Mt. Inas (30th April - 1st May 07)

Hai Poh went to Gunung Inas 5 years ago and had described Gunung Inas as the 2nd beauty of Banjaran Bintang. So, 14 of us signed up for the Gunung Inas hiking trip during the Labour day. I went to Gunung Bintang at June 2005 which also located in Banjaran Bintang and I had seen the most beautiful sunrise at Gunung Bintang. So, I had put the high expectation on Gunung Inas. Higher expectation leads to greater disappointment. Gunung Inas – “too beautiful” which made me never ever think of want to visit her again.

We separated into 3 cars and headed to Ipoh at 29th April. We spent the night at Dee’s house. The next day, we started our journey to Lawin at 6 o’clock early in the morning. I slept in the car all the way and when I opened my eyes, the signboard of “Selamat Datang Ke Lawin, Perak” came into sight. We passed by a secondary school and a police station, stopped at the Malay stall beside the road to have our breakfast. Hai Poh went into a shop to buy something. A Malay told Hai Poh that he recognized him and asked whether he came here to climb Gunung Inas. We felt a bit unbelievable but later we found out that he’s a friend of the tour guide that Hai Poh hired at his previous climb. He saw the photos of Hai Poh before. His name is Salim and turned out to be our guide this time.

After breakfast, we parked the cars at Salim’s house and started our journey. We bypassed the rubber estate and walked into the palm oil plantation. After an hour walking, we reached the starting point of the trek. Gunung Inas is about 1800m and half of the trek is the logging trail. Fern grow wildly along the trail. Our guide was in front to make the way for us by removing the fern. Hai Poh, Tack, Kok Yuen and Ming also took turn to chop down those fern. Guide hiring is the spontaneous decision and we are glad that we have a guide with us. Without Salim, most probably we will get lost in this forest.

Rain started to pour around 12pm.Leeches had become extremely active in the rainy day. They attacked us aggressively and wouldn’t lose any opportunity to suck out our blood. We stopped to check and remove the leeches. This activity had become more frequent from time to time. Imagine that you will find leeches on you every 5 minutes walk, then you will able to understand why leeches is our nightmare at Gunung Inas. Salim kept on telling us that campsite is not far away, only about 2 hours journey. “Dekat saja, 2 jam” and the problem was he had been telling us this since 2 hours ago. We only reached the campsite at 5.30pm. It’s 8 hours journey.

The campsite is located beside the river but it’s not the nice campsite, a lot of sand fly. The river at this campsite is the last water point. If we would like to camp at the summit, we need to carry the water from here and all the way up to summit. We are afraid that we might be able to descend and go out the forest before night fall if we camp at the summit. So, we decided to hike up to summit the next day and come back to this campsite for overnight. The next day at 9.30am, we slowly trekked towards summit and reached the top 4 hours later. The surrounding was covered by clouds, couldn’t see any scenery. There was nothing at the top except the pine trees. We teased among ourselves again for spending the holiday in this terrible place. We descended back to the campsite around 2pm and reached campsite at 6pm.

1st May – Labour day, we packed all our things and desperate to go out from this mountain. We were ready to battle with the leeches again. Maybe because of not raining, the leeches are not as much as 2 days ago. But still consider a lot comparing to other mountains.

At last, we had left Gunung Inas at 4pm. The only thing that I remember of Inas is leeches. I can still clearly remember the scene that everybody busy to remove the leeches and kill them with yokoyoko and “minyak angin”. Chee Yong had prepared a small bottle of salt water and put the leeches inside. He said this was the spa that he prepared for the leeches. Phew! I am so glad that this nightmare had finally ended.