Continued from our unforgettable experience of finding this Piney Lake, finally we found it.

The size of the lake is not as big as I expected.

The scenery around the lake was also not as beautiful as I expected (if compared to many places I have visited such as Kek Lok Tong).

Do you think this lake is beautiful?

But there are more birds than I expected.

Most of them look like ducks.

They seemed to be swimming happily in the “small” lake.  I can see that the main objectives in their lives is to look for food and look for a partner.  Feeding is not allowed in this park though.

They walked nearer to us if we carry something in our hand (they thought we would give them food, but we did not).  They ran away when I chased then.  They ran slowly in a cute way.  It was fun playing with them.

This group of birds have a same characteristic as human being - “find a cooler place to sit”.

I remember a Teochew song (one of the Chinese dialects), “DiGoLiangDiGoZhor“.  Translated directly it means “where is cooler where we sit“.  In the other part of the lyric, it mentioned that “where got money where we go“.  :O

Should I call it a pond or a lake?

How about if a human wants to swim here?  :P

This is a little bridge to get across a stream.

The stream is connected to this mini man-made waterfall.

The trees looked like having a meeting in this round shape area.

Conclusion, Piney Lakes Reserve might not be the most beautiful place to visit, but it has its own uniqueness which cannot be found in the other places in this world.  :)

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Anyway, every place that I have visited gave me a feeling.

We visited a place because someone introduced it to us otherwise we might not have even heard about that place.  No matter who introduced it, whether he, she or they 1.  guide us personally or 2.  wrote about the place and we read about it and visited the place on our own, there must be some interesting attractions about the place otherwise they would not even mention about it.  Sometimes the map is a good introduction method that tells me to visit a place.

In bookshops, it is common to find books such as 1001 great places that MUST be visited, 500 most uniques places in the world etc..  When I came across these books, most probably I would flip to the pages of the places that I have visited.  Then I will start to compare.  Yes, it is the time to compare my personal feeling and experience about the places with the author’s point of view.  Sometimes I agree, but sometimes not.  It does not means that it might not a good place to visit, but there are 3 factors that create the bias.

In Chinese, they are 1. TianShi (time),  2. DiLi (location), 3.  RenHe (people).  If there is a good combination of these 3 factors, everything would be perfect.  But most of the times, because of these factors, it is a bias to make a conclusion about a place.

Sometimes we can see that the introducer has had a good memory at the place that he / she introduces.  One might said that it is a romantic place if one has been there with his / her lover.  Next time, if I tell you about the unattractive park next to my house is a beautiful place to visit, you would understand what I mean.  May be I should not use the word “bias”, but it is just the personal feeling about a place.

If you ask me if I would like to come to this Piney Lakes Reserve again, I will say YES, because I have not seen how it looks like in other season - spring,  autumn and winter - (the factor of time), it might looks nicer in one of the seasons.  I also want to bring my brother here to see the grassland (with green grass and blue sky) that looks similar to a Windows XP wallpaper - (the factor of people).  Then I will compare my experience of the first visit and recall the previous memories.  I think next times I come here I will still remember a song - fireflies.

Thanks to SiewPeng’s sister who brought us here.  She came here before and I believe she like this place.  She must have been introduced by someone else to this place, and now I am introducing this Piney Lakes Reserve to you.

Next, I will show you a big collection of natural things that I found in this reserve.

ps: I also learned another thing - Do not judge a place by its name.