its just been carrying out missions, missions and more missions anyway. Shagged, boring, and sleepy.
Let's talk about R&R! I have found hip-hop heaven in the form of Shi Ling Ye Shi, as well as Hsimenting in Taipei. Shi Ling Ye Shi's a night market, where the human traffic increases dramatically at around 10pm. Its the first time i've seen a place where the amount of guy's clothes rival those for girls. Plus, there're all a steal if you know how to bargain. And i have never spent so much on clothes before. The mysteries of why girls get such a kick out of shopping have finally been revealed to me. (yes! i finally understand you deb! hahaha) Which was a pity, since i hardly had any cash left when i visited Hsimenting on the last day. Sheesh, i wouldnt have minded going AWOL to live there. An area about the size of Orchard road, with Hip hop music blasting from every shop, baggy shirts, track pants, accessories, CDs, toys, all going for rock-bottom prices. Stages set up at various corners to showcase street dancers and emerging artistes, and people dressed in the weirdest fashions (sometimes weirder than japan). And yes, the girls are pretty.
Mental note: stop blogging these super long entries because you have no idea how to end them. Sheesh.
Another side thought: Yours truly may probably not even be here to blog, because he had a near fatal experience with a bai bu she (hundred steps snake). I know some of you will be real disappointed that the snake didnt kill me on the spot, but oh well, just too bad. Apparantly, once you get bitten by this snake, you'd die before you can take a hundred steps. My section was having an AAR in the vegetation, when a passing farmer alerted us, causing us to jump up in time to see a 2m long brown snake slither past our backsides.. stress stress. Would have been a lousy way to die, bitten in the backside. Sheesh.
he rocked the party at 10:20 AM |
