Ying Hui's Scrapbook: The Hills are Alive, with the Sound of Music the 9 of us.

- Morning are you up yet? –

Audrey, that is not a wakeup call, it is a text message.

In the light, or lack thereof, of the breaking dawn, I had to feel my way through everything, except Joanne, to the desk. It was bloody 5.45am. I had probably smashed my hips, bruised my arm and stubbed my toe by the time my fingers curled around my spectacles. All in the name of the hiking trip.

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Our form of warm up exercises was sitting the swings (toning our ham-strings), rocking the see-saws (bending our knees), looping through the monkey bar (stretching our arms) and slithering down the tunnel-slide (training our flexibility).

And we were squealing with all the joy of a 5 year old. I couldn’t blame the old folks who were staring at us with nuisance.

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“Eh, if the trail is not open or if raining, we’ll just go to McD for breakfast!”

We didn’t call him Chicken-Wah for nothing. Though it partially stemmed from his Chinese name: try saying Chew Kean Hua consecutively in high speed.

Anyway, 10 minutes into the trekking and half of us were already panting with exhaustion.

"Okay enough! Damn tired already!"

"I can't go on anymore!"

"I swear, we've walked more than we ever will in college!"

"Wait up! I need to rest!"

Probably our stamina simply lies in our fingers, where we store enough potential energy to power-run them across our instruments for hours on end.

We got to the rope-bridge in record time. And to freak Jie Ying out, all of us clamber onto the bridge and started stomping and swaying. For music students, it was amazing we didn’t move in rhythm. But thank God for that. Resonant frequency would be the death of any kind of bridge (Form 4 Physics, no?).

I hate my camera

Even though I kind of expected it, I was still perpetually horrified when we began the climb up the steepest part of the hill, the area where my family would never venture into for fear of overloading my, erm, condition.

But I plowed through, despite watching wearily as the colour beneath my fingernails flushed blue.

Bravado aside, I think most of us aged upon crossing the bridge. Seriously. Our treading became trudging, our stops grew longer to accommodate our longer intakes of breath, our ceaseless singing and crapping became silent puffs of exhaustion. Not to mention us letting trickles of people who were considerably older than us to pass through more than thrice because they would probably had grown a beard by the time we finished the trail. Aha.

Yet we still managed to maintain a certain level of noise, enough for some random stranger to shush us.

"You guys shouldn't make too much noise. Later you might disturb the habitants of the forest."

I supposed all of us understood what, or more like whom, he meant.

"Oh, you mean the monkeys?"

Why yes, Andrew. We WERE afraid of distressing the mammalian quadrupeds.

"Err...yes. Yes. You might disturb the monkeys. There are a lot of them in the trees here."

They guys seemed amused.

"Don't worry. We won't disturb them. They're our friends!"

Right. Speak for yourself.