Caving, by Eileen (May 17, 2015)

For the third year in a row, I have taken my Grade 2 class to the Gua Tempurung Caves, along with the other Grade 2 teacher and her class.  The caves are about a 2.5 hour bus ride from the school, with about a 2 hour hike in the caves.  It gets a little easier each year though there is still the anxiety about details all going smoothly and that no one gets hurt (no one ever has).  We leave at 7:30 in the morning and we get back about 5:00 and that is keeping things really tight in the schedule.

There is always the unexpected when you teach students and especially so when you take them out of the classroom.  But there is also the unexpected because we live in Malaysia.  Here are some stories about the unexpected happening on the caving field trip.

Last year, we all trooped up to the bus, knowing we had to leave promptly at 7:30, but there was no bus driver.  The bus was there but the bus driver had gone for breakfast somewhere and we couldn't figure out where. It is not as if there are a lot of eateries open around the school.  Garth, who comes on the trip every year, finally tracked him down by going onto the street and asking people walking by if they were the bus driver.

Last year one of my students missed the bus for the field trip.  We waited as long as we could but his driver didn't bring him to school until the usual time.  Either the boy's parents didn't communicate the correct time to the driver or he decided to come at the regular time anyway with the boy and his two siblings.  We were about half an hour into our trip, making good time, when I got a call from the school that the boy had arrived at school and wanted to come on the field trip, but there was nothing I could do at that point.  The driver couldn't speak English and the nanny spoke only very broken English.  I could only suggest that maybe the driver try to catch up to us in his vehicle with the student.  That seemed to be the plan and when we arrived at the caves we waited and waited for this one student but he never showed up.  It turned out the driver had changed his mind.  The boy was, understandably, very upset about missing this Grade 2 tradition.

It really bugs me that at the caves, they charge to use the washrooms - 30 sen for the toilets and 1 RM (100 sen) to use the change rooms after going through the caves.  (Why the difference in price, I have no idea). You have to bring your own toilet paper.  The toilets are disgusting - two regular sit down toilets though one of them did not work this year - and two squatty potties -

- Asian style, raised above the floor on a platform.  There is water and dirt all over the floor and the little girls this year were all plugging their noses as they waited in line.  This is not an actual picture of the squatties at the caves but a close approximate.  Sometimes at head level, there is a chain to pull up that will flush the squatty but other times there will be a big or small bucket like the one shown and you use the ladle to pour water down the squatty to flush it.  You have to use a lot of water and "flush" it fast or it doesn't flush.  I'm a roughing kind of girl but it still intimidates me to use this kind of toilet especially when there is no chain flush.  People who don't have toilet paper use the ladle and water or sometimes there is a kind of garden hose in place of toilet paper to clean yourself.

This is a squatty with a chain

This is a really nice squatty

 
Enough of toilets.  The "showers" that were offered at the caves were really large red buckets (bigger than the ones in the picture above) and you ladle the water over you.  Nobody used the showers.







It is really easy to not get your message across.  This year the only really big snafu for me was that I asked for two English-speaking guides but only one was made available.

My teaching partner, on the other hand, was in charge of getting the receipt for all the admissions.  We paid out of our own pocket for all the admissions which came to about 420 RM for both classes.  This is a somewhat usual thing for teachers to do because you are never 100% sure what the costs will be.