I like walking; in other words, I don’t mind walking, and coincidentally, hiking and trekking are all about walking. Sometimes it is incomprehensible to see someone who could gravely fall in love with walking, as inscrutable as it could be, walking has become a proclivity to me, a prodigious infatuation that is close to fetishism.
I couldn’t remember when I habitually inculcated walking into a part of my nature, probably the encouragement from my mother to take up jogging when I was a teenager, but the affinity for walking has to be inherent, as I displayed very little resistance; it was like a new hobby uncovered, and it has never left since.
I jogged my way into the years of the university in KL. I used to frequently jog on the campus of MU, most of the time in the evening as my footsteps cut through the lush expansive field beside the lake, or dotted around the residential area nearby Jalan Gasing, where I rented a room. Even in the first year of my dental practice in Batu Pahat, I either jogged or walked almost every day around this petite town for hours after the evening clinic sessions, I still could remember the spot I always frequented was a water pump in the river where aquatic plants swaying gracefully in the swift currents, occasionally a school of tiny fish appeared from nowhere to hide and seek around them before scooting away.
After nearly a year, I migrated to Penang Island to operate my dental clinic, and that was the commencement of my intensive hiking adventures. Penang Island is never short of hiking trails, hills, and mountains looming densely over each other. There are myriad options of trails to assault, and it sets a perfect stage for me to indulge my fetish with walking. During those few years, I hiked not less than 5 times a week, for those short windows of evening breaks, I hiked no. 3, no. 46 or halfway to no. 39; During weekends or on holidays, longer routes to no. 84, the peak of no. 39 or even Penang Hilltop. Eventually, the over-enthusiastic indulgence took its toll when I began to detect alarming discomfort in both of my knees. I sought advice and was told to reduce the frequency of hiking per week.
As much as I was reluctant to comply, I heeded the advice and drastically reduced it to just a few times a month. Instead, I switched to brisk walking on flat terrain, and it remains a pure enjoyment to me until today. I enjoyed walking in the park. Back in my hometown, I walked in the paddy field passing through the quaint villages; whenever I travelled, I excessively walked around unfamiliar cities and places, I explored deserted streets and alleys, remembering landmarks to guide me back to the starting point. Even today, I still deeply relish the joy of doing the above whenever an opportunity presents itself. Walking has become second nature to me, and I wholeheartedly embrace it.
When it comes to the tales of my walking, the walking experiences that I encountered and gathered from my short stays in New Zealand are not to be neglected; they changed my perspective on walking and elevated the elation of walking to another level. The balmy weather in New Zealand granted me the precious possibility to do multi-hour walking, with the absence of scorching sunlight and suffocating humidity, I never knew that I was able to reach a distance of 20km, traversing the city and rural area for more than 4 hours alone, and yet, I reached home feeling fresh and rejuvenated.
It consequently empowers my faith in my walking ability and emboldens my ambition to attempt longer, tougher, and more arduous adventurous routes, especially in Nepal, my love at first sight when it comes to trekking.
I didn’t have my first full-scale hike until I was 51, considerably older, the age of geriatric, which was not so youthful enough to attempt something called a multiday hike. Doubtlessly, I did hike aggressively when I first migrated to this small island in the early days of my career, but they were short, done and dusted within a couple of hours; multi hours, far and in between, the one I still vaguely remembered was Laksamana Hikathon that took me more than 4 hours to complete, it was not the consummation of the race that left an indelible mark in my memory, but how I threw out the vomit on someone’s head on the bus on the way back to the starting point that embarrassingly resided with me until now.
It is something I am reluctant to recall, but that was my last nasty encounter with a long hike. The multi-day hike was still very much unknown to me until my first trekking trip in Nepal. It was, later I came to know, the easiest route for novice trekkers to dip their feet in the water for what multi-day trekking is all about. I launched myself with untainted thrill and excitement into the trip, the perpetual dust and chaos of Kathmandu enthralled me with angst and consternation, as I skimmed by the commercial streets where the goods burst with mindboggling vibrant colours, I was dazed by its intensity, and then I perceived the first taste of multi-day trekking on our first day of the hike, 3500 steps to Ullery after a 3-hour walk from the starting point were seemingly interminable, energy-sapping and bone-crushing, and what ensued after a simple dinner in a sparsely furnished canteen was these tiny lingering misgiving and remorse that stalked me into my sleep.
And then I woke up at midnight, clueless about why, and in a light daze, I callously hurled a gaze outside a small, squarish window beside my rickety bed, the framed image of that window pane shocked my consciousness to the core, and after that very moment on that freezing night, the rest is history.
Since then, I have never looked back when it comes to multi-day trekking again.
