Salam people,

First and foremost, my most sincere apologies for the absolute tardiness in posting my posts. I know, I know…I promised to post my stories about Bakun aeons ago but I haven’t don’t so. I could list a whole lot of excuses (all are true mind you!) but I won’t waste your time (nor mine). So….

It was noon when I arrived at Bintulu airport. The food on in-flight was ok; we were given cold sandwiches, an apple, a small tub of mineral water and some junk food (Cadbury-bites it was called if I’m not mistaken). The queue at the customs took some time. My colleague Kath and I were the last of our team to reach the lobby. We were greeted by Wong, another colleague from our Sibu office.

After stuffing all of our bags in the 3 Hilux’ (1 from our Sibu office, 2 provided by the client), we made our way to Bintulu town to collect sampling bottles and yes, grab some bites and do a bit of shopping.

I was in the same pickup as our Sibu colleagues. We started the journey from Bintulu town to Bakun at abt 4 pm. The journey took about 2.5 – 3 hrs. The road was bad. (Like one of the client’s driver, Jem, said, “Jalan di sini jahat-jahat,”. I tried not to laugh when I heard that but believe me, my tummy nearly burst!) Anyways, we reached the Resort before 7 pm and it was already dark.

The monitoring activity started that very night with noise level monitoring. We just set-up the equipment and left it at the station until the next morning where the monitoring resumes for the daytime monitoring.

The nest few days were really hectic: the air monitoring, the noise monitoring, the sewage effluent monitoring and the water quality monitoring. On top of the monitoring activities themselves, my team had to do parallel monitoring with the contractor’s environmental consultant as well as verifying their sampling methods. Phew! That was a lot of hard work!

My days basically started at 6 am and ended at about 11 or 12 pm. Not much rest in-between except for lunch breaks and dinner.

Food was a real problem to me because there were not many Malay/Muslim café/restaurant. Though they don’t serve pork there, but still…I just had to ‘tawakkal’. I guess I’ll bring my own rice cooker and other stuff the next time I’m there. That means a bigger bag….hmmmm

Anyways, I will not bore you anymore with the environmental monitoring stuff, but I have to tell you that nothing beats waking up to the sound of rivers flowing, the songs of birds chirping, fresh air, green surroundings and the cicadas at night…hmmmm…I miss them all.