... notable events : The very first time... with stars in our eyes...

The very first time... the feelings were indescribable. With child-like wonder and curiousity we explored and immersed ourselves into the experience. The beauty of it all was breathtaking. Her eyes were opened that night, her very first time... the immensity of it all, overwhelming, exciting, and yet a little scary.

The first peek was tantalising, a promise of things to come. From that one single peek, we knew that we would get very little sleep that night. The sun was begining to set, withdrawing the last tendrils of light from the ever darkening skies.

It wasn't my first time. I'd been there and done that two other times before but the look of rapture on her soft features glowing in the dim starlight made it all new for me all over again, the pleasure of sharing this moment with her, priceless.

There were 6 of us, split into two cars for the drive up. The male to female ratio heavily in favour of the feminine gender at 1:2. We knew that others were already there waiting, having set out the night before. It was going to be a large gathering. There would be some people I knew there, the others would just be people I had yet to know. As we drove from Singapore, we laughed and played the entire journey, a short 2 hour drive along the old winding highway to the northeastern coast of Johor state. We had set out just after lunch and expected to arrive at the small coastal town of Mersing just in time for dinner and a little shopping before we headed to the beach. Everyone was excited and there was anticipation in the air because for most of them too, this would be their first time and I being the experienced one, was determined to make every effort to make it memorable.

It was late afternoon when we arrived. Our tummies rumbling, we tumbled out of the cars into a quaint little restaurant for food. We ordered and ate in a hurry, ordering extras to be packed and eaten later for supper. The sky had gotten visibly darker by the time we exited the restaurant and we needed to hurry. I fretted a little because I knew I needed to find my way to that secluded spot on the beach we were headed for and I didn't relish the thought of having to find it in the dark.

We topped off our supplies of drinks and junk food from the provision store next door to the restaurant and then we were off. From the central roundabout at Mersing, we got onto the narrow coastal highway and started heading north. This highway hugged the South China Sea coast and led all the way to the Thai border 800km to the north. We weren't going that far of course, just 15km or so for the right turn that would take us to the beach.

The streetlamps petered out not long after leaving the town, plunging everything outside of the board arcs of our headlights into darkness. We drove slowly looking for the turning we needed to make, gauging it's location more from dead reckoning and the measure on the odometer, than from any physical landmark or sign. The first time I had been here was in another friend's car, and he had used a GPS system to tell him exactly where to turn and how far to run. I had jotted notes of that first trip, converting a GPS system of navigating into a simple but crude directional and distance system of readings. With my directional and distance readings, I had put them into practice on a second excursion in broad daylight to verify the accuracy of my notes. They had worked then and I was fully confident that they would work now, the only difference being the lack of vision beyond the car's headlights.

I found the turning without problems. Slowing and signalling to make sure the second car would follow, I turned down this side road which would take us a further 2km towards the water's edge. There again, I waited for the other car before turning left along what had originally been a small dirt track but was now apparently in the process of being tarred and surfaced. A further 5km or so along this narrow track I slowed yet again. This was the difficult part. The exact stretch of beach we were headed for was unmarked and I had no foolproof way of knowing the exact moment to turn off the track. Twice I stopped my car to look for fresh signs of other cars turning off the track in the light of my headlamps before I found one with visible tire marks on the grass a metre or so beyond. This was probably it, I told the rest but wait... I had to be sure.

Turning off the car lights, stilling myself while peering outward and taking the time to let my eyes adjust to the night, I stretched out with my senses... there was the low whistle of the sea breeze, and there, the sound of the surf... and yes, there, the unmistakable sounds of other people with the telltale flashes of reddish lights about a hundred metres or so in the distance, exactly in the expected place and direction.

"Ok, we're going." I told my pensive passengers, all chatter having ceased along with the disappearance of streetlamps. To these city dwellers, the lack of lighting was an alarming thought and something probably to be feared. I smiled reassuringly. We were almost there.

With headlights on, over the low earthen kerb we went, onto the grassy knoll. Slowing twice, I edged around two small ponds, making my actions deliberate enough for the driver behind me to notice. It wouldn't do to have to call a tow truck now. Mobile phone coverage in this area was tentative to the point of being worthless, not to mention that one usually didn't want to get one's car into a pond.

Nearing the now increasingly visible group of parked cars and tents, we turned off our headlights yet again and coasted to a stop, turning our cars around for ease of unloading from the rear trunk, as well as for quick getaways in case of trouble. We were here.

The oohs and aahs were already eminating from the cars as the engines were silenced. So they've noticed, I grinned. I looked over at Waikit seated in the front passenger seat. She was silent, her eyes glued to the skies. Reaching a hand over to hold hers, we shared a treasured moment, the glorious vista of the heavens stretching from horizon to horizon above and before us.

Movements were sluggish, breaths were laboured, all due to the unabashed gawking at the night sky without city light pollution. Someone exclaimed that she didn't know that there were so many stars in the sky, enough to fill the heavens with hardly a blank space. I gave them all a knowing smile, my sister and I the old hands at stargazing, quietly making the rounds to greet the others who had arrived earlier.

We spread the mats and deck chairs and started work on setting up the telescope. I used an 8 inch which was just at the edge of decency for a deep-sky observation platform. I would have loved to have at least a 12 inch or even a 10 inch but the cost of delivery and the need to lug about such a large weight all over the place made such a bulky and heavy telescope impractical. The other newbies were all mesmerized, faces glued upwards to the heavens. Yes, it truly was breathtaking, I told them, but they really needed to stop or risk a stiff neck soon.

The coffee and snacks soon appeared and we were soon munching and slurping our supper while I took them on a slow tour of the cosmos, first identifying notable sky objects with my PDA, then waiting for them to rise high enough before pointing my telescope towards them. It was amazingly clear. The night as usual, was chosen especially for a moonless night due to the disturbing brightness of moonlight. The hazy cloud-like milky way band could be seen crossing the sky like the river of the ancients. We identified constellations, nebulae, planets, binary stars, coloured stars, star clusters, and my personal favourite, spiral galaxies.

The temperature dropped to a chill and we opened the heat packs to keep
the telescope tube warm so as to keep the lenses from fogging from dew. Not many of us slept much that night, Waikit and I snoozing off and on in our sleeping bags, waking occasionally to repoint the telescope to yet another new deepsky object that had finally risen. The very satisfied smile that was permanently etched on her starlight-lit face was simply the best reward I could have gotten for my efforts. In order not to spoil the night vision of our eyes, torches were banned or at best dulled to a low reddish glow. It was nice sharing this experience with her, in the category 1 darkness where a person's featureless outline is all one can see at 3 feet away, it was an intimacy of the closest kind possible.

The first rays of sunlight soon brought both groans of disappointment mixed with good cheer for the end of a long night. We woke up to a new world, the surroundings of the previous night now increasingly visible. The distant horn of a motocycle tooting, the crow of a cock greeting the morning, the sound of the surf returning with the rising tide and the switch of the nighttime land breeze to a daytime sea breeze made the experience one of such engagement with life and nature, a stark contrast to the numbing insulation of city life.

Waikit and I walked over the last 50m or so to the beach proper, now lit brightly enough for the waters of the South China Sea to be seen as a darker line of movement on the white sand. We took our time to explore the increasingly visible beach as the morning sun peeked over the horizon in a dazzling burst of colour. Hand in hand we returned to help pack up our things, knowing that the sun would soon be up fully, and the whole area too hot to remain out in the open for long. A friend who had arrived a day earlier had given us the keys to his hotel room in Mersing town the night before. We headed there now, dumping our stuff before going for a quick breakfast. The chatter was all about the night sky and the sights we had witnessed. Very tired bodies were dragged back to the hotel room to sleep off the edge of weariness for the drive back. The two drivers, myself and the other man in our little party, were given the beds to make sure we would be well rested behind the wheel.

3 hours of sleeping later, we were checked out and packed back into our cars. Picking up a quick lunch in Mersing, we were on our way back to Singapore. The were smiles on everyone's faces, having seen what few today ever see their entire lives, the beauty of the stars above our heads. I've been bugged and harrassed to make a second trip ever since by some of the ladies from that first trip but have yet to do so. Perhaps someday we'll return. We'll return to fill our eyes with stars, reexperience the glory of the night sky and for just one night, be again explorers of the cosmos.

>>> Click here for pictorial blog "Activity - Star Gaxing at Mersing, Johor, Malaysia"