Travel Fail, Walk Success

We had a hard time finding our Nature Walk today, but Ms.C's face after seeing a wild monkey for the first time was worth it in the end.

We were meeting a homeschool group for an instructor led nature walk in Thomson Nature Park. I was really excited to see this area, as this park includes the ruins of an abandoned Kampong (village) which has been taken over by the jungle.

We took a Grab there, because it would have taken over an hour to get there by bus/MRT. I was worried about being late, so I was following our ETA on Google Maps. Our ETA kept getting farther away, but our driver dropped us off at the original estimated time. That should have been my first clue that something wasn't quite right. I did notice that this didn't seem to be the drop off point we had specified. The group was meeting in front of a church. We were dropped off in front of a Cinema and it did not look to be anywhere near a Nature Reserve.

The driver was quite adamant that the church was just to our right, so I got out of the cab.

As I googled walking directions, they came up with a walk of 60 minutes. Yep, definitely something wrong here! I took me a few minutes of trying different direction apps to believe we were so lost.

I tried to order us a new Grab - a number of times - and there were no drivers in this area. Bus/MRT was 45 minutes to get to our desired location; 90 minutes to get home.

Basically we were dropped of no where near our destination.

I tried hailing a cab. When that didn't work, I realized I needed to be in a better pick up location. Walking to the corner, we found a Mall. Malls have Taxi Stands. We followed the taxi signs through the Mall; stopped in the Bathrooms. Regrouped! And caught a cab to our original destination. It took us 30 minutes to figure our how to just get a ride!

15 more minutes in the cab and $10 more. That was $40 spent on transportation and $25 pre-paid to the walk leader, so we were going for our walk whether we found our group or not. Our group had carried on without us, but we had found our way to without anyone loosing their temper, which is a huge success for us. Thankfully I only had 2 kids with me for this adventure.  

We arrived at Thomson Nature Walk and pulled out some Oreos to snack on before we got into the park. I knew we needed to be careful of snacking in the jungle, because of the resident monkeys. Well as we ate the first one, we started to hear cracking in the trees, and sure enough, it was 2 big long-tailed Macaque Monkeys.

First wild monkeys we've seen!!!!

We were pretty excited till the monkeys came out of the trees after our Oreos. Someone walking by shouted for us to get out of there. They said coming onto the path at us is very aggressive behavior. We escaped and then hid the Oreos away deep in our bags! Ms.E was ready to go home at that point. No need to see this crazy jungle. She was persuaded to walk down the centre of the wide path into the park. She agreed that that was as far from the trees as she could get.

Some of our friends were actually on the guided Nature Walk. They had shared their location with us, so we knew what path to head down. The paths were very clearly defined with maps at intersection points; no getting lost here. We didn't rush, but we didn't dawdle either. We met up with them 15 minutes later.

While wandering in alone, we spotted a Giant Jungle Ant. Evelyn screamed as she spotted it as she was stepping over it on the path. They are  huge; about 3 cm long, black front half with a red rear potion with stripes there. These ants are a sign of the good health of this area; They only appear in mature forest.

We spotted a yellow and black spider with a zig-zag web too.

After we found the group, we also found evidence of the Kampong. There were large round water cisterns, brick buildings with the roofs long gone overgrown with vines. We saw cracked pieces of pottery and bricks among the leaves on the ground. Someone even found a glass bottle from the 60's. There were even some roofless buildings of concrete walls. The jungle was thinner here.

The leader was great with the kids and very knowledgeable about everything. We would walk a bit, the stop as he pointed something out and told us about it. The kids milled around. It was very casual, but also very informative. He even pointed out a curry plant along the path which would have been planted by the villagers.

As were were walking out of the park along the main trail, we came upon a troop of monkeys. Ms.E was not impressed, but over came her fears with this group of smaller much less aggressive monkeys. It looked like mostly moms and babes. One did decide to walk right through the kids. The kids promptly got off the path.  As we walked away from the troop, we were told to shift our backpacks to our fronts to discourage any overly ambitious monkeys from deciding to jump on our backpacks.

We passed a Rambutan tree, and talked about how the monkeys shake the fruit to the ground. The instructor passed around some ripe Rambutan from his bag. It was our first time trying this fruit with it's spiky outside that we cracked open to eat the white flesh of. I think it tastes like a cross between a grape and a lychee. MsC could not figure out how to open it.

The families all headed to the local Prata shop, where we recuperated from our adventure with Prata (flat bread) and Thosai (fermented lentil and rice crepes). MsE got a Mango Lassi, which she will definitely be ordering again.