Kemensah Krazy 12-4-2015

A few months ago Aric asked me if I was interested to join him and a few of his friends on a hike, called Kemensah Krazy.

website

They were thinking about the Kemensah Kinda Krazy, 15 km, “ideal for those who want to have a feel of what the jungle is all about without going to extremes

Could I go the distance…:-)  Hm, I was pretty sure I could, with my almost daily morning exercise in Bukit Kiara. So I registered for the 15 km hike. Checking more carefully what to expect, I found on the website this profile of the 15 km hike. It made me slightly nervous…:-)  Distance no problem, but up and down all the time, total ascent (and descent) 850 meter

profile

The start was at 9 am, but we had to be there at 7:30 am to collect the race card and a BIB number, which you have to fix on your shirt. The race card will be punched at the various checkpoints and the BIB number contains a tag that will record your start and finish  time. Here is my BIB  number. With my nickname Kwai Loh..:-)

BIB

The whole event was organised very well. Free shuttle buses took us from the car park to the start. There breakfast was provided and you could leave a bag with a fresh set of clothes at a counter. For our hike there were six checkpoints, with free water and fruits.

For the 15 km hike there were about 200 participants, just after the start there was a big crowd, slowly moving forward. The organisers had done their best to create an attractive circuit. Sometimes wide logging roads, but also narrow jungle trails and a few steep slopes. Those slopes formed real bottlenecks, at one place we had to wait for about 45 minutes, in the hot sun. We had decided to walk at our own pace, Aric and his friends were faster than me, and often I walked alone, which I did not mind at all…:-)

It was a tough hike, much more strenuous that I had expected. There were a few moments that I thought about giving up. Actually there were quite a few participants who did, halfway. And almost everybody was huffing and puffing. I may have been the oldest participant and one Indian couple asked about my age. When I said I was almost 71, they replied: Wow, we are half your age. That you can do it, gives us strength to continue.  Really nice to hear.

The last (very steep!) part of the hike could be skipped without missing a checkpoint. Aric was waiting for me around there, to tell me that…:-) Sweet. But I decided to struggle on.

And I made it !!

When I shared the finish picture with my siblings in Holland, my youngest brother commented : “Everybody else went home already?”  LOL. But his next comment was that he complimented me…:-). Actually it was true that I was one of the last finishers…:-)  It took me more than 6 hours to hike this 15 km.

Here is the official result. A few participants finished after me. Aric (Cheah Yoke Seng) finished late too , but that was because he had been waiting for me! Later he told me that he and his two friends also had moments where they considered giving up!

results

Here are my certificate and my medal.

Certificate

Medal

And here is a Google Earth map of the circuit. There were three loops, green, red and finally blue. The red one was quite strenuous. Will I (we) do it again. No lah.  But it was a good experience

Map

And of course I had to show off with my well-earned T-shirt. Here in IKEA. You may note that my tummy is still there…:-(

Showing off

Family gathering

When I am back in the Netherlands, we always try to organise a family gathering. This time on 18 April, one day after my 71st birthday. First we met in the family house at the Conradstraat, where we grew up and where my youngest brother and his family are now living.

Conradstraat

Conradstraat

It was a beautiful day, so we decided to take a walk through our hometown and see how much had changed..:-). Here are the six Stuivers, as we call ourselves. A stuiver was the popular name for a 5 cent coin, before the Euro was introduced.

The Stuivers

With the perfect weather, our native village (now a town) looked very attractive with quite a few historical buildings still standing and well-conserved. For Dutch readers of this blog, our Reformed Church is the Gereformeerde Kerk, the other one is the Hervormde Kerk. In English they are both “Reformed” and it would take many pages to explain the difference..:-)

Of course also a lot of renovation has been going on. The modern town hall (2003) has an eye-catching architecture. Next to the railway station a bike storage facility has been constructed in the form of a green apple :-).There is modern sculpture and some of the new residences look quite special

We had booked for our dinner in Casa Havana, a buffet restaurant inside  Avifauna This bird park was opened in 1950(!) as the first dedicated bird park in the world. We have been here regularly in our youth, but for me if was the first time in many decades to revisit the park. Before our dinner we had a stroll through the park. Of course birds in cages, like the hornbills and the flamingoes, but many also roaming free. Very nice, we should have come earlier, as the dinner was waiting for us…:-)

The buffet restaurant turned out to be a popular, crowded and quite noisy venue. A table had been reserved for us and we had a very friendly waitress. Starting wih a welcome cocktail, free flow of wine and beer, a large variety of food, even port with the cheese! Value for money.

“Shall I take a picture of your group”, the motherly waitress asked me. Here is the result

The family

The problem with buffet restaurants is that my stomach is not big enough..:-( Here is what I managed to consume (hm, actually there was such a variety of starters that I had two plates).

dinner

After the dinner we walked back to our cars. Spring is a few weeks late this year, so many trees still were barren. It gave the pollard willows (knotwilgen) an almost magical appearance

IMG_5925

IMG_5927

Before going home, we had a farewell drink in the family house. A very nice and satisfactory reunion!

In the Conradstraat

Copycatting, copycatting, copycatting

In my last journal I wrote that I had made a long hike in Bukit Kiara with a group of hikers. I joined their Whatsapp group and they know about my interest in waterfalls. Last week a message was posted in this Whatsapp group with a link to  Paradise Malaysia Waterfalls . Of course I was interested and I opened the link. Surprise!   Hey, it is about me!  Here is the opening page (click to enlarge).

Waterfalls

The website belongs to the Big Blue Taxi Services and this article has been added to the site in August last year, by ‘bigblue’.

But I have never had any contact with this company, I have never used a Blue Taxi in KL and when I read this: Avoid Blue taxis in KL at ALL cost! , I never will in future, LOL. So, how is it possible that I appear on this site?

Time for some investigative  Google search… 🙂 As I suspected copycatting, I did a search for “Dutch enthusiast Jan Stuivenberg” and got this:

Google

Bingo! Big Blue Taxi Services is there, but top of the list is a STAR article “Our Best Waterfalls” dating back to 2009. And yes, that rings a bell…:-)

In 2009 my friend Joe Yap was very active with her Waterfall Survivors group, drawing attention from a STAR reporter, Louisa Lim, resulting in an article about the activities of the WS group titled  Fighting for the Falls .Joe told her about me, that I was her “sifu”,  I got an email from Louisa and in the same STAR issue a second article was published: Our Best Waterfalls

STAR

When you compare the two texts you will see that they are identical, except for one small, but telling detail: in the Big Blue article  the word five  is omitted, and the title mentions Top 8 Must Visit Waterfalls” . And indeed, in the Big Blue article 3 more waterfalls have been added.

There are more differences. In the Big Blue article the description of the waterfalls is much more elaborate than in the original STAR article.

For example, about the Jerangkang Falls in Pahang.

Here is the STAR description. Not my words, by the way, they were written by the STAR reporter …:-)

Jerangkang STAR

And here is Big Blue (click to enlarge)

Jerangkang Big Blue

The first paragraph is identical. The rest of the text is mine! Copied from the Jerangkang page  in my Waterfalls in Malaysia website. Double copycatting..:-). Ok, the pictures are different.

Did Big Blue do all this? No, it is more complicated.

In the Google search there is another hit, the website Holidays in Malaysia . In May 2010, almost five years ago, and six months after the STAR article, a certain Kenny published an article Best Waterfalls In Malaysia on this website. He added one more waterfall to “my” five…:-). The Geruntum fall in Perak. The rest of the text is identical with the STAR article, but he adds a few pictures. Here is Jerangkang again, including a picture

Jeraqngkang Holidays in Malaysia

And the Geruntum fall links to a separate page: Splashing Time At The Ulu Geruntum Waterfall , published by Kenny in July 2010. Fair enough, for this article he mentions  the STAR as source. It did not take me long to find out that he had copied the content, lock, stock and barrel from Having a splashing time , written for the STAR in 2009 by my waterfall and birding friend Chan Ah Lak !

Do you still follow me…:-)? Because we are not yet there…:-).

The Google Search has another, more recent hit: My Travel Journey September 2012  This is a blog, written by “John” . Here is the opening page

My Travel Journey

And here is the part about Jerangkang on his site. The first two paragraphs are from the STAR article, the purple part has been copied from my Waterfalls of Malaysia site.

Jerangkang My TRavel Journey

For this waterfall no pictures have been copied, which makes the sentence: “These pictures cover the falls until step 15, so there is still work to be done…!” rather meaningless.

For other waterfalls he copies the pictures too, actually just linking to the pictures on my website (which is considered impolite in Cyberspace!) Here is a part of Lata Kinjang, first as shown on my site

Kinjang_WoM

And here is the same part of Lata Kinjang on John’s site. When I check the source code of the page, I see that the whole page has been extracted (using MsOffice Word?)  from my site, even including the table structure, leading to misalignment of the lats picture…:-)

Kinjang-My Travel Journey

In this blog two more waterfalls are added, bringing the total to 8. Why the Bukit Larut (Perak) fall  and the Giam Klimau fall (Sarawak!) are selected from my site, is unclear to me. They are not that special.

Far enough, at the end of the page, he writes: For more info can go to http://www.waterfallsofmalaysia.com/index.php……….  But of course it is still copycatting.

Now we are almost there, finally…:-) When I compare this My Travel Journey version with the Big Blue one, I find only minor differences. Big Blue does not link to my Waterfalls of Malaysia pictures. They have edited (and improved) the layout of the page and made some textual changes. At the end they mention the Waterfalls of Malaysia site, and also that they used My Travel Journey as their source.

But it still is copycatting, copycatting and copycatting…:-) My Waterfalls of Malaysia site has a contact option and the least they could have done, is to contact me and ask my permission.

Final copycatting reconstruction:

STAR article (2009)  > Holidays in Malaysia (2010) > My Travel Journey (2012 > Big Blue Taxi Services (2014)

And one last remark. On all these sites I am introduced as the  “Dutch enthusiast Jan Stuivenberg, who has paid a visit to more than 110 of the nation’s 130 waterfalls

What utterly nonsense about “the nation’s 130 waterfalls“, LOL. When the STAR reporter wrote her article, there were 130 waterfalls described on the Waterfalls of Malaysia site! When you visit the site now, you will see that the present count is 183. And there are hundreds, maybe even thousands more in Malaysia.