Broga Hill hiking

Broga Hill is a pretty famous hiking attraction nearby Kuala Lumpur. It is located in Semengih, at the border between Selangor and Negeri Sembilan.

It has a nice sunrise view, which you need to start your hiking latest by 6.30am in order to catch the sunrise timing. Since it is still dark when you start your trekking around that time, it is advisable to bring along a torch light. If you prefer to make use of your handphone LED light instead, make sure it is bright enough, and its battery is fully charged.

There are quite a lot of hikers there during weekends and public holidays. Parking is available in a palm oil plantation estate at the trek entrance, but the space is limited. If you are too late to arrive there, you might have difficulty finding a nice parking space. There will be people collecting parking fee from you, and they charge by number of headcounts in your car instead of per car basis. The rate is RM1.00 per person.

Not long after you walk on the trail, there will be another station with people collecting yet another RM1.00 per person from you as hiking fees. They also sell drinks and simple snacks to hikers, at a premium price compared with the price you can get in the shop in Semengih.

The trail is actually pretty wide and easy to walk. When we hiked up Broga Hill, there were days of raining before, so the trail is pretty muddy and a little bit slippery. Proper shoe for hiking is highly recommended to walk on this kind of trail condition.

There are 3 hill tops as viewpoints good for photo shooting. 3 of them are pretty close to each other. To reach the first hill top from the entrance, you will need about 45 minutes to an hour.

When you reached near to the first hill top, the slope is quite slant there, and you'll need to climb with the aid of rope already prepared for hikers there.

When you reached the hill top, enjoy the beautiful scene there.

After the third hill top, you can continue your trek to another viewpoint at Gunung Tok Wan, but the journey will easily take more than 2 hours to reach there. Most people set their endpoint at one of the Broga Hill hill tops, and there are also people who like to take the challenge to hike all the way up to Gunung Tok Wan.

After you walk down the hill and completed your hiking, there are some picnic plateau with tables and seats near the entrance for you to take your self-prepared breakfast. There is also a small children playground with some outdoor gymnasium facilities.

If you prefer to take your breakfast or lunch nearby, there are plenty of restaurants and food centers in the Broga Village located just about 1 kilometer away from Broga Hill.

At the end of the village, there is another famous attraction called Sak Dato Temple, which also attracted quite a lot of visitors during weekends and public holidays.

There are a number of hawkers and mobile stalls selling goods and foods near the entrance of the temple.

The temple is pretty large in area, with a nice botanical garden inside it. You can find statue of the 12 zodiac animals in the garden.

There is a place to spin for better prosperity and harmonious family in the temple which you should not miss it.

On top of a small hill next to the temple, you can find a very large statue of the Monkey King.

There is a nice suspension bridge connecting the temple to the hill, which you can walk over with it.

You can complete your day trip to Broga Hill, Broga Village and Sak Dato Temple, and returning to Kuala Lumpur right before dinner time. As such, hikers in Klang Valley can always plan for hiking up to Broga Hill as frequently as they like.

A family trip to Genting Highlands

It has been quite some times since my family last visited to Genting Highlands, and during the last school holiday we have visited it again to escape the heat.

On the way to Genting Highlands, we stopped by Batu Caves Temple.

Something new about this temple since our last visit is its colourful staircases, which apparently successful to attract more tourists to it.

The monkeys in Batu Caves are still around. They are, as usual, got used to the people around.

Driving uphill to Genting Highlands, I felt that the road is wider than before, and it is safer and easier to drive there.

We stayed at a new apartment called Geo 38 Residence, which has nice facilities including swimming pool, jacuzzi pool, fitness centre, sauna room, children playground, etc. all located at the same floor. The sauna room is not too big, and located inside the gents and women washrooms respectively, beside the swimming pool.

The main problem of this apartment is its location. It is hiding behind a new small township at mid-hill, at a lower ground than the Awana, which is quite some distance away from Genting Highlands at the hilltop and most of the visitor attractions uphill. You will need to travel by car to go anywhere out of the apartment, despite there is some food at the shops around within walking distance. If you stay in one of the hotels uphill in Genting Highlands, it will save you time, effort, petrol and parking fee to just walk around without the need of using a car.

If you are looking for vegetarian restaurant, there is one in Chin Swee Caves Temple, but crowded with people. There was a long queue outside, and the food waiting time exceed hours.

Genting Premium Outlets is a new attraction on top of Genting Highlands. There was a big crowd there. It was raining when we visited the place, and its top floor area is outdoor open concept, which has very limited shelter to the rain.

There is a food court in Genting Premium Outlets, which still using the troublesome temporary prepaid card method. We need to buy a prepaid card and load it with value, then use the card to buy food and drinks in the food court. Then, we need to return the card to get back the deposit money in it.

We visited the Happy Bee Farm, which is located quite near to Geo 38 Residence. After the visit, we found out that the road is one way. To return to the apartment, we need to go all the way down until we reached a roundabout, then only can go back uphill. This has tremendously lengthen the distance of travel.

We've also visited the Genting Strawberry Leisure Farms.

The entrance fee is not cheap, but it is quite worth to go inside and take photos.

We discovered that the strawberry farm only forms a small portion of the entire area. Majority of the farm is planted with flowers - a lot of colourful, beautiful flowers.

Our stay in Genting Highlands this time is only for 2 days 1 night. Since it is a family trip, we didn't enter into the casino. Outside the casino, we found that the shopping mall is still familiar, and the indoor theme park is also quite familiar.

My Realme C2 budget phone with Color OS 6

Realme is a brand of OPPO. Realme C2 is a decent budget phone which you can get at the price of slightly below RM400.

Realme C2 is a successor of C1. I would say it is an alternative option of C1, which both of them are identical in terms of actual performance, which in some areas C2 is slightly better than C1 and some other C1 is slightly better than C2.

The 2 main differences are that C2 is using Mediatek MT6762 Helio P22 (12 nm) chipset and running on Android 9 OS, while C1 is using Qualcomm SDM450 Snapdragon 450 (14 nm) chipset and running on Android 8.1 OS.

Its size of 6.1" is big enough to have a screen suitable for elderly people to use after the font size is configured to be the largest.

Although it is a budget phone, it has pretty well performance with just a little bit of speed lagging compared with those flagship phones for normal applications. Its back cover is pretty nice and modern looking too. Therefore, it is also very suitable for kids and for people that just need a decent phone.

The Realme C2 comes with 2 options of specification: one with 2GB RAM & 16GB storage, and another more expensive one with 3GB RAM & 32GB storage. Bear in mind that the actual usable storage for the 2/16GB option is only around 6GB. The other 10GB was already used by the system and OS. It has a dedicated slot for microSD and supports external storage up to 256GB.

This phone only supports 2.4GHz WiFi and does not support 5GHz WiFi. However, it does support dual SIM 4G LTE.

It has a normal 13MP f/2.2 main camera working together with a 2MP f/2.4 camera for depth sensor. At its front is a 5MP f/2.0 camera, not a good option for people who loves selfie, but still usable.

Its Color OS 6 has a Control Center with big icons, provides convenient and easy access particularly to elderly people.

Color OS 6 also comes with  the Android App Drawer, which you have a choice to switch it on or off.

It's home screen has a handy smart sidebar for quick access to your favourite apps, which you can access by swiping from the side of the screen. The apps listing in the sidebar is configurable. You are also given the option to switch it off if you don't want to use it.

The phone has all the essential features in Android 9. It has quite a number of security related functions.

The anti-harassment/fraud function is actually the call and/or SMS blocking function. It has interesting features such as blocking of one-ring incoming calls, which you might not find in other phones.

The Realme C2 4,000 mAh Li-Po battery can last for more than 1 day for normal use.

One thing I dislike is its battery saving feature, which I think is too over. It always kill a lot of background running processes and apps, which might stop automation app and widgets from working after a while.

A lot of tweaking needs to be done to find the way to let the automation app and widgets continue working at normal even when the phone is in sleep. Smart Power Saver will always kill them off. You need to use Custom Power Consumption Protection option, and manually configure each of the apps for them to be able to continue running in background, and to automatically start when the phone starts.

All in all, this is a nice phone with high performance/cost ratio. Most apps (including the not so resource demanding games) can run pretty well on it, also I found Facebook is quite slow (takes a few seconds) in launching up in it.