Air Putih Kemaman

My brother came to stay with me for the month as he has an instrumentation project in Gebeng Kuantan area. He mentioned to me about our uncle who came to build a bridge at the entrance of the Kampung Air Putih in the late 70's. He was then the sub-contractor working under a French company for the bridge projects that lasted for almost a year. That bridge spanned over a river and linked towards the Cheneh direction. The source of the river water comes from a distant mountainous region further to the West and I was told the river used to have green Arowana or Kelisa fish.

Air Putih is about 28 km from Cukai and driven by curiosity on seeing how does the bridge look like, my brother and I took a slow drive and finally reached there before the sunset and took some photos as posted above. We would like to show our uncle these photos during the Chinese New Year home trip to remind him of his work done almost 30 years ago.

During those earlier years, there were only narrow jungle roads or paths that could lead to the bridge building site before the current tarmac roads were built many years later. Basically it was an area used to be covered with thick primary jungles filled with vibrant wild lives. And now because of housing development projects and land clearing for palm oil estates, the landscape was changed entirely and their natural habitat had been destroyed by the encroachment of humans and the boundary was shifted further in towards Taman Negara direction. My brother related to me a story about a group of wild boars was chased all the way by a tiger and found their refuge in the company warehouse despite the presence of humans. They were trembling inside the warehouse but managed to keep the fiery beast at bay, perhaps because it was a place dwelled by the humans. And its natural instinct might have forbidded the beast to trespass that boundary despite hunger and reluctance; it had to give up the chase, and thus forego its meal for the day. The big footprints of a tiger probably in the region of 200Kg were found near the warehouse the next morning.

We took a look at the surrounding area by driving through the Kampung Air Putih, it was a nice and quiet place with good scenery and river. Some of the old shop lots, wooden houses and one particular Chinese shop along the main road reminded my brother of the good old early years of this village.