Day 3: Soaked undies is no fun

One word for today: RAIN.

Adjectives to go with it: Non-stop, Heavy, Massive, Continuous

Synonym: Storm

OMG.

It sucks when you have to bear through the whole day drenched and, worse, disgustingly smelly and soaking wet jeans, and WORST, soaked undies. YUCK.

We got onto a boat in Batu Putih to do three more tributaries today, and as luck would have it, we couldn't get a boat at MESCOT (what with it being a Sunday and all and hoardes of tourists were coming in apparently) so we looked up a villager to rent his boat -- which took rather awhile as he was in the nearby puny town 'hanging out'.

We finally got our boat and just as we set out, THE RAIN CAME. The massive torrent of water from the heavens. Like W.T.H. And it didn't stop till we completed our whole thing.

I had to walk on this to get to the boat. A klutz like me does not like planks like this.

The thing about weather in the rivers is that you get an almost-storm on the main river, but you get drizzles in the tributaries. And no, tree-cover is not one of the reasons.

We also learnt another lesson today: never NEVER EVER attempt sampling at night. Especially when it's one of those rainy times. And the fact that there are man-eating buayas in this area really freaked me out. Basically I was reminding myself that it's just gonna be like one of those night-river-cruise-thingies..but yea, it ain't that enjoyable when the ride was about 5 hours long, with no proper seats that create butt-numbing effects, in smelly-soaked clothes, and overall feeling totally disgusting.

It was almost torture.

And I lost count the number of buayas I saw. Well, more like their eyes 'cos that's the only thing you can see in pitch-darkness. Croc eyes' reflect like gemstones in the dark when you shine a torch at it. Was keeping myself entertained by watching the silhouttes of the trees against the sky (quite similarly like people watching clouds. What I was grateful for that night was that the boat had a roof. At least I didn't have to undergo another bout of rain.

Btw, this is the "crocodile hunter" part of my experience if you are one of those who have been told that "Li Ying's not in KK this week, she's being crocodile hunter".

And yea, everything I had in my bag was soaked. My river schematics looked absolutely dreadful, and my notebook now resembles one of those field journals that archaelogists find during one of their digs (and according to B, it's looks as if it contains codes to some mysterious conspiracy theory).