Staff of Mandarin Oriental Plant Trees at Rimba Ilmu, UM

Today was our opportunity to give back to the environment. The Environmental Committee of Mandarin Oriental organized a Tree Planting day today at Rimba Ilmu of Universiti Malaya.

It was a great day today for planting trees. The sun was up and shining and a group of us were ready to get down and dirty! (yeah rite!)

This is our Environmental Logo.

Pretty cool huh? We had a contest recently, and this won the top prize.

It reads .... The good is beauty. The green is eternity.

Which was orginally written in Bahasa, and translated to English. (That's why its a bit ick-ish)

Yang elok itu Seni. Yang hijay itu Seri.

We started the day with a Breifing from an Officer of UM.
He took us thru the types of Rain Forest Trees in Malaysia.

Actually it was a great educational time. I learned that there were so many
species of trees in Malaysia that is totally unique to our country and can't be found
anywhere else in the world.


Hahahaa .... Veronica ... was like Hey .. don't let the Sun hurt me.

Where's the Shade ah? :)

We collected 11 Trees or rather saplings of various size and types.

With wheel barrows, trolleys, cangkuls and some other tools, we divided the

stuff and journeyed into the JUNGLE!

Ahhh ..... yes.. i actually did some work. This was one of the tallest trees

that we were gonna plant. It was really heavy and we had to use this Orange Trolley

to transport it into the Rimba Ilmu.

Its like a walk into the Jurassic Park.

Rimba Ilmu ... Knowledge Jungle ... Hmmmmm ....

Its a really good place to visit .. esp most of you reading this would most probably not know

that not too far from SS2 and Sect 14 .. in the North Western section of UM, there's a Rimba Ilmu. :) hehe ... its a good experience to step into this place.

Al the trees are labeled with their scientific names and with additional comments on them.

Here we go .... Planting a Tree by a Stream. (you can't really see the stream behind this team)

We had to learn to mark a circle in the ground, cangkul the earth out, had to ensure that the depth of the earth is even with the tree's base, remove the black plastic from the tree base, put it in, and slowly cover back the earth!!

Yay ... we planted a Tree!

Here's another effort to plant the tree by some other shurbs.

This is where we get down and dirty!!

Mashita showing us how to use the Cangkul.

Couldn't help take this shot as she chewed on a Saga Seed plant whilst

cangkul-ing earth to plant the tallest tree of the day.

Yups ... this is the tree that I pulled earlier.

Although it looked so thin and fine... this tree is actually 10 years old.

YUPS!!!

So the UM Officer asked us to come back and visit one day.

Yeah man ... we can come back when we are 60 years old to see the fruit of our labor! :) hehe

Another effort of planting a Tree at the end of the end of the trail.

We had walked like 40 minutes into the Rimba Ilmu.

Ohhh ... we met some kids from UNICEF who were volunteering their Saturday to help the environment as well. They were helping to pull out weeds from the stream.

They really worked hard .. jumping into the stream and pulling out the weeds.

Forming a human chain to pass the weeds to a central place for disposal!! Coool!!!

So all in all.... it was our Day for the Environment.

Great education on different plant species and the knowledge of our trees in Malaysia.

Let's go GREEEEEEEEEEEEN !!!

[tags : delephant fun stuff]