I’m back from Kukup Island! If you’ve never heard of this place before, read on! =)

This is an ice-breaking trip organized by the Tourism Club of our university for its senior and newly-recruited committee members to better know each other and get along!

Kukup Island is located in the state of Johor. It’s not the luxurious, resort-island type, like what you’d expect from Redang Island. In fact, the place where we stayed at is not even an island!

Kukup (without the ‘Island’) is a small, traditional, Chinese fishing village.

Requiring a journey of almost six hours from Cyberjaya, Kukup’s remote location, with wooden village houses and bicycle-riding villagers, really gives visitors a warm feeling of peace and relaxation.

The ‘real‘ Kukup Island has to be reached by boat. You’ll be able to visit it’s mangrove swamp, which is quite famous, and also the Kelongs – aquaculture farms on the water where people breed fishes and crabs.

One of the extraordinary things about this village is that their houses, wooden and concrete alike, are built on stilts – over the seawater!

And since it is built on the water, you can imagine one of the conveniences that only they can enjoy is, naturally – the quick disposal of human waste!

They don’t even need to have pipes, sewers or sewage treatment plants! All the waste from your body goes straight down to the water below!

Don’t believe me? Check out the toilets!

Just for the pleasure of my few precious readers, I took the liberty of getting down and zooming into the hole, into which you can clearly see seawater and one of the stilts of the house!

Oh… Gross!! Don’t worry, I assure you this is a zoomed-in picture, I absolutely did not lower my head into it.

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Of course, I’m not complaining about the place. =) These are experiences that we can hardly get staying near KL.

The accommodation where we stayed is called Kukup Resort – Name sounds nice, doesn’t it? – Makes you think of a high-class hotel with huge swimming pools and beach chairs under the shades of tall coconut trees, friendly waiters serving cocktail … Right?

Wrong! Out resort is actually a house! Yes! An individual one-storey house renovated to accommodate tourists!

Nevertheless, it’s air-conditioned rooms are pretty comfortable and the house generally spacious. We were also provided with Mahjong sets and tables for our entertainment! Mahjong is a traditional Chinese table game that I am not exceptionally good at.

My friends were kind enough to teach and let me practise the game. I played for the entire night (until 7.30am the next morning) but won just a single round. =(

Apparently, a lot of people are really good in the game! Whenever there was free time, they’d sit down in tables and play indefinitely – Stopping only during meal or activity times. Wow!

I took a huge amount of photos during this trip, BUT, very unfortunately, all of them are of extremely low quality. That’s due to my own mistake of using the wrong setting on the new camera that I’m still very unfamiliar with. Huhu…

I accidentally used a scene mode that automatically sets the shots to ISO 1600 or higher, with no flash. A film speed this high has caused all my photos to be littered with noise … Result? Extremely crude photos. =(=(

You can check out the pictures after I’ve sorted them out and uploaded to my photo album. That might take a couple of days. Meanwhile, here’s a video clip of us yelling a traditional Chinese celebration toast, called ‘Yuuuuum……. Seng!’ Translated as “drink for victory!”, something like that. =)

P.S. I’ve finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows!! Will post my review in the next entry!

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