CP3 – Deposit Bike and Run to Diagonal Abseil Station – Pick up Bike – Enter BT Trail at Rifle Range – CP4

AVOID THE RIGHT LANE AT ALL COSTS!

When we arrived at CP3, I wasn’t in the best of moods as I kept berating myself in my mind for being ‘too clever’ and trying to read too much into what’s required instead of just blindly following what’s been given to us. But well, with the damage done, all we can do now is to try to play catch-up with the rest of the other 2 ladies team. We parked our bikes at CP3 and was told to run into the Kampong trail for some reason. At that point, we were rather exhausted both mentally and physically from the ‘ordeal’ that we’d just been through. And when we were running in, we met Oliver’s team coming out from the trail and all he mentioned was ‘Avoid the right lane at all costs!’. Huh? What was that all about? We shrugged our shoulders and went on our way.

We then came upon another marshall and was told that 2 of us needed to make our way down some path while one of us need to continue to climb up to some higher elevation to do the diagonal rope abseil. As we’d decided that I’m a disaster with ropes as I always never fail to get myself stuck somehow and since Rina is new to all the technicalities of the ropes & their equipment, we decided that Ling would be the best person to do the abseil while both me & Rina stay below to pull her rope.

When both Rina & myself made our way down to wait for Ling, we saw the other 2 ladies team in front of us in the queue and saw Team JAFT there as well. My heart sank as we realized how much time & energy we’d lost just because we went to “Horlan”. Anyways, we took that opportunity to catch our breath and to catch up with Team JAFT, who still didn’t lose their sense of humor and was able to make my spirits a little lighter.  When it’s finally our turn, Rina & myself were told to pull the rope as tight as we can and it was not easy as the angle of the rope wasn’t very convenient. Somehow we managed as we saw Ling trying to ‘lower’ herself down as quickly as possible. However, I can’t help but noticed that the other rope on the left seems to be much easier and the teams didn’t have any difficulty tugging at the ropes and the even while coming down, they were a lot faster. And there and then, we finally realized what Oliver meant by his sentence “Avoid the Right Lane” but well, it’s too late. And we had the good luck of being made to come down on the ‘slower’ RIGHT rope.  Another setback for us but we decided to take it in good stride and ran all the way back to CP3 to collect our bikes.