Night Cycling

Posted by HELiX

Yesterday, I met up with some friends to go prawn fishing.

But no, fortunately, this will not be about prawn fishing. Because… well, first, a very scientific diagram of prawn fishing.

I caught 2 prawns in 3 hours, and I think I did pretty okay. Get the idea?

So, moving on. It was about 3pm when we were done with lunch and had nothing to do. So we decided, on the spot, to go home and meet up again for night cycling.

You see, normally, that would have been a totally sound and cool idea.

But here, we’re talking about three guys who last went cycling together at Desaru 5 years ago and ended up like this:

So, at about slightly past 7pm, me, Dong Wei and Xin Jie accidentally met up at some junction along Choa Chu Kang Way. Otherwise, we would be having a fun time playing hide-and-seek.

From there, this was the planned route:

We had three aims in mind:

1. Lim Chu Kang Cemetery
2. Kranji Dam
3. Kranji War Memorial

Heading down from CCK, we would pass through Bukit Batok for a little sight seeing at Little Guilin. Stole the picture below from somewhere. It was dark when we arived.

And then we would pass through the Hillview area and take a short detour for dinner at the Railway Mall.

From there, it was a long and tiring journey straight down Upper Bukit Timah Road, Woodlands Roads before we finally arrive at Kranji.

We were slightly ahead of time and decided to take a turn for Kranji War Memorial.

I don’t have the photos because Dong Wei was doing the photography and HE LEFT FOR MACAU TODAY. So for now, I shall just steal DAYTIME photos from elsewhere.

Turning into the memorial from the main road at night was perhaps the scariest part of our journey. We arrived at the turn, a road leading into the memorial. We looked in - pitch dark. We looked up - lamp posts, which were switched off!

It didn’t make sense for them to build lamp posts if they weren’t going to use it. Ignoring that, we took out our torches - only to discover that I was the only one with a decently working one.

So we crawled our way to the cemetery gates. Admittedly, I was half-hoping that it would be closed. And fortunately and unfortunately, it was open - that’s where it didn’t make any sense again. They had gates there. Built right there, attached to the walls. But it wasn’t closed at night!

Perhaps it’ll be good to note that the Kranji War Memorial was constructed with no night visitors in mind. So, at night, the place is totally dark and we were relying on light pollution from the sky to find our way around.

It felt a little weird when you arrive at the main area where over 4000 graves are. It isn’t one bit scary. If anything, I found the sight beautiful and impressive.

Uh. They were very… uniform. And evenly spaced. And… I don’t know. It was nice.

So after spending about 45 minutes there, we left and continued up Kranji Road.

And we finally arrived at what we thought was Kranji Dam…

View Larger Map

And Dong Wei started complaining of how disappointed it was. Having seen many similarly unimpressive dams in my life, I told him to get over it.

We cycled on and arrived at another dam. On the map below, it’s the one on the left. We arrived from the one on the right.

View Larger Map

“DAMN. SO THIS IS KRANJI DAM.”

It was big alright. Big. And Dong Wei was satisfied to the point that he could have married the dam if we left him right there.

We carried on and made our way to Neo Tiew Road, the road no one cares about because it’s the transition to Lim Chu Kang Road.

Lim Chu Kang Road is long. Really long. It was pretty much the climax of our journey. The cemeteries were somewhere ahead, and we were really exhausted by then. It wasn’t helped by the fact that both mine and XJ’s bikes had steel-fibre concrete seats which were really hurting our butts. It was so painful, that midway through I swapped bikes with Dong Wei to enjoy his cushion bike.

After almost 5 hours of cycling, it started to rain heavily. OF ALL PLACES, WE WERE IN THE MIDDLE OF LIM CHU KANG.

We quickly took cover at bus stop and considered our choices.

(1) Sit and wait for the rain to stop. Being a midnight rain, it may last into dawn and we’ll be sleeping there at the bus stop with nothing but our bikes.

(2) I could also call my Dad to pick us up, but I concluded that it would be absolutely insane for me to tell my Dad over the phone that I was stuck, OF ALL PLACES, IN THE MIDDLE OF LIM CHU KANG.

(3) We could hitch a ride, but those vans and lorries driving along Lim Chu Kang at past midnight… were not in our interest.

(4) Call a taxi, and abandon our bikes.

The rain did, however, eventually stopped. It took almost an hour to do so, and we were feeding the LCK mosquitoes big time.

That was when XJ had to say, “Y’know, LCK is a mosquito disease hotspot right?”

…I already had about 4 bites. There’s a chance that I’ll show symptons of some disease in a few days, so don’t be surprised. Dammit.

We continued our way down the wet LCK roads and after a crazy hour or two on the road, we finally arrived at the intersection to Old Choa Chu Kang Road - our journey to civilisation and home.

“Where were the cemeteries? I didn’t see them.”

-Checks Google Maps-

“Shit. It’s there. We past them sometime back. We PAST them. They were on our RIGHT and we were looking to our LEFT.”

“You mean we missed them? We rode past the cemeteries without seeing them?”

“YES, SHIT.”

“Are you disappointed or glad?”

“Quite disappointed actually.”

We made the turn for Old CCK Road anyway, and after a tiring last stretch of road, we smiled at the sight of HDB flats towering over us.

I reached home at 3.15am.

…

In total, we were travelling for 8 hours.

Google Maps plots our route at a total of 35 km, but due to the detours we made for food, water and exploring, I estimate that we clocked in about 40-45 km.

The seat of my bike really took its toll on me. I came home with a BRUISED butt. No kidding. I couldn’t sit without wincing.

Our thighs were burning throughout the journey. It was a real long time since we last exercised due to A-Levels, and to put ourselves through this immediately after was a crazy idea.

So now, my thighs are aching and screaming. And I can’t walk more than 100m without feeling tired.

12:17 AM 11 November 2008