Waterfall adventure

Posted on February 17, 2013 by janstu

Yesterday I have revisited the Nyangung waterfall in Pahang. The Nyangung fall is a powerful waterfall in the Perdak river, near Telemong. Further upstream is the equally impressive Seminyang waterfall, which is more often visited. The trail head for Nyangung is not easy to find and it is a scramble down a steep slope to reach (which is unusual!) first the top of the waterfall.

Here my waterfall kaki Rani is standing near the top of the fall and in the picture to the right he is exploring the way to go down. For comparison, in both pics you see the same tree fallen across the river. During this trip I have made several short video clips. Click here to view what you see and hear from the top. Notice the same tree, and also, deep down, the bottom of the fall.

Going down you have to be careful, rocks may be slippery, in which case it is better to keep right of the rocks and use trees and shrubs as a support. Luckily we had splendid weather. In the picture below you see Rani on his way down in an exposed position…:-) Imagine the thunderous roar of the falling water.

When we had arrived at the bottom of the fall, we could not see yet the fall in all its splendour. We had to cross the river for that, and the current was strong and turbulent. Personally I would not have dared to cross, but daredevil Rani wanted to give it a try and looked for a possible passage. Here he is exploring. He managed and even asked me to follow him. I did..:-)

From the other side of the river we had a beautiful view of the fall. See the picture. And click here for a YouTube clip.

While crossing we had left all our barang behind, but there were nice sunny rocks on this side, a perfect place to have coffee and our lunch. What to do? I will go back, said Rani and get the stuff. So he went back, and daredevil as he is, he took a slightly different route. I followed him on video, click here. Notice how relaxed he is, even smoking a cigaret..:-) The second attempt to cross back, was successful..:-) That was actually the same way we came over.

When Rani had collected our lunch, coffee, water, put it in my watertight bag, he came back, again trying a different route. Click here to see what happened, and you may understand how I felt when I saw him suddenly being swept away! But I did not panic.

Because I trusted him to come back and he did! Safe and sound. Click here. But of course it gave me a shock. If this would have happened to me, I would not have survived. So we had our coffee and our lunch, but after that I suggested Rani to cross over, the safe way, and have a more relaxing time at the other side. Which we did…:-)

This was really an adventure for me, in several ways. Quite a few “What if” questions too.

Added 20-2-2013

Rani still had pictures of our first visit, almost 4 years ago. Left picture shows the situation in April 2009. I have marked corresponding points with red crosses.

In retrospect I think it was too risky what we have done.

Snakes

Posted on February 8, 2013 by janstu

This weekend the Chinese Year of the Snake will start. As usual I will send a digital New Year Card to family and friends, so I was looking in my photo archive for a suitable picture of a snake. Not so easy, because I don’t meet with snakes that often. Here is a collection of my encounters with snakes during the last ten years.

I am not afraid of snakes (as long as they don’t bite, haha). Here I carry a python in the Penang snake temple. Not really an animal you want to cuddle, the skin feels a bit clammy

I had only one encounter with a python on a jungle trip. Actually I almost stepped on it, as it was resting just besides the trail. It didn’t move at all, first we thought it might be dead, but when I touched its head (ok, with a long stick, not my fingers, lol), it opened an eye. I think it must have eaten recently.

Here is another “lazy” snake, a cave racer, no idea why it got its ‘fast’ name. It feeds mainly on bats and it did not mind that its picture was taken. This was in the Dark Caves below the famous Batu caves,

One of my first encounters with a snake in the wild occurred in Endau Rompin National Park. After a waterfall trip and a bath in the Selai river, I was relaxing near the river with a book, when I noticed that less than one meter away a beautiful snake was doing the same (without a book). Moving slowly I stood up and walked to my backpack to get my camera, hoping the snake would stay where it was. It did.

To be honest, I had one encounter with a snake which could have ended unpleasantly. It happened at Upper Chiling fall. I was carefully crossing the river, when I saw not far from me what I thought was a stick. But the stick was waving and at the same time my friends shouted, look out, snake! Within a split second I was back on the bank of the river! It was a black spitting cobra and clearly not pleased with my presence. The main danger with this kind of cobra is that they can spit accurately in your eyes, causing blindness.

During my usual walk in Bukit Kiara we quite regularly notice green whip snakes resting on the ferns. To be more precise, I don’t usually notice anything until my friend Robert spots one, he is very good at it. Beautiful snakes, only slightly poisonous, it seems. In the picture to the right Robert shows that you can take the snake by its tail.

Here is a picture of another whip snake, also taken in Kiara, isn’t it beautiful?

During a trip with the Kiara Bunch, a few years ago, we had a remarkable encounter with a snake which had managed to get its head inside an empty Guinness beer can! The poor creature could not get it out, so of course we (Robert, that is, haha) rescued the snake from an untimely death. I think this is a (harmless) rat snake.

That’s about it, regarding my experience with snakes…:-)

By the way, for those of you who believe in astrology (none, I hope!) the Snake zodiac is not a bad one. Although for me, a Monkey, it may become a turbulent year. Hm, as if the last year was not turbulent enough already!

You may ask, did I find a suitable snake picture for my New Year wish? Yes, I did! It’s a temple snake in the Penang snake temple. When you enter this temple, at first you may ask, why do they call it a snake temple? But when you look more carefully, you will find snakes all over the place.

Here is our card. May the year of the Snake fulfill your wishes, and bring you happiness.

Journal 1-2-2013

Posted on February 1, 2013 by janstu

You could say that my life here in Malaysia is a continuous struggle between gaining weight (nice dinners) and loosing weight (my daily exercise in Bukit Kiara and jungle trips). Last week was a good example.

One week ago I had a nice dinner with friends in restaurant Thong Kee, in Seapark. Famous for its barbecued “dinosaur” pork ribs.

The food was good and the company pleasant…:-)!

A few days later I went for a waterfall trip. One of my friends, Edwin, had told me about nice waterfalls upstream of the Lepoh waterfall in Ulu Langat.
Here is a picture report of the trip.

: Start of the trek

: Following the pipeline. Notice the impact of the fallen tree

: Beautiful! Butterfly or moth?

: The Lepoh Fall

: Upstream of Lepoh

: River trekking

: The upper tiers

: Enjoying my jacuzzi

: They managed to climb up. And I followed!

: The beautiful top tier

: Enjoying our lunch

: We almost destroyed this bridge but repaired it

To reach the top tier, we had to scramble up the lower tiers. At first I decided that I was too old for that, but my friends convinced me I could do it. And I did. Here is a video clip of Edwin and Eng Hoe coming down from the top tier. It was really a fun experience.

Intermezzo: parking in a shopping center can be a problem when you forget where you parked your car. Solution is to take a picture of the location with your smartphone, LOL This is the 1 Utama parking in PJ.

On weekdays I walk in Kiara before having my 1 Ringgit breakfast in IKEA. There has been a lot of rain recently, causing several (minor) landslides in Bukit Kiara

IKEA has also become my alternative living room where I meet my friends..:-) Like today a (Malaysian!) friend from the Netherlands. We walked in the Curve and had lunch in the mamak restaurant near the Curve.

It was a nice week.

Adopt a waterfall!

Posted on January 30, 2013 by janstu

A few years ago I visited the Sg Liam waterfall, near Ulu Yam with my friends Joe and Rahim. I published a report about this fall titled Most polluted waterfall in Malaysia! Here is a picture of what we found:

At that time Joe was organising waterfall cleaning operations with her group of Waterfall Survivors. These Save Our Waterfalls projects were a success, but it was disappointing that after a few months, the rubbish was there again. How to ensure that a waterfall after cleaning, remains clean? Of course the best solution would be to educate the visitors that they should take their rubbish home, but will that ever happen?

Two weeks ago I was back at Sg Liam, invited by friends who are active in a recently established NGO, the Waterfall Lovers Association of Selangor The occasion was the launch of a Sustainable Waterfall Adoption program, where a Company, a School, a Kampong, etc adopt a waterfall, regularly check the cleanliness, take action when needed, etc.

The event was well organised, hundreds of school children took part in the cleaning, there were speeches, there was food. Let’s hope the program will be a success!

Here is a pictorial report.

: Launch of the adoption program

: The VIP’s

: The audience

: Opening speech

: Handing over a memento

: Rubbish enough

: Young volunteers

: Ready to go

: On their way

: Collecting rubbish

: Almost clean.

: The result of hard work

: Of course there is food

: Nice vegetarian lunch

: Part of the collected rubbish

: The satisfied organisers

Largest structure in the Universe discovered

Posted on January 29, 2013 by janstu

This will be a bit longish post…:-)

A few weeks ago an in international team of astronomers announced the discovery of the largest structure in the universe: a group of quasars extending over a distance of 4 billion lightyear (ly).

Quasars (Quasi-Stellar Radio Objects) were discovered about 50 years ago. They look like stars but are so distant (billions of ly away) that they can not be stars. Now we know that they are active nuclei of galaxies, surrounding a massive black hole in the center. Billions of ly away means that we observe them as they were billions of years ago when the universe was still young.

More than 200.000 quasars are known at present. Some of them occur in (large) groups, called LQC‘s.The group that has now been discovered has 72 members (the black circles in the image). The red crosses form another, smaller group.

So, why is the discovery of this large group of quasars so exciting? To make that clear, we have to talk about the cosmological principle and the large-scale structure of the universe.

Long it has been thought that the Earth was the center of the Universe. Then it was discovered that Earth is one of several planets orbiting a star, the Sun. It is the blue marble in the image below. It is not in scale, light needs only 8 minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth, and more than four hours to reach the outermost planet Neptune.

Is the Sun the center of the Universe? No, the Sun is one of several hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. Some of you may have seen the Milky Way on a cloudless clear night far away from cities, as a white band of light across the sky. Here is an artist impression of the Milky Way as seen by an observer from outer space. The approximate location of our Sun has been indicated with a red cross. The diameter of the Milky Way is about 100.000 ly.

Is then the Milky Way the center of the Universe? Again negative! Our Milky Way is just one of hundreds of billions of similar galaxies. The scientists now think that the Universe has no center! From each location and in each direction the Universe looks the same, if you observe it on a sufficiently large scale. This is called the Cosmological Principle

So, what is a sufficiently large scale? If the galaxies would be randomly distributed in the Universe, we would not need to zoom out further. But that is not the case! Our Milky Way is a member of a group of more than 50 galaxies, bound by gravity. It is called the Local Group. Most of the galaxies in this Local Group are small ones, with the exception of our neighbour, the beautiful Andromeda galaxy.

Andromeda is bigger than the Milky Way, may contain one trillion stars and is located at a distance of 2.5 million light-years from our galaxy. Here is a “3-dimensional” sketch of the local group.

The size of the Local Group is in the order of 10 million ly. Many more of these galaxy clusters exist, for example the Virgo Cluster, much bigger than our Local Group, consisting of more than 1000 galaxies, at a distance of 54 million ly.

Here is the Virgo Cluster. All the fuzzy blobs are galaxies, the light points are stars in our own Milky Way. Click on the image to enlarge it and take a few minutes to think about the meaning of life..:-)

We still have to zoom further out. Our Local Group, the Virgo Cluster, the Fornax cluster, the Eridanus cluster and about 100 more are part of an even larger collection, the Virgo Supercluster . Here is one more “3-dimensional” sketch of this supercluster.

You will see the Local Group in the center, the Fornax and Eridanus clusters and many more. We are talking now about a size of more than 100 million ly already!

Many more superclusters have been discovered. Could it be that these superclusters of galaxies are randomly distributed in the Universe. Let’s zoom out one more time! The image below shows the superclusters around us within a distance of 1 billion ly. So the width of this image is 2000 million ly.

Obviously this is not a random distribution. Clusters and superclusters are aligned along filaments filaments, with in between large portions of space almost without any galaxies. It looks like a kind of foam-like structure and is sometimes called the Cosmic Web. In the center you notice the Virgo supercluster. Keep in mind the zooming out steps we have made to reach here! Earth → Sol → Milky Way → Local Group → Virgo Cluster → Virgo Supercluster → Cosmic Web.

Do we need to zoom out more? According to the present cosmology theories: NO. Computer simulations starting from right after the Big Bang show that this foam-like structure on a scale of hundreds of millions of light-years is to be expected. Starting point for these simulations is the measured Cosmic Background Radiation CMB), as depicted in the image below.

To explain the relation between this CMB image and the large-scale structure asks for another post…:-). Basically the Standard model of Cosmology is used, including the effects of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Here is a typical result of such a simulation. The image has a width of 1500 million ly The bright nodes represent Superclusters. You will notice strings of galaxies and voids, quite comparable to the real Universe. At this scale, the Universe looks basically everywhere the same.

We started this post with the discovery of a group of quasars extending about 4000 million ly. Quasars are nuclei of galaxies, so in the terminology used above, they would form a “cluster”. But a cluster of this size would not fit in the above image at all!

This explains the excitement among astronomers and cosmologists. Is the Standard Model of Cosmology wrong?

Let’s wait and see!

Several images in this post come from a fascinating website: An Atlas of the Universe

A Secret Waterfall

Posted on January 20, 2013 by janstu

After my recovery from jet lag and the germs I had taken with me from the Netherlands, I felt the urge coming up to visit a waterfall. Where to go and with whom?

‘Shall I bring you to a Secret Waterfall?’ my friend Siang Hui asked. He is an expert in discovering unknown waterfalls. ‘But you must promise not to divulge the location on your website or blog! The villagers from a nearby kampong are using the water of the stream and are concerned about pollution.’

Of course I accepted the condition. Aric and Rani were interested too, so on a Saturday morning we met at a mamak stall for breakfast and drove to the trail head. Not a real trail actually, traces here and there and river trekking. As was to be expected the waterfalls (many tiers) were pristine.

Here is a picture report about the Secret Waterfall.

: Breakfast with roti canai

: Ready to go

: Start of the trek

: Testing the walkie-talkies

: River trekking

: I have to loose weight!

: Forest giant

: Another one

: The first waterfall

: Another one

: Going gets more difficult

: The main fall

: Measuring the height of the fall

: Dare-devils in action

: Taking a shower

: Refreshing bath

And here is a picture of the main fall in all its glory. Recently I have bought a hypsometer to measure the height of an object. For this fall I found 15 meter.

The Meaning of Life

Posted on January 17, 2013 by janstu

When you are getting older, it is probably normal that you think more about ‘existential’ questions regarding Life and Death…:-)

Is there an Afterlife?
Do we have an Immortal Soul?
Has (my) Life a Meaning?

My background is (Protestant) Christian, but already during my student days I lost my faith. For many years I called myself an agnostic, but during the last decade I became more and more interested, reading a lot (Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) and I became a staunch atheist.

Actually I try to avoid the word atheist, because it raises aggression in many people.

So I call myself a secular humanist. The god of the Abrahamic religions does not exist, he (she?) is a human construct, a meme. I do not believe in an immortal soul or in an afterlife. This life is the only one I have. When my body dies, my mind will be no more, it will be the end of my “I”.

Life is without meaning. It developed on Earth, 3.8 billion year ago, probably only once. Everything that is alive now, is offspring from this common ancestor. There has been an era of the dinosaurs, now we live in the era of homo sapiens, the next era may be dominated by insects. Let’s not overestimate our importance.

Has my life a meaning? That is a different question and I think the answer is yes. We are social animals and can only survive in a group. Our relation with this group (family, friends, society) gives meaning to our life.

Recently I came across an impressive letter about these topics, written in 1931 by the American journalist and writer H.L. Mencken . The full text can be found here , where also background information is given.

The letter ends with:

I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it. The belief in it issues from the puerile egos of inferior men. In its Christian form it is little more than a device for getting revenge upon those who are having a better time on this earth. What the meaning of human life may be I don’t know: I incline to suspect that it has none. All I know about it is that, to me at least, it is very amusing while it lasts. Even its troubles, indeed, can be amusing. Moreover, they tend to foster the human qualities that I admire most—courage and its analogues. The noblest man, I think, is that one who fights God, and triumphs over Him. I have had little of this to do. When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness. No show, however good, could conceivably be good for ever.

Well said!

This will not be my last post about religion/philosophy and related matters

New Year’s Eve 2013

Posted on January 4, 2013 by janstu

My plan to celebrate New Year’ Eve (Oud en Nieuw, as we call it in Dutch) with my sister Lous and her husband Arend in Valkkoog, almost failed because I did not feel very well. A running nose, a bad cough and a sore throat, apparently I can no longer handle the Dutch climate…:-(

But I was looking forward to meet my only sister, and she had promised that she would prepare oliebollen ! These oliebollen (oily balls) are a very Dutch delicacy, I had not tasted them for years. So I decided to brave the weather.

Of course there was still a Christmas tree in the house. Often Christmas trees are thrown away after New Year, but last year Lous and Arend had placed the old one (still with roots in a pot) in their garden. Preparing to buy a new one, she had inspected the old one and found it still in good shape. So in the picture you see the second life of a real Christmas tree. Many birds in their garden, like this Great Tit.

After we had lunch, Lous and Arend started the preparations for the oliebollen. The dough is simple to make with lots of raisins and currants. It has to rise for at least one hour. In the meantime a pan with oil is heated. Then comes the moment to fry the balls, using two spoons. The dough has to be neither too thin nor too thick, the temperature of the oil has to be just right, etc, so it is always exciting to see how they come out. Is the shape round, are the balls not too dry or moist inside, etc.

Well, in this case they were perfect. You cover them with powdered sugar before eating. Another variety is the appelflap, a slice of apple, dipped in batter, then fried in oil. Also very tasty.

: Preparing the dough

: Let it rise for one hour

: Preparing the apple slices

: The first batch

: Looks good

: Lous checking

: The cap used by our mother

: My turn

: Powdering with sugar

: Yummie!

: The appelflappen

: A job well done

: Dinner time

: Sjoelen

: Happy New Year

: A friendship drink with my sister

Later we had dinner, watched some TV and played a few games of sjoelen .This is another typical Dutch specialty. At midnight we wished each other a Happy New Year and we toasted with a glass of champagne. Far way in the villages you could hear and see the fireworks, but around their bungalow it was peaceful and quiet.

On New Year Day I flew back in the evening to Malaysia. Lous had given me a few oliebollen, for Aric. As you can see, he enjoyed them.

Still not feeling well, even went to see a doctor. My lungs are ok, will just have to keep quiet for some time.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2013

My Blog

My adventures in Malaysia and other countries

Waterfall adventure

Largest structure in the Universe discovered

A Secret Waterfall

The Meaning of Life