The Macritchie Adventure-Part 1-the forest

Since one of the Biology assignments when my friends and i went to Macritchie Nature Reserve to do some research, we took an interest for it and hope to explore it more one day when we had more time. So yesterday, that was where we went.

Initially, Ben was supposed to come too, but he forgot about it, so its left with cmc, mel and I. At AMK hub, our meeting place, I was trying to wave to mel when he could not see me. Despite me telling him through the phone that I was in front of him, and me waving frantically, probably due to the crowd, he did not seem to get me. Finally, I got impatient for waiting so long and walked up to him. This taught me an important lesson. Sometimes, when we do things, we keep insisting on doing it in a way which might seem faster, but when it does not work, we have to change. If not, we keep on wasting our time doing it 'our way' when it could be done much easier had we changed plan.

This is the map of Macritchie:

And this is the route we planned to take (follow the black line):

That's 9.5km. Click here for a clearer map.

We started at around 1:30. After a 2.5km walk, we took a break at the Terap hut.

From there, we proceeded and went onto the Terentang trail.

Nothing much happened, and soon we reached a ranger station where we took a water cum toilet break. It was then when we needed to decide our path. The HSBC treetop walk looked interesting. However, we then realised that the by taking the HSBC treetop walk, it will take us a lot of time as it makes one big round before going back onto a main trail. In addition, from the ranger station bulletin boards, we saw pictures of snakes and the trail was not boarded. This made it look dangerous and thus we did not dare to take the treetop walk.

We found this at the ranger station:

We proceeded

and took a rest at the Petaling Hut this time.

We continued and reached a crossroad.

We wanted to go to Bukit Timah Nature Reserve via Rifle Range Road so we went right--->>>


We walked out of the canopy of trees and arrived at the trail along a ridge, where we passed a butter- and dragon-fly infested area. Hi dragonfly!


We entered the dark shadows again casted by trees. Now, our journey was getting rough...