Part 1 - Joint Training Exercise

 
Recently, a joint training exercise was conducted by the Malaysian Civil Defence Department (JPAM - Jabatan Pertahanan Awam Malaysia) involving 3 states, namely WP Kuala Lumpur, Selangor and Perak. Its a series of joint training required to be conducted every 2 months to enhance the capability and agility of its members, especially in standardizing and addressing cross boundaries operational issues.

Since this time around, WP Kuala Lumpur was the host of the event, I was involved as a member of the Technical Team, comprising of 20 team members. Our task...was to design, implement and supervise the training, a daunting task since the total participants was 200 in strength. Nevertheless, in the true 'esprit de corp' spirit, we accepted the task with great enthusiasm.

Barret HF Man pack

Weeks before the event, on a beautiful Sunday, we went in for a short recce trip, a one day trip to Batang Kali. Since communication is essential in any training exercise, we brought along the newly procured Barret HF man pack to test out. There were three 4WDs... mine (Isuzu Trooper), the camp's (Toyota BJ) and JPAM's (Hilux). From the Orang Asli kampung, we had to cross 2 rivers to get to Kem Hamzah, the forward base camp.

After having 'Durian Hutan' courtesy of the Orang Asli, we started to head for Dubai...off road style. Abang Hamzah had warned us that the road has deteriorated tremendously. Being 4WD enthusiast, that's like an irresistible invitation to pitch our skills and knowledge against mother earth. Little did we know that it has been raining for a few days, making it super slippery and muddy. As soon as we made it pass checkpoint 2, we came to a very large boulder. The BJ almost tilted over sideways. Never mind, we thought, it has a PTO winch. Alas, the winch didn't work as the gearing  went kaput. Thus, what else to do but do some bicep building manual winching.

The BJ and my 'anak gajah' facing their respective challenges

Then a decision was made to leave the BJ and Hilux at checkpoint 2, and went ahead using my 'anak gajah'. From the boulder onwards, most of the movement was by winching. Since I was using a high speed winch, it uses a lot of battery juice. I made a dumb mistake when I forgot to switch back the secondary battery with a higher capacity battery. After 7 times winching and in 4 ft of mud, the batteries just gave up, right in the middle of nowhere.

The calm face of a guy with his 4WD stuck in 4ft mud with no winch power

To cut the story short, I had to call in 4WD friends to help me out...and they came, recovered my vehicle and left, without any payment....try to beat that.

To be continued......Part 2