Post-Finals Beach Getaway

So as we turned our backs on exam halls and piles of books, we find our­selves suc­cumb­ing to the lure of the beaches as the hol­i­day sea­son beck­ons. We headed to Per­mai (sur­prise!), that same patch of beach we invaded dur­ing last semester’s break, and the semes­ter break before that and the one before that.. you get the idea.

Nonethe­less, this time I went with a whole dif­fer­ent com­pany of friends — Natal­ius and Ms. Chong planned a day trip as soon as the Sat­ur­day of the week of our last paper itself. Six of us went in two cars that morning.

Despite spend­ing retreats to per­mai every semes­ter break of my life, I’ve never dri­ven there myself. There’s always some­one else to be the dri­ver. Not this time though.

The road to Damai is pretty straight­for­ward, but there’s one patch I never seem to remem­ber — the round­abouts in Petra Jaya. I get them mixed up all the time and I wasn’t spared a wrong turn this time either. And I had to make wrong turns both going and return­ing. I’m not usu­ally bad with direc­tions but I some­how man­aged to proved so dur­ing this trip, heh.

Siong Huo was jok­ingly skep­ti­cal if I was on the right road all the way but I proved him dead wrong when we reached the sandy shores of the Damai beach.

We wasted no time jump­ing into the water with our newly-purchased ball. But because the sun was so blaz­ingly hot and we didn’t want to get baked on the nicely-heated sand, we jumped into a stream in cool tree shade instead.

Kick­ing around in the tiny stream bored us pretty quickly. It was only a mat­ter of time before we charged towards the wide open sea, hot or no hot.

We soon found out though, that it was rather tricky to actu­ally launch a sta­tion­ary ball on water into the air. Fur­ther obser­va­tion would show that the den­sity of water damp­ens our swing towards the ball. If that wasn’t enough, the dis­placed water effec­tively pushes the float­ing ball for­ward, caus­ing us to miss the ball com­pletely more often than not.

But when it comes to hav­ing fun, the rules of Physics doesn’t apply any­more. Hell, screw Physics any­way — the finals are long his­tory already. =P

So we kicked and splashed around like we’ve never been to a beach with a ball.

Then sud­denly Heng Hong sur­prised us with a mighty ninja-kick send­ing the ball fly­ing towards Sin­ga­porean shores. Okay it barely made it over Siong Huo’s head but it was the kick of the day.

Natal­ius wasn’t so happy with Heng Hong’s sud­den fame so he sab­o­taged the ball and headed to drier sand and started to show some skillz. Sud­denly he felt like an 80 mil­lion British-pound player.

Any­way, we were soon bored with the ball and decided to con­quer the rocks instead.

We dared our­selves to scale the largest mono­lith we could find in the area.

So we camwhored a bit and savored the sea breeze from atop the rock. Chee Min and Heng Hong joined us later but we soon scram­bled down the rock as it got too baking-hot for us to sit on.

Because we fried our butts while sit­ting on the rock, we retired to sea to get wet again — this time we tried kayak­ing. We were sup­posed to head out in three two-person kayaks but only one was avail­able for another hour. So Heng Hong and Chee Min went out first while we helped them out.

While both of them were out pad­dling around the Damai bay, we waited for the other kayaks to return so we could head out together and have a kayak-flipping war. But the Per­mai beach man­age­ment sud­denly decided to halt the kayak­ing rental ser­vice before we had any chance to hop on.

Long story short, we couldn’t join them. But with the kayak rental ser­vice hut left unmanned and thus, no one to super­vise the return­ing of kayaks, we swam out and as Chee Min and Heng Hong pad­dled near us, we flipped them off their kayak and sab­o­taged it for ourselves.

Chee Min and Heng Hong were tired of pad­dling around any­way so Siong Huo and I took over cap­tain­ship of the kayak — free of charge. =D

The last time I pad­dled a kayak was dur­ing NS, way back in 2007. What mat­tered back then was speed in order to win the water games. But now we spent every ounce of energy left on a slow pad­dle along the coast when we passed another beach­front of the Per­mai camp where a few cou­ples were embrac­ing in the water.

That sight led to Siong Huo and I talk­ing about rela­tion­ships and stuff while we drifted back to the beach.

By then, we were all tired, exhausted and hun­gry. We unan­i­mously decided to have a late lunch at Hartz Chicken Buf­fet back in Kuch­ing. In no time we were invad­ing the doors of Hartz like hun­gry zom­bies smelling like the beach. Luck­ily we had to whole out­let to our­selves or else we could’ve scared every­one else off. =D

I was so occu­pied in gob­bling down chicken wings and mashed pota­toes I didn’t take any pic­tures when we were in Hartz. Go fig­ure. But yeah, we called it day after lunch, all stuffed, drained and wear­ing a layer of tan that is still peel­ing off as I type this, but nonethe­less we had great fun.

So it’s the semes­ter break again. I’ll cer­tainly miss the com­pany of friends back in cam­pus as bor­ing as semes­ter breaks can get. I’ll be fly­ing off to KL tomor­row with my fam­ily to send off my sis­ter fur­ther­ing her stud­ies to the West, but that’s a post for another day.

Until then, Happy Hol­i­days everyone.