... notable events : My friend's death-trap on wheels

It was a cold and chilly day. Winter still gripped the land and black ice was the lurking danger on Vancouver roads. But, it was Valentine's day, and a man's got to do, what a man's got to do.

I had planned it for weeks and it was to be a surprise. I wanted to impress and having seen one too many hollywood movie, I got all the elements of the surprise in place. Balloons, flowers, appropriately mushy writings on an appropriately mushy card, and of course I was dressed to the nines, in coat and tie. The only thing I needed now was my apartment-mate's car.

My apartment-mate was a Singaporean who had come to Vancouver to do this Grade 13 and was now in the faculty of Commerce at UBC. He was a strange one, always sitting with his back to the walls, eyes darting to the windows and to the doors. His room was filled with interesting things, from throwing knives to nunchuks. He used to run with the gangs in Singapore according to him. They sold little goblins to superstitious businessmen who couldn't afford not to buy them for fear of having them run loose in their stores. He'd often regal us with tales of the things he'd seen and the things he'd done as well as the battle-scars he'd accumulated as a youngster in the shadowy world of streetgangs in Singapore. We would listen with bright-eyes and breathless anticipation. He said he was lucky that his Tai-kor let him go when his father yanked him out of the gang and to try and wean him off the gang, sent him to the other side of the world from Singapore.

When he arrived in Canada, the first thing he did was to buy himself a car with his father's allowance money. CDN$2000, he told us proudly, for a second hand American make hatch-back. Now, another 3 years older, this was the car I borrowed to woo fair maiden.

It started simply enough. He'd flung me his car keys without a second glance. Burdened with countless numbers of bulging balloons and a dozen roses, I had taken the lift down to the basement. It was late evening but frost already covered the ground and the coming night looked to be colder than usual for late February. Crunching my way to the car parked just outside the basement, I fumbled for the carkeys to open the door.

"What the..." I cursed as the driver-side door refused to open. Jammed probably from the frost and cold. The other side then. Still manhandling my flowers and balloons, I walked over and fumbled some more the keys. This time, the key didn't want to go into the groove. Peering over the things in my arms, I bent down to see what the problem was in the dim streetlamp light. "Damn!" the whole groove apparently was frozen solid with ice. This being a hatch-back, 2 doors was simply the limit on this car.

Sighing heavily, and watching my breath fogging in front of me, I headed for the rear. Last chance to enter the car. After more fumbling with the keys, I was somewhat relieved to find no problems with this lock. I dumped all my things into the car, squeezing balloon after balloon into the back seat until it filled the whole rear space. Only then did I belatedly realise that I too needed to get into the car.

Feeling extremely sheepish and not a little self-conscious, I parted the balloons and ingloriously crawled into the boot of the car from the rear hatch-back door, suit, tie and all and nose-dived into the backseat. I must have mashed some of the flowers in my hand but at least I was in! After that it was a simple matter of opening the car door from the inside to exit and slam shut the rear door. Ok, now I was good to go.

Thinking the worst behind me, I had calmly backed out of the parking lot and began the drive to Burnaby, the town just east of Vancouver. Traffic was light that evening and thankfully so because I soon realised that the car had a dangerous tendency to slip and slid on occasion. A quick stop by the side of the road to check the tires soon told me why. Every single tire was bald. If there used to be friction patterns on the tires, I couldn't tell what or how they used to run because they were literally bald. How my friend could continue to drive with such tires was beyond me. Gingerly I eased the gear-shift back and very slowly continued my journey. Black ice on the road was an even more dangerous threat now since I not only didn't have either snow-thread tires or chain-tied tires, I didn't even have normal threaded tires!

The drive down the hill from the university went blessedly uneventful, until I reached the trafficlights at the bottom of the hill. The lights were green so I eased the brake gently to slow down just sufficiently to turn. That was when the car's engine decided to quit on me. It literally stalled halfway in the junction as I was turning. Undeterred and pretty much resigned to expect the worse from this car, I very calmly freed the gears, restarted the ignition, all while using the momentum of the hill to turn right onto 10th Avenue, yet worried that that the tires would slid. Thankfully the engine caught on the second ignition try, and I was able to re-engage the gears and continue on my merry way.

It still did it's darnest to slip and slid but I think I got the hang of the beast after awhile, and the rest of the journey was uneventful and I made my Valentine's day surprise. The car, probably having said it's piece, decided that it had said enough since I had by then built up a healthy respect for it and it's quirks. Later that night when I returned the car to my friend, I asked him about his tires and his engine. He shrugged his shoulders and rather non-chalantly said, "Yeah, but it's a good car."

Well...

... notable events : My longest ever birthday gift

It was the morning of August 24th 1991. 5am in the morning to be exact and my parents and little sister were there to wave me off for what would be one of the greatest adventures of my life, one that would span 4 years and the entire width of the Pacific Ocean.

As I stood there in the immigration line, waving back at them, I couldn't help be feel a little mixed-up inside. Mixed feelings were warring inside of me as I fingered my passport and dutifully moved forward with the inching line. I was excited, sure, but I was also apprehensive as well as a little happy but yet annoyed all at the same time.

I was excited. Who wouldn't be at the thought of travelling to foreign lands to live in a foreign culture and to experience life in another world? But I was also apprehensive. It was an apprehension tinged with a healthy dose of fear. I would be all alone by myself 10,000 km from home, away from the comforts of mom and the security of dad who would be but miles out of reach. It would be cold in Canada, and it would also be the most trying struggle of my young untested life as I attempt to earn a degree. I was also on a university scholarship, and the onus to perform and to live up to its standards were extremely daunting. Also included into that heady mix of emotions was happiness, and almost deliriously maniac happiness which threatened to break out in smiles and chuckles. I was all grown up! Here I was, standing in line, waiting to board a plane that will take me to another life, one that I would have to manage and tend to myself. I was free to be me!

But I was also annoyed. As I cleared immigration and sat in the departure hall of Changi International Airport waiting for my flight, I couldn't help but dwell on the fact that I was now 20 years old on this very day. This was my parent's warped sense of humour, to pack me off to Canada on the very day of my birthday. In a way it was sweet. It meant that my university degree would be my parent's birthday gift for my 20th birthday. But young as I was, it also meant that I wouldn't be opening any presents anytime soon.

I was booked into a United Airlines flight transiting in Narita, then Los Angeles where I would have to change planes for a short internal hop to Seattle before changing yet again for the last leg across the Canadian-US border to Vancouver. What this really meant was that instead of a normal 24 hour birthday with birthday cakes, presents and friends, I had a full 44 hours of birthday as I cross the international dateline, the bulk of the hours spent cramped in a narrow seat restricted in motion on a plane full of strangers without even the benefit of seeing pretty kebaya-clad airstewardess since everyone who's ever been on an US airline would tell you that they probably chose their female staff by the musculature tonnage.

Cold, tired, sleepy and disorientated I arrived at LA International Airport. Already forewarned about the strict US immigration system I braced for the worse. With stiff muscles I dragged my two pieces of luggage which were brand new at the start of the journey but already looking as tired as I was through the customs and immigration lines, but strangely enough I was waved through with little fuss. The officers looked as bored as I would have expected to see on a hollywood blockbuster of some third-rate banana republic border crossing. Thankful for my good fortune, I made my way out of the International terminal building and out onto the pick-up road outside. This I knew from having been briefed prior to arrival, that unlike our usual transiting all done within the same terminal building, the Domestic flight terminals were separate buildings all off to the right of the International terminal as you exited the building. Naive as I was, I thought I would just walk over next door from one terminal to another. Little did I know that they literally meant Domestic Terminals in the plural, and to make matters worse, they were different for each domestic airline. My first impressions was that the famed LAX was such a dump! After the classy-modernity of Changi International, LAX looked decidedly third-rate. I'd seen local small town terminals in Malaysia look better than it did. Maybe I was tired and my brain was staging a mini rebellion of it's own.

Clutching my transit ticket, I trudged along the road, knapsack on my shoulder, luggage rolling along behind me and searching for the United Airlines Domestic Terminal. Twice I stopped to ask for directions, and twice I was told it was just further ahead. I'm not sure how long I walked but I dare say I reached it... eventually. Now this really looked third-rate. I'd known bus terminals in Malaysia which looked better than this, and with much better organisation. Shoulders were aching and sore feet now added to my grand total of stiff back and neck coupled with the usual sleep deprived jetlag-adled mind. The only good part of this story was that I was in no immediate danger of missing my flight as my boarding time wasn't for another 2 hours. Having spent the better part of the first hour walking the inter-terminal roads, I was still 1 hour early for my flight.

Marching up the stairs, my luggage bumping along, I came up to an empty seating area. Wait a minute. Is this even the right place? I began to panic a little until I noticed the small stand off to the side with the flight number on it and the departure time. Well, at least they did match my ticket, but where is everyone? The minutes ticked by and still I sat there alone, no other passengers, not even a flight staff to punch my ticket or anyway to check-in my luggage.

30 minutes to departure. What if I really am sitting at the wrong place?

15 minutes to departure. Hey, someone is coming! Finally. "Seattle?" I asked. The old man grunted at me. I think he said yes. At least he's also sitting down here clutching a ticket, one which I tried my damnest to peek at.

10 minutes to departure. More people arrive and a so does a flight attendant! I was up as fast as I could. "Is this the correct flight I should be on?" I asked her, thrusting my ticket in her face. "Yes, please take a seat." she said without my expected service smile. Well, at least I'm not lost, I thought as I plonked back down onto the seat.

The same scene repeated itself again at Seattle Airport but this time I was a little wiser and things nearly went just that little bit less scary as at LAX United Airline Domestic Terminal. After another hour of waiting, I was on my way into Canada. It was still early morning and the sun was just beginning to warm the land, or at least that's what they say. To me, born and bred in the tropics, I really couldn't tell except for the fact that it seemed to be shining well enough but the usual burning sensations were oddly missing.

As the final leg of my journey commenced, I finally had time to really take in the sights. Looking out my plane window, I was struck first by the vast emptiness of the land below. For miles on end, one could see acres upon acres of green forests or brown farmland. The roads and buildings much too sparse in between and the mountains in the distance seemed impossibly.

A short 30 minutes or so later, I was in Vancouver International. Here, the famed Immigration Officer made his presence felt. I felt throroughly like a common criminal trying to establish an illegal import business of banned Chinese drugs or someone who was the front runner of an illicit asian-bride smuggling network. It was at least an hour before I cleared immigration and customs to exit into the bright Vancouver late morning sun. A car was there to meet me, curteousy of the University's International House who had volunteers mainly made up of professors and lecturers who gave time to pick-up international students. His greeting was both warm and sincere, a very nice change to that first Canadian I had ever met in my life who had probably now gone on to harrass yet another poor bone-weary student newly arrived from yet another country on the other side of the globe.

As the car pulled out of the parking lot, I told him it was my birthday and he wished me a very happy birthday, and since it was only about 11am in the morning of the 24th of August 1991, I still had another 12 odd hours to celebrate. I smiled, wishing more for a soft bed and pillow than anything else in the world. He chatted away happily as I nodded off sleepily in his car, a very tired and travel weary first year student literally thousands of miles away from home on the opening phases of his longest ever birthday present.

... notable events : Reclaiming our house

"Kit Meng, go up to KL and get our house back." my father said.

It was late 1999 and Southeast Asian economies were still struggling to recover. Crime was rampant, bankcruptcy numbers were at an all time high. A frantic call late one night from our old neighbours in Petaling Jaya prompted that strange request from my father. Apparently something dreadful had happened with our house and our tenants.

It all started 6 months ago. The signs were there. Payments were late. Excuses were becoming repetitive. But my father was perhaps too kind and he allowed rental payments to slip. A month of deferment became two, and two became three, cheques would arrive in partial amounts, then they would arrive not at all. Then came the call from the old neighbours from across the monsoon drain. "You better come and see.", they said. "Your house is a mess and your tenants are gone."

So up I went, fearful of what to expect. Taking a night bus I travelled overnight and reached home early the next morning from Singapore. Standing outside the gate, I could see rubbish strewn all over the place and a great pile cloggin up the carporch. The lights were all on and it was obvious that the house had been abandoned in great haste.

Wisely, I headed next door and called to my neighbour. He came out and explained that the the tenants were in a frantic burst of activity a few days ago and then silence from the house. It had been like that for days before he called us in Singapore. Then he popped back into his house and returned with his shotgun in one hand, and a cellphone in the other. "Ok, you go in, I'll be watching." he said.

So in I went.

Under the watchful eyes of my neighbour who was peering intently over his side of the fence, I circled the house. There was rubbish everywhere. Almost every light I could see was on. Almost every ceiling fan was on too. It was a wonder that they didn't leave the airconditioning on as well. The electricity meter gauge was racing round so fast I didn't even know it could go that fast, but what really worried me was the sound of water gushing somewhere inside the house. Interestingly enough, none of the doors were open. The tenants at least had the presence of mind to lock up the house. That must be a good sign at least. But the bad news was that none of our keys worked either, and those that worked had wooden doors bolted from the inside.

I trotted over to the fence and yelled across the monsoon drain. "Can't open the doors." I said. "I'm going up onto the roof." I explained and my neighbour nodded, looking very serious with the shotgun propped on his hip.

Scaling the wooden creeper wall, I clambered onto the porch roof and from there it was a simple matter of popping open the front room window glass and grill. The scene that greeted my eyes was too incredulous to describe. Mosquito netting was all over the place, furniture was in various states of dissessembly, and again, rubbish was all over the place.

I leaned back out the window and waved to my neighbour. This was the tricky part. If there was still someone inside the house, I would be in trouble since my neighbour wouldn't know until perhaps too late. I moved cautiously, opening doors one after another. It pained me to see my house this way. This one was my room. This one my sister's. That was where I played and lined up my toy soldiers all over the floor... but now the whole place seemed... alien. To top it off, I did find evidence that someone else had been in the house and perhaps even sleeping here after the tenants had left. I had the urge to dial my neighbour had hold an open line just in case, but thankfully, the house proved empty, at least the upstair rooms were empty. I had yet to check downstairs.

I found the gushing facet. The bathtube was draining water at a rate that made my conservationist heart cringe, but the bathtube was as yet thankfully only half full and would probably have begun to clog in another couple of days. That would have been a disaster as it would have meant having to deal with water damaged timber flooring. All the mosquito netting had been ripped out and the mesh strewn all over the floor. Apparently someone had decided the aluminium used in the netting frames was worth the effort to remove and steal. With a total of something like 16 window panels upstairs and an equal number downstairs perhaps all that aluminium made for a tidy sum on the recycling market, but the greatest shock was yet to come.

Gingerly picking my way through the incredible amount of rubbish, I switched off lights and ceiling fans as I went along, checking and double checking that everything was shutdown before moving on. Then, when I was satisfied that the upper floor was secured, I threaded myself down the stairs to the ground floor. The same scenes of chaos greeted me downstairs with strange stains on the kitchen floor and obvious burgler damage to the rear kitchen door and gate. Puzzling though, was the fact that the burgler damaged kitchen door and gate shown no signs of entry. The locks had held and bolts were still bolted, yet someone else other than my tenant looked to have entered to rip out all the aluminium screens.

Again I went around shutting electrical switches and stoppering the flow of yet another faucet on the groundfloor toilet. I was feeling a lot more relieved having found the entire house empty and having signaled to my neighbour the all clear after re-exiting the house from the main door out in front. He gave me the thumbs up and disappeared back into his house, shotgun and all. That was when I noticed the stack of letters on the top step of the front door entrance. They were all utility bills stamped with big red words meaning "Overdue". Water and Electricity bills both. Ripping open the latest ones for each utility I read the contents and promptly sank to the ground on weakened knees. Not only did the tenant owe us an accumulated 5-6 months of rental, he apparently also owed the electricity company about RM7000 and the water company a further RM5000, bills we would have to pay if we failed to find that ingrate, and even if we find that ingrate, we probably wouldn't be able to get any money out of him. Last we heard, he had gone back to his kampung and that was the only clue we had left to go on to trace him. What really surprised me was the fact that both the electric and the water companies didn't shut down services when the bills became unreasonably overdue. This was something we needed to take up with the authorities, but not yet. I still had a house to secure.

As best I could, I cleared up the most obvious piles of rubbish so as to make the house look less empty and abandoned. I walked out to the nearest hardware shops and bought whole sets of new padlocks as well as arranged for a locksmith to come over to remove all the other lock which my keys couldn't open. I also bought self-timers and lights to give the house the appearance of being lived in but all this was only temporary stop-gap measures. My family and I would have to make another trip at another time to really clean up the house and to get another tenant, a more responsible one hopefully.

It was both bitter/sweet as I went through my old house, the childhood memories now somewhat smeared. Over there was where I had my hammock, and here was where the piano used to stand, or just across the patio was the spot where I had spent a few nights outdoors sleeping under a coconut-tree-leaf shelter I had built, or that now-blackened slab of flooring was a minor extension my grandfather had helped us build with his own hands...

But at least, it was back in our hands. Mine.

... notable events : The day the jetty blew away

Today if you said you were going to Jurong Island, it would involve nothing more complicated than an exchanging of your identity card or passport for a security pass at the checkpoint, and a simple drive over a 300metre long bridge.

In 1996/1997, a visit to Jurong island meant cramming into a highspeed ferry that left from Jurong pier to one of the small islands, Pulau Ayer Chawan, Pulau Ayer Merbau, Pulau Merlimau, Pulau Pesek, Pulau Pesek Kecil, Pulau Sakra and Pulau Seraya, that made up what is now the reclaimed island of Jurong Island. I was a young engineer then, involved in building a mere SGD$2 million dollar temporary site office for the construction of oil refineries on what was still Pulau Sakra.

It was a dark stormy day when I stepped onto the ferry that morning to attend yet another boring site meeting on Pulau Sakra. The waves were choppy and there were wind warnings for smaller boats. Thankfully mine was a large ferry, I thought to myself. Looking at my watch, I was a good 1 hour early for my meeting. Lots of time to arrive at the pier at Pulau Seraya, catch the ride from the car the contractor would have sent for me, and be in the site meeting room in time for coffee. Little did I know that the world doesn't always work that way.

The storm hit halfway across the sea and the ferry began to heave and buck like a raging bull. I clung onto the seat in front of me as the ferry rose and smashed back with a huge splash only to rise yet again in a crazy determined cycle, custom-made to make you throw up your breakfast. I amazed myself that I didn't oblige the ferry despite it's best efforts but quite a few people did and because opening the windows would have let the pounding rain in, the acrid smell of vomit soon made itself apparent.

A journey that would have taken 30 minutes, took 45 minutes instead as the sea did it's damnest to sink the ferry. Many a person heaved a sigh of relief when the Pulau Seraya pier came in sight. I too caught myself calculating the swimming distance to shore if the need should arise.

Well, this isn't so bad, I though as the ferry began to pull in close to the pier. I'm still in one piece and not too bad in terms of making my meeting on schedule. I was thankfully right on the first count but way off on the second. For 30 minutes the ferry stayed at the pier while we continued to sit and wait for the all clear to disembark. A quick look at the ferry edge and the pier edge told us all we needed to know. The two edges which should be nicely aligned on the same plane level for us to hop across was now heaving and moving up and down as much as 1 metre in both directions with each other. Well... there goes my morning schedule. My meeting, slated for 10:00am in the morning was going to have to start without me and I had been in the ferry for over an hour already with the pier still heaving and up and down.

It wasn't until close to 10:30am when the seas subsided sufficiently for us to attempt jumping across, timing it just as the ferry edge was higher than the pier edge to leap down. My knees never felt more wobbly than they did that morning, and solid earth never felt so solid before in my life. The contractor's car was no where in sight as the driver had probably assumed that I wouldn't be coming.

A quick call from a payphone at the pier soon put that right and within minutes another car arrived to collect me. Over temporary bridges, across sandy mounds, over muddy fields and over recently tarmaced roads we raced from island to island, the car not having seatbelts which worked, nor having any numberplates and I suspect, the driver probably not even having a local Singapore driver's license, but this was Jurong Island. It was one big construction site and traffic rules didn't apply within site boundaries. There was a cowboy frontier feel to the place, just minutes from squeeky-clean downtown Singapore.

I breezed into the meeting room at close to 11:00am, half drench and with knees still wobbly only to learn that most of the people had yet to arrive as many of the big shots from the oil industry used private boats which docked at the smaller private contractor piers and they fared worse than my large stable ferry. I grinned rather happily at not being the last to arrive.

The meeting soon got underway and we could hear the storm outside increase in volume again but I very smugly smiled, safe as I was within the meeting room of the site office I built. The meeting proved a let down to the morning's excitement as I twiddled my thumbs and nodded sagaciously as a good professional should. It was nearing the end of the meeting when we heard the commotion outside. "What?" I asked, and received equally puzzled looks in return. There was shouting outside and the fear was that my lovely temporary site offices were collapsing with us inside! We filed outside in a hurry to see.

Initially we didn't notice anything amiss until one of the workers pointed to the sea. I looked and saw the waves pounding against the sand, splashing at least 3-4 metres high into the air. It took me awhile before I realised other than the unusually high waves, what was wrong with the scene. The sea was at least 50 metres closer to us than it was this morning. The sea had apparently washed away a 300 metre stretch of coast 50 metres deep in just under 2 hours, and laying on its side half washed up on the new shoreline was the 20metre steel gangway that used to lead to the private contractor's jetty that served the site. As for the floating jetty itself, it was no where in sight. The sea had been powerful enough to tear up all the moorings and wash the entire jetty out to sea to become a half-submerged shipping hazard somewhere between here and Indonesia. I never found out what happened to that floating jetty but knowing how busy the shipping lanes in these waters are, it was probably found and towed back to shore rather quickly, but who knows, perhaps it is still floating around somewhere just lurking and waiting for some unfortunate ship to run smack into 1-2 tonnes of floating concrete.

We joked about it, but very nervously eyed the still raging sea. Thankfully the rest of the day was uneventful, and the client's private boat came in close enough to shore to take us back later in the day when the storm was finally over and the sun had come out. But it was a nerve-racking brush with nature and ever since that day, I've had a very healthy respect for mother nature and what she can do when she isn't in a good mood.

... notable events : Searching for WW2 Tunnels on Campus

We were college students.

We had come from all over the world, Canadians, Americans, Japanese, Malaysian, German... we were young, and not a little wild.

The world was ours.

The University of British Columbia campus is sited on Point Grey, a spar of outcropping rock that juts out into the sea. The twinkling lights of the city of Nanaimo across the straits can be seen on Vancouver Island far in the distance. Point Grey was the western most part of Vancouver city. It commanded all approaches to the Vancouver harbour as well as the entrance into the Fraser river which led deep into the British Columbia interior.

The Universtiy of British Columbia or UBC, first started in the early decades of the 20th century as a military college. During the 1st world war, UBC churned out military graduates who served in the Canadian army in the trenches of Europe. The war was a distant affair, fought in the newspapers and in the radio reports of the day. The ordinary Vancouver city-dweller knew only second hand news of the war. But by the 2nd world war, war had evolved. It had become more dangerous and the western pacific coast of continental North America was no longer immune to the dangers of war.

Point Grey was the natural place, with it's commanding presence and it's military college, for the emplacement of gun sites to defend the harbour and city from possible attacks from the Japanese. A series of pillboxes and military tunnels were constructed along the rocky beach known as Wreck beach at the bottom of Point Grey. These tunnels were all interconnected and stretched round the entire Point and would have led up the steep slope to the top of Point Grey where twin 12 pounder gun batteries and armouries had been installed.

We found the 12 pounder gun battery sites easily enough. The guns are long gone but the current Museum of Anthropology is straddled by two round raised platforms with sealed staircases and openings for what must have been storage areas or dumbwaiters around the sides. Everynight for an entire month, a group of us, ranging anywhere from 3 to 10 young punks would go out exploring. Armed with torches and good spirits, we would roam the campus by night and scour the beaches by day. We probably would have tried scouring the beaches by night too if not for the fact that even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or RCMP (Mounties for short), usually don't even attempt to go down to Wreck beach past sunset.

No many of us made our morning classes that whole month, but we didn't care. We were on a mission! We were looking for the secret tunnels that led from the gun emplacements and armouries at the top of Point Grey, to the string of pillboxes at the bottom of Wreck beach.

Our search turned up a small 600 x 600mm square hole in the ground, just within the bushes and trees shielding the cliff-face from the campus. It was ringed in rusty iron and had obviously once sported a hinged door. Called the Devil's pit by rather unimagintive students, we theorised that perhaps, this was one of the entrances into the underground bunkers and tunnel system. For many nights, we returned to the Devil's pit, dropping into the hole one at a time to explore. The floor of the room below must have been at least 3-4 metres down but the entire room had been filled with sand which reached up to just 1 metre or so below the opening. It was into this sandpit that we slipped and slid our way down from that opening in the room's ceiling into a corridor that opened just off to the side of the room. This corridor opened in two directions. One was a dead end which looked like it has been bricked up and seal, while the other led to yet another door to another room, one which was filled entirely with sand. Crouching on the sand with our heads just touching the ceiling, we attempted to dig our way into that room. Alas, kids being kids, we were too inconsistent and too impatient for such a massive undertaking. We never got more than 2 feet beyond the door. Sand kept slipping in to fill the pits we dug, and we all soon tired of working by torchlight in the pitch darkness of the underground corridor. We soon abandoned the Devil's pit.

Then we tried it from another direction. We started skipping classes in order to maximise daylight hours for searching the entrance from the Wreck beach end. It was loads of fun, climbing in and out of empty pillboxes, skiing down the slippery sand slopes as if it were snow, as well as looking over some of the strange stuff left over by beach "creatures" (the people who inhabit Wreck beach at night) the night before. We found tarot cards, half-burnt bird bones, girlie magazines, blood-splattered sand and not a few needles which we very wisely avoided stepping on for fear of contracting AIDS. But sightseeing asides, we did find a sloping tunnel that led from a sealed doorway upward into the cliff. This must have been the tunnel we were look for! We know knew from the position and direction of this tunnel that our efforts at the Devil's pit was in vain as it was on the other side of Point Grey from the Devil's pit.

It became very obvious to us that the twin gun emplacements at the Museum of Anthropology was where this tunnel ended. We redoubled our efforts. As students, we got into the Museum for free, so again classes were skipped to enter the Museum to search for lock room doors or corridors that led down into deeper levels. We were all very disappointed when, after two separate teams had made the survey, we concluded that the Museum was either separate from the tunnels, or the access into the tunners were not easily apparent. None of the round raised platforms offered access either as all the openings were sealed and no amount of enthusiatic checking by young university students would pry open their secrets. We were dejected.

Then a way out of our impasse appeared. Apparently the team which we had sent to search the old library records had turned up a complete map of the Point Grey World War 2 Military Installations! We were elated. We made copies of the relevant parts of the map and poured over them eagerly. The old Devil's pit was nothing but a coal room for storage and even if we had completely dug out all the sand from the second room, it would have been just an empty deadend room. The other door that was sealed didn't go anywhere either though we remained suspicious as to the need to seal an door that didn't go anywhere. We also realised that the Museum was separate from a large underground armoury stretching between the two gun emplacements. It was from this main corridor of the armoury that a branching tunnel stretched downward to connect with the sealed door we found at Wreck beach. A way in needed to be found!

Various points indicated in the old drawings as openings were explored over the next couple of nights. We could sense that the end of our search was in sight. We just needed to find one opening still accessible! Our nightwalks became casual strolls and bike rides into university parks, into restricted university maintenance areas, into closed off unversity gardens. But the more we ticked off the possible openings, the more dejected be became. They were either sealed, grilled over, missing/buried or completely surrounded by unpenetrable bramble bush. That however, became our way of identifying the openings well before we even came close. Apparently, bramble bushes were the favourite method of hiding the squat concrete structures which we tentatively began to identify as mainly grilled over exhaust vents.

This continued for awhile and we were all getting rather exhausted from a whole month of sleepless nights and exercise until someone noticed a huge bramble bush by the side of a little used service road leading to the museum. Could it be, we asked ourselves. Was this it? Back to the maps we went and true enough, it was a major double door accessway large enough for a jeep to enter through.

That next night we were ready. Everyone who'd ever taken part in our excursions turned up. We were dressed all in black with fresh batteries in our torches. This was it, we could feel it. It was the end either way. We would enter the tunnels or we would find the doorway sealed and thus conclude our mission on a rather disappointing note.

Everyone noticed the huge thorny grove at once. It was gigantic! We prodded the bush with sticks and completely circled it but we couldn't seem to entice it to reveal its secrets. Even attemping to peer through the thorns and leaves with torches proved futile. No wonder no had had ever noticed anything as exciting as a military bunker/tunner opening here before.

"Over here guys!" someone else on the other side hissed. He had found a narrow passage that curved through like a hedge-maze, to a central clearing within the grove! Yes! One by one, we curiously slipped in. It was obvious that no one had been through here recently. The concrete outcrop in the middle was a squat squarish block about 1 storey high and it was completely surrounded by the prickly bush which now towered menacingly overhead.

We stared at the corroded double doors and the old padlock at its centre. This was it. A way in that was neither sealed nor unaccessible. Interestingly enough, I hadn't noticed how but a crowbar emerged out of the dozen or so students that now clustered in the dark in front of the doorway. How that person ever hid and carried a 3 foot long crowbar on his person through the night I can't imagine but it was passed to the front quickly enough. "Oops." and the lock was opened. We grinned like the schoolboys we were and shrugged nervously. "How did that happen?" someone asked mischieviously. We all shook our heads. Who knows how that lock broke. If you asked any of us today, none of us know how that lock suddenly opened on its own accord.

After a brief period of shhhshing and pausing to listen for any signs of discovery by the campus cowboys (University security), we yanked the right hand door open. There were quite a few ooohs and ahhhs as one torch after another flickered in through the dark opening. This really was it! We crowded in eagerly, panning everything with our torches. Here were chambers after chambers of what were probably barracks, ammunition storage rooms, guardhouses, supply rooms and all the other possibilities that filled our young minds. We spent hours in that place identifying first the locations underneath the two gun emplacements and matching perfectly the locations of the dumbwaiters and access catladders that would have led up and out to the guns. Then well satiated and briming with confidence, we started exploring each and every darkened room for that illusive tunnel to that would connect us to the bottom of the cliff.

We couldn't find it. Rather, we couldn't positively identify the exact location of the tunnel but believe that one of 3 sealed door ways in the north facing direction should have been it. What laid behind those sealed doors? Which one would open to a sloping passage down to the pillbox-dotted-beach? These are questions that for us at least, must forever remain unanswered. Even our maps failed us at this point as the actual layout of the place did match the map in many places. I was also rather disappointed not to have found anything worth keeping as a keepsake like a old rifle or bayonet perhaps, but on hindsight that may have been for the best knowing what I might do in my spare time.

Satisfied with our handy work and thoroughly exhausted from a month long series of explorations, we dragged our sleep-deprived bodies back to our residence and into long underused beds. Tomorrow will be a new day, and we would be back at our various classes, eager to learn and be the perfect model student. That at least was what we all privately promised ourselves as we slipped off into slumber. What really happened the very next day was of course another story entirely. I doubt many of us even managed to make it to lunch let alone breakfast. I know I didn't.

... notable events : Being left behind in Hazy Pekan Baru Airport

1997 was a bad year in more ways than one. It was the height of the Asian Financial Crisis. It was also the year I broke-up with my girlfriend of 4 1/2 years, it was also the first time the word Haze became a worldwide phenomena no associated with university/highschool initiation rituals.

My 15 storey "skyscraper" building construction in Yangon had just been cancelled, the new 100 million USD$ Baliness resort every engineer in my company had been jostling to manage was shelved indefinitely and my own personal pet project, a 500 million USD$ pulp and paper mill project in Pekan Kerinchi on Sumatera Island was being downscaled.

For 2 years I had been involved in the Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper Mill project or RAPP for short, designing pad foundations for the huge storage tanks, kilometres after kilometres of pipe bridges which went up, over, under and through both the buildings and through the Sumateran jungle and all the other bits and pieces that engineers spend countless hours worrying over just so that the plant can go online within acceptable datelines.

It was a "fun" project, perhaps not as "fun" as a balinese resort would have been, but "fun" al the same because of the travel component, as well as being able to work in a "foreign" environment. Flying in for meetings and to rush designs became a routine affair, two days here, 1 day there, sometimes with other colleagues, most times alone. The cast on site was international, Canadian engineers, US specialists, Indonesian design teams and of course, other Singapore consultants. It was also fun because the engineering was "real". Designs were calculated and thrown to the drafters who would produce drawings in time for construction on the very next day. Often I would sit late into the night at the site office pouring over drawings, checking and cross-checking so as to endorse them for construction in the morning. Within days, you could literally walk the site and see your design "in the flesh". No messy design submissions for authority approvals, no overviewing by other engineers, no boss looking over your shoulder. It was your design, your approval and your endorsement that got things moving. Things couldn't have been any more "exciting".

Apparently I was wrong. The haze which blanketed most of Southeast Asia in the second half of 1997 put a stop to my short trips across the Melaka Straits. The Financial Crisis had also hit RAPP hard and we were told to wrap whatever was in hand up. I needed to make one final trip to Pekan Kerinchi to finish off the remainder of the most critical pipe-bridges.

For weeks, the secretary tried to book a flight from Singapore to Pekan Baru, the nearest airport. For weeks works were stalled because of the haze. Silkair flights were cancelled, Garuda Air flights were cancelled, nothing would fly into Sumatera which was one of the main haze "epi-centres". Then suddenly, one flight opened. A Garuda flight was confirmed! "Will you go?" the secretary asked me. "It's an Indonesian airline." she warned.

I nodded my head, desperate to clear the backlog of work on site.

The flight over was uneventful except for the nagging worry cause by seeing duct-tape used to keep some of the overhead baggage compartments shut and the fact that I couldn't see anything outside of my window from the haze. The one thought that went through my mind at the time was that, "They must know what they are doing, and perhaps the ground is clear of haze enough to land." This little thought was still going through my head as I stared outside at the blanket grey outside my windows when the pilot announced that we were landing. Moments later, when we felt the wheels touch down, I still couldn't see anything outside my windows, not the airport, not the ground, not even the tip of the aircraft's wings. I was amazed the pilot could land. I'm just glad he knew where the ground was because I sure couldn't see it until I was actually on the ground. It was nerve-racking to say the least, and I still had to return to Singapore on another flight!

As usual, I was met at the airport by one of the site's drivers in a 4-wheel drive for the long ride through the small single-lane road through the jungle. Pekan Kerinchi was a town that only existed because the site existed. It was literally created from virgin jungle to serve the needs of the construction crews and subsequently to house the workers for the RAPP mills.

The driver must have been possessed I think. The drivers usually zip along at 80-100km/h on these narrow roads, using the horn as often as they use their brakes to skirt around slower moving traffic and all manner of people ranging from school children to entire families on motocycles as they go up and round bends that I'm quite certain don't meet regulatory "stopping-sight-distances" in most countries, ie. the roads are not built sufficiently gentle for you to be able to see obstructions and still stop in time. But with the haze, this was suicide, and to make things worse, that was the day I decided to sit in the front seat. Maybe the driver had the same type of super eyes the pilot had, because for the life of me, I couldn't see 10 feet in front of me. Thankfully the ride was uneventful, except for my musings on how far apart the walking school children on the roads were and the length of time it took for me in my 4-wheeled transport to actually pass the school they were quite obviously walking to, and the various blacken patches of secondary jungles which were still streaming grey trendrils of smoke into the already hazy air. Sumatera was one of the primary sources of smoke for the 1997 haze and I lay claim to the dubious honour of having been in the smack centre of it at its height.

Anyway, after hanging on for dear life for the better part of 2 hours, we arrived on site safe and sound. Evidence of haze was everywhere. Cars and just about everything else left outdoors developed an orangy coloured covering overnight. The smell of the haze was so strong that I still have memories of that stench. It was literally like living in the twilight zone. Visibility was literally down to just 10 or so feet and everything else beyond that would take on surreal shapes. The days were dark as sun would shine but it'll be more like a full moon. The nights which were usually already rather pitched dark at night so far from the nearest town, now took on a heavy presence since even the moon, let alone the stars were missing and all you had was this ominious presence of an enveloping haze.

Two fruitful days later, having given instruction for the driver to pick me up at 5am in the morning for my flight back to Singapore, I was up bright and early at the front of my quarters waiting to be picked up. The flight was for 7am in the morning and 2 hours was usually more than enough time to travel the long road back to civilisation. 5am and no driver in sight. It was 6am before the car arrived and flinging my bag into the boot I was torn between asking the driver to step on it, and my desire not to experience another mad high-speed drive through the haze-filled jungle.

The driver tried his best. I got there in record time and still very much alive. My watch showed exactly 7am when I bundled myself out of the rear seat of the car, but a glance around the airport told me that my worse fears were confirmed. Slamming into the check-in counter I half yelled in Bahasa, "Penerbangan ke Singapura! Sempat tak?". The check-in lady practically flew to the door just 10 feet behind her which opened up into the airport tarmac. I could see the plane I was supposed to board, it's doors closing and the ladder being driven alway. The lady spoke furiously into a walkie-talkie but her face told it all. Shaking her head she gave me a sorrowful stare. "Sudah tutup." The doors were closed and unless I was an Indonesian bigwig with lots of money, I wasn't going to make that flight.

I stood there, the only passenger in an airport full of airport staff and stared through that still open door, as the plane taxied out of sight and I heard the engines vibrate to a roar and then die off into the distance. It was a Saturday, my transport had left, and I was in the tiny international airport of a small sleepy provincial town.

"When is the next available flight?", I asked in Bahasa.

"Isnin." came the reply. Monday. What in the world would I do here until Monday. I have a life you know! No way was I going to let myself be stranded a whole weekend here, but what were my options? I could call the site and have them send someone to pick me up again, but that was one hazy horror I didn't want to relive. I'd risked my life twice this trip already. Better to stay at Pekan Baru. At least I only risk bed-bugs.

Then I had a brainchild. "Any flights to Malaysia? Or better still, any to Battam or Bintan?" I asked in Bahasa, knowing I could then hop onto a 45 minute ferryride and be back in Singapore in time for dinner. Yes was the reply but the flight was in 2 hours.

Eureka! I could do that, I said to myself. "How much is the ticket?" I asked, only to realise my mistake too late. The gleams on the face of the lady and her two male colleagues who had magically appeared beside her, drawn by the scent of blood probably, told me I was about to be fleeced.

The cost came up to about SGD$450 which was way more than the return flight I had booked from Singapore but they showed me their pricing charts and yes, it was SGD$450.

I panned my options again. Credit card? No, that'll just be suicide. Cash. How much rupiah did I have? I counted out all my rupiah and came up SGD$300 short. I knew it had to be done so I asked the question they were all waiting for. "Do you take Singapore Dollar?"

I almost winched at the sudden gleam of teeth as they smiled. "Of course we do!" they chorused and quoted me an exchange rate loan sharks would have been proud to call their own. Naturally, they also had the exchange rate charts to prove their point. Sighing and vowing to claim all this back from the client for making me miss my flight, I forked over the cash, leaving me with next to nothing but a final SGD$50 note in my pocket. Clutching my precious ticket out of Pekan Baru, and with that last miserable SGD$50 note I settled for a 2 hour wait. I didn't even dare order anything more than a cup of coffee and a piece of local pastry in case I run short of the ferry ticket at the other side and find myself really stranded just 45 minutes from Singapore.

The flight arrived. It was Mandala Air, an airline I had never heard of before in my life, and probably would have remained ignorant of it's existence if not for this. I boarded the flight feeling a little better, at least home would be just 50km away and not across the Melaka Straits.

Arriving in Battam airport, I met a fellow traveller who was also going to Singapore via Battam. Happily we shared a cab from the airport to the ferry terminal and my fellow traveller who had obviously done this route before, led the way. I was too exhausted and too happy to care. The rest of the trip was uneventful, a trip that started at 5am in the morning took me 12 hours to travel just the width of the Melaka straits, but I was back home in time for dinner and looking forward to a nice relaxing Sunday at home.

... notable events : The Asian Financial Crisis and Me

It was 1997, the height of the Asian Financial Crisis.

Salaries were slashed, companies were downsized, people were laid off, and dreams were shattered when the bubble burst.

I was an engineer with R&K Consultants working on a whole series of construction projects at the time. As project money dried up and companies went belly up, we were faced with the possible loss of our jobs and the drastic paycuts. We went from 3-4 month bonuses to 30% paycuts in our basic salaries, and in R&K Consultants, the engineering staff was slashed from a total of 7 engineers in 1996 to just 1 engineer in 1997.

Projects were stacked and I went from handling 6-7 jobs to as many as 18-19 jobs on hand. This went on for the better part of 1997 but then something worse happened. The projects themselves were either shelved or began to stall. The workload dropped from a mad juggling of projects enough to occupy 7 engineers to practically zero. Faxes were silent, phones didn't ring, no clients, architects or contractors walked in through our doors, and e-mails inboxes too went empty except for the occasional chatter with friends. I had 18-19 jobs on paper, but I had trouble filling in my timesheet.

It was great for a time. As an employee, being paid for having no work other than twidling of thumbs is always great, until the silence dragged on into weeks, into months, as colleague after colleague gets axed. The company, increasingly top heavy with 2 primary partners and 2 senior associates supported by a staff of 1 engineer, 2 drafters and 2 admin, was in dire straits.

Paycuts began to hit in mid 1997. It started small, at 5%. Then a further 10%. Then with no end in sight, in 1998 my salary was docked even further until I was drawing the same salary as I did back when I had first joined the company in 1995. As the sole engineer left, my salary was actually the least affected as they really didn't have anyone else to fall back on if I upped and left in a huff. The drafting staff were not so fortunate. The worse off was the senior draftsman who left the company when he couldn't stand it any longer having suffered a 50% paycut.

Some of us ex-colleagues began meeting after work on Fridays, at least those who found new jobs and still had extra money to spend on drinks to complain and to rant on the sad state of affairs. I found it increasingly impossible to join the group if any decent sum was to be set aside and saved in the bank every month, but it was a bitter group indeed and we blamed everyone and everything we could think of, from our bosses, to our government, to George Soros, to the IMF, no one was spared except ourselves. Some of us had just bought new houses which were now worth less than the bank mortgage still owed to the bank. These unfortunate people were stuck, unable to sell, unable to repay the loans. It's a wonder none of us went bankrupt. I count myself lucky to have been just at the age when I was just starting to develop significant savings, yet not significant enough to have had them committed into the downward spiralling property market although I do admit to having rather large losses suffered in hyped buying of stocks and unit trusts during the "good years". Later on I found out that my old R&K bosses, who not only downgraded all their cars from luxury models to regular models, as well as turning up at the office everyday with dark faces due to massive losses at the stock market, all took 12 months
without salaries from mid 1997 just so we could be paid. A haunting memory of
something one of the senior associates once told me back in 1998 echoed
in my head. He said, "When times are bad, the boss work for the
employees." How true. I never realised just how true this statement
was at the time.

It's now 10 years on. Many businesses have recovered, as have many people, but the scars remain. R&K Consultants, once on the brink of making the leap from a mid-sized engineering company to the big league with local and regional mega projects worth in the billions of USD$ in 1996, are now back to and still limited to local warehouses, condominiums and small individual houses. Another friend of mine, whom I watched grow his consulting firm from 1 to a peak of 5 persons, saw his entire savings wiped out and he's now back to square one, no different from the day he set out on his own as a 1-man company.

We've survived, at least most of us have, but behind the shiny new facade of the current 4-5% economic growth are battle scars and a littered trail of broken dreams, individuals and companies.