Tristan Park Dirt Bike (The trail and review)

Continuing from my previous post Dirt Biking at Tristan Park, I follow up with the trail ride in the afternoon and the review for my this trip.

The Trail Ride (afternoon):
We started our trail soon after lunch and the trail requires us to ride thru palm oil field, grass and gravel, narrow lanes and lastly steep slopes up hill!! The trail ride took us 3 hours plus to complete and along the way some of us did fell but we manage to pick ourselves up and complete it under the scorching hot sun!!

According to one of the guide, the trail that we did was the easiest one as we have beginners riders with us. There are much tougher trails for those more experienced riders who wish to challenge themselves!

Safety Aspect:
Trail biking is no doubt a dangerous sports and it does gives you the adventure vibes when you are doing it. But we need to make sure we stay safe while doing it.

They do provide safety gear such as helmet, knee and elbow guards and kudos to them because I think they did a pretty good job in keeping those gears clean. What I felt is that they didn't really take care the safety of the riders during our trail ride. One of the guide was often seeing showing off his riding skills by speeding pass us at top speed and performing stunts which put the safety of the riders at jeopardy.

What important stuffs you need to bring along (base on my experience):
Sun Block
Covered shoes
Insect repellent
Water bottle
Plaster or antiseptic cream (in case of any injuries)

Summary:
Place - 2/5
Service - 2/5
Safety - 2/5
Bike - 2.5/5
Price - 2.5/5 (rather expensive given that the bikes are not covered by insurance and we have to pay if any serious damage occurs to the bike)
Adventure - 5/5!!

Will I go back again?

Maybe... but I will prefer to have bring my own bike (if I have one by then) and try a tougher trail! =)

Nevertheless, I enjoyed my time there with my group of friends and not forgetting we had a terrific seafood dinner at Jade Garden Seafood Corner!! Yummee~!

Other Important Information:

You can book a taxi by calling this contact below: (Rm5 per person per trip to your chalet or to town for the seafood dinner)

Eng Ah Kim
JHC 8082
H/P: +6013-7397286

Jade Garden Seafood Corner
54, Jalan Kerisi, Sungai Rengit,
81620 Pengerang, Johor.

You can find more info at their website: http://www.tristangroup.com/

Dirt Biking at Tristan Park, Pengerang

I had this chance of going to Tristan Park located at Pengerang, Johor with my group of friends for a 1 day Dirt Biking trip recently and I would like to share my experience there on my blog!

Pengerang is a small town located in Johor and its an hour ferry ride from Changi Point Ferry Terminal. Besides dirt biking, its quite common for Singaporeans to go Pengerang for cycling trip to Desaru because the road there are long and winding with very little traffic.

How we got there:

BumBoat

We charted a bumboat for $120/way for the 10 of us from Changi Point Ferry Terminal. Its better this way cause we wouldn't have to wait till the boat reaches 12pax for it to depart. The boat journey takes an hour.

I have no idea why the boat is called a bumboat and not just BOAT. Haha! I was hoping to see something that look like a hovercraft waiting for me at the jetty!! I watched too much James Bond movie!!

First bumboat from Changi Village to Pengerang = 7am
There is no fixed departure timing. Bumboat will depart when there are 12 passengers. ($10/person per way)

Bumboat charter contact: Mr Seng, 9848 8527

The Place: Tristan Park, Pengerang

 We were picked up by Tristan Park workers ard 930am and its only 5 mins from the jetty. The workers weren't really helpful. They literally just sit inside their car and "expect" all of us to load our bags to the boot and get our butts inside the car!!
And when we reached there, it was "Do It Yourself" too!!

I was quite surprised that the place was actually quite run down and not what I expected.

The Bikes:
There are 4 types of bikes available at Tristan Park and there are mainly:
- SGD70 per day for Pitbike.
- SGD90 per day for Yamaha WR/DT 125cc.
- SGD120 per day for KLX150cc.
- SGD150 per day for KTM200cc.

Pit Bikes (Mini Scrambler)

KLX 150cc

If you are a not a beginner, I think the best choice will be to take the KLX150cc because I feel that it is the best maintained bikes (or maybe because it is newer compared to the rest) among all the bikes available and its the only bike that features push button start rather than kick start. There is only 2 KLX150 available at Tristan Park.

KTM 200cc

The rest of the bikes I feel is quite badly maintained/old and one of the main problems we faced during the rides were our engine keep dying off quite frequently and we have to kick start the engine which was quite tiring. And not forgetting we need to put the gear back to neutral which was a hassle too because most of the bikes don't have indication which gear its on. For beginners, it can be quite a challenge!

Practice session (Morning):
For the beginners, the session started with a familiarization of the bike and getting know how to ride the bike!! I think the basic criteria for riding the pit bike will be having a good sense of balance and must at least know how to ride a BICYCLE!!

Practice session

And soon everyone started to ride circles around a tree and besides learning how to make to bike goes forward, the instructor also taught them how to perform Emergency brake!! Which I feel is very very important!

We started our trail biking after our lunch (which was included in the package). You can read more about it by and my review of on Tristan Park and my trail biking adventure at the link below:

Tristan Park Trail Bike (The trail and review)

River Rafting at Padas River (Kota Kinabalu)

Date: 19/1/2011

After a tiring 2 days climb up and down Mt Kinabalu, I was really worried that my friends were not prepared/not looking forward to the river rafting at Padas River which is classified as Class 3-4 river. But turn out, they were feeling great and all were eager to fight on head to head with the various rapids like washing-machine, merry-go-round and etc!!

The van picked us up at 8am and we managed to buy McDonald for breakfast from McD which was located near to our condo. We were told that the whole journey to Beaufort/Tenom town will take us around 4 hours (which include resting and lunch time) and from there, we will be taking a 30 minutes train ride to Pangie, the starting point of our rafting adventure and through out the train ride we will be passing by villages of the Murut tribes.

We stopped by for some photos taking session and lunch before heading to the train station. The lunch was not bad altho the serving wasn't much. Some of them really enjoyed the open space train ride that we took from town to our starting point as it was something we wouldn't able to do back in Singapore as all MRTs are covered!! Once we reached our starting point, safety briefing was given to all participants and soon our adventure begun!!
Check out some of the pictures that we bought from the tour operator. We paid them Rm120 for the pictures. At first, we thought it was rather expensive buying the pictures for that amount of money, but we had a lot of laughter while we looked back at the pictures when we were back to our condo. We heard that they offered the pictures to a couple for only Rm50. I guess they charge their pictures by the number of people taking part in the rafting.
Contary to popular belief that rafting is dangerous, I find that rafting is a matter of fact a very fun and exciting and not to mention safe activity (cause the local operators take safety matters seriously). This is the second time I did it at Padas River and my advice is, if you don't do it at Kota Kinabalu, please don't do it anywhere!! Cause I've done rafting at Phuket and Bali and the rafting there are no where as exciting and fun as this one that I did at Kota Kinabalu!!

And just for your info, even tho the rafting finished around 4pm, we were only managed to reach our condo at 9pm because there was only 1 train going back to the town where we came from and it only arrived at 5pm. Well, even so we really really enjoyed the rafting and we know that a sumptious seafood dinner is waiting for us!!!