We climbed the Keldang Hill (Bukit Kledang) this morning.  This picture shows the view of housing areas from top of Kledang hill.  The hill is located in a town called Menglembu.  Menglembu is a town in Ipoh city areas.  The housing areas at the foot of Kledang hill are within the Menglembu boundary.

As we went higher up the hill, objects were getting smaller and we can capture a larger area 0f landscape views from the Kledang Hill.

Let’s zoom in to get a better picture.  Without the leaves at the top left corner, this picture resembles a building and landscape model.

Using the maximum zoom power of the digital camera, we can even see the vehicles on the streets quite clearly from the hill.

Similar to Matang, there is a tar steep slope that allow 4WD to reach the transmission station for TV and FM station.

There are many entrances and exits for this hill.  We started with the tar road route.  We have only tried the tar road route and the red soil stair case route.  We will try the different path using the jungle track next time.  It will be more adventurous.

And we went down using the red soil route, where there are stair cases.  It is actually the same path as the power cable.  It’s a bit more challenging than the tar road.

The red soil route to go down or up this hill is just beside this Meteorology station.  This is also a seismology station where it study about the earthquakes and propagation of elastic waves through the Earth.

This is another hill connected to Kledang Hill with a transmitter station on its top.  We can see it on the way going down the hill.

In the middle of the deep forest, there is a very small hut.  I use our camera to zoom in again to see its detail.  We wonder how the  people who stay there go up and down the hill usually.

There are 3 sections of stair cases.  In front of the meteorology station, above the stair case.  There were many birds resting in one line on the power cable.  They were singing the bird songs.

We use the red soil route to go down the hill.  As you can see it is the path for the power cable, and the transmiter to go up the hill.  I’ll tell you more about the red soil route of Kledang Hill in the next post.

There are 3 blocks of soils looks like Ayers Rocks.  These blocks of soils are used to hold the support for the power cable that link to the transmitter stations.

We have passed by this red soil area.  Siew Peng’s sister called it the desert.

After we got out from the red soil desert, there is a tar road again, but it is another side of this hill.

I can see the entrance we went in earlier, but it is at least 200 meter away from the place where we came out.

We were exhausted but luckily there is a stall at the foot of the hill.  We enjoyed some drinks and rested for a while before we left.

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed that there was a vertical dark line in the sky.  It’s raining over at that area which I believe it’s not far from here.  I did not hear any sound of the rain, but I can feel the air was getting a bit cooler.  A few seconds later, it started drizzling here, just a few raindrops and then it stopped.

After that, I turned my camera approximately 60 degrees to the left and caught this view. The weather over here was totally different. It was sunny except there was a bit of dark cloud.

The weather is often unpredictable, its scale (large or small area) is also unpredictable as well. As the saying goes, “Save for the rainy days”.  Chinese says, “Tian You Bu Ce Zhi Feng Yun” or translated to English it will sound like “The sky has unpredictable wind and cloud”.  So, be prepared!

These are the pictures of Kuala Lumpur (KL) city taken on the airplane during the journey. KL is the capital city of Malaysia and has gone through series of development over the past decades. As you can see from the picture, there are a lot of skyscrapers and fly-overs all around the city.

The city is often busy and crowded with people who are there to earn a living, to shop or to travel. The view from above shows the city is becoming more and more packed with houses, buildings and vehicles.

When we reached the air-port (Low Cost Carrier Terminal, LCCT) and arrived at the luggage retrieval area, this was what we saw. Just look at the crowd that day! This situation seldom occur if it wasn’t because of some festive seasons are around the corner. I guess everyone was going home to celebrate Christmas and New Year with their loved ones. We made our way through the crowd and waited for our luggages to “appear”. We began to worried when we can get all our luggages because we still need to catch a bus to Ipoh later. We didn’t want to miss the bus because we have to wait for quite some time for the next one.

Fortunately, we made it. And the following pictures were what we caught when the bus stopped at one of the refreshment facilities along the highway. We spotted them and quickly took a few pictures of them. They are the “Felis Silvestris Catus” breed, as in the Tortoiseshell Tabby Cat. They reminded me of the Felis that came into our garden not long ago.

“Hey, wait up, bro!” Felis called out to Silvestris.

There were actually three of them. The two above went to take a walk or hunt for food I guess. The other one remained at where they were spotted. The one below is the third one.

“Where are you guys going? What about me?” shouted Catus.

“Why didn’t you wait for me?” cried Catus

“You’re still too young to come along…just stay there! We’ll get you something to eat,okay?” Felis and Silvestris answered with a loud and clear mew.

“Alright then, can I have fish and chips?”

After a short break and refreshment, the driver continued the journey. We bid Felis, Silvestris and Catus good bye. Ipoh, We’re on our way!

Today is winter soltise.  We spent most of our time today on the journey travelling from Kuching to Ipoh.  We took the 1.5 hours flight from Kuching to LCCT and 3.5 hours bus from LCCT to Ipoh, and reach Ipoh at about 6:30pm.  There were a lot of people at the airport, and a lot of car on the highway as well, everywhere was crowded.

There will be no photo for today’s post.  They are still in our camera.  And today I want to tell you something about Winter Soltise.

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“A solstice occurs twice a year, whenever Earth’s axis is tilted directly toward or away from the Sun, causing the Sun to appear to be farthest north or south at noon.”; - Quoted from Wikipedia.

“The winter solstice occurs at the instant when the Sun’s position in the sky is at its greatest angular distance on the other side of the equatorial plane as the observer. Depending on the shift of the calendar, the event of the Winter solstice occurs sometime between December 20 and 23 each year in the Northern hemisphere, and between June 20 and 23 in the Southern Hemisphere, and the winter solstice occurs during either the shortest day or the longest night of the year.“- Also quoted from Wikipedia.

After I read this on wikipedia, I miss the early sunrise in toowoomba again.  Winter solstice is the opposite way, the sunrise is very late in the morning.  It may be also the coldest day in a year.  I wish that I can experience it again in Toowoomba.  Toowoomba’s winter solstice is in June because it is located at the southern hemisphere.

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In Chinese winter solstice is called “Dong Zhi”.  We ate “Tang Yuan” in Kuching yesterday.  ”Tang Yuan”  is the glutinous rice balls in red and white colour.  And tomorrow, I may have the chance to try the “Tang Yuan” in Ipoh.  I heard that here got another extra colour, the green “Tang Yuan”.

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The winter soltise this year makes me think and recall about something again… …
and
I actually wanted to write a short post, but it grows as I write and it become this long… …