“Ondru”
I bet you’re wondering what that means.
Well, I made a goal for myself for this year. A goal inspired by the way I spent my day yesterday.
How was that, you ask? Let me tell you.
We’re currently in Penang, Malaysia, visiting with two other teams from K-Squad. We’re on a mini-vacation. Though it’s the opposite of a typical vacation, the time here has been an incredible blessing. With all the stillness we’ve been immersing ourselves in, it has been nice to have constant activity. Penang is “tourist central.” It’s a pretty large city and there is always something going on.
Now…Back to yesterday. We left the YWAM housing at about 10am and rode a bus out to Penang National Park. From there we entered the jungle. We hiked about two hours to what is called “Monkey Beach.” Here’s where we get to that goal I was talking about.
I had forgotten how much I love hiking. It filled me with so much joy. I couldn’t get the smile off of my face as worked my way through every obstacle that we came upon. One of the girls from the other team asked if I enjoyed hiking because she could see the light in my eyes as I moved along the trail.
Here it is.
I will hike in every country.
And then I’ll write a blog about it.
Here’s the significance of the blog name. “Ondru” is how you say the number one in Tamil. Tamil is the language they speak here in Malaysia. Each blog will be name in sequential order and in the language of the country where the hike occurred. Make sense? I sure hope so…
Let me tell you a bit more about our day at Monkey Beach. It held up to it’s name.
As we hiked along, we heard a scream from one of the girls ahead of us. We immediately froze and let my amazing brothers, Heith and Brian, run ahead of us to see what had happened. As we approached we saw it… a monkey.
Said monkey had decided it wanted what was in one of the girl’s backpacks and proceeded to jump on her back. She threw it off and watched as the monkey pillaged through it. The dumb thing ate almost an entire bottle of Tums.
Monkeys can be seriously aggressive, as was this one… whenever approached it would growl and lunge at people. I stayed as far away as I could. Eventually the monkey gave up (or got sick of Tums) and ran off, allowing us to pass.
After our battle with the monkey, we finally arrived at the beach… we all set our bags down on the ground and looked around. Then… the dang monkey showed back up. This time he brought a friend. They ran out… we ran away, grabbing what we could. Unfortunately I was unable to grab my Camelback water bottle. The dang monkey ran right up to it, grabbed it… looked back at us (I would even venture to say that it had a smug look on it’s face) and ran up a tree with my bottle. Needless to say, we never retrieved the bottle.
Following the theft, a friendly Malaysian man gave Heith a sling shot… and the monkeys didn’t bother us again. Everything was beautiful. We played in the water, talked, rested and got a nice sunburn. After a few hours there we jumped on a boat and headed back to the port and waited for the next bus.
The beach was great, but nothing compared to the two hours we spend hiking to it.
The day was a success.
Hike ondru: completed.
