Perth: quietly and confidently growing up

After a 19-year hiatus, I return to the city I once called home.

Perth, Australia never seems to amaze me. Upon stepping foot back here, I realized that the city has matured. The once sleepy town on the west coast had seen many facelifts since then.

Always loved the view from Mends St Jetty from across the CBD at South Perth.

Mimaland Revisited

** Due to the frequency of people who visited this post in the past, I have decided to reproduce this post from my previous blog. All credits due where applicable. **

Originally written: 2 November 2009
Previously also available on: 9 May 2014

This old photo from 1991

Just yesterday as I was browsing through some old photos with a friend of mine, I came across a photo which took me back to 1991.

I was a teenager back then, and the picture was one that had been taken when I was a camp committee for the youth group way back when.

The photo had been taken at Mimaland.

By friend, being a few years younger than I was asked, "what is Mimaland?"

I paused for a minute and then replied a question with another question, "You haven't heard of Mimaland?"

"Nope".

So I went on to say, "Before there was Sunway Lagoon, there was Mimaland."

She then got the idea that it was a theme park or something.

Then for a quick silent moment, in the deep recesses of my mind, I was taken back further in time.

I had the vague recollections of my folks taking me to Mimaland when I was somewhere between 5 to 8 years of age. What I remembered most clearly were the replica of dinosaurs made of concrete (well, at least I think it was made of that). Being a child born in the 1970's and had spent my childhood in KL it was needless to say that I had felt a tinge of nostalgia reminiscing the past glories of the 70s and 80s and this was clearly one which I had fond memories of.

Mimaland was a famous recreation park located 25 kms from the city at the northern suburb of Gombak right at the tip of KL en route to the old Bentong road. The theme park was a favourite with Klang Valley residents who needed a quick retreat from the hustle and bustle of the city. Like I mentioned in the previous paragraph, there were replica of dinosaurs (eg. tyrannosaurus, pteranodon, stegosaurus, triceratops, etc). If I remembered correctly, there was a water park there as well, and also a lake for boating activities and also lots of greeneries surrounding it.

I located some old photos from the Web and a big special thanks to those who had managed to preserve these photos and had brought back so many memories to those of us who were privilege enough to live through the "Age of the Dinosaurs". I don't think I am the only one out here in cyberspace that had, at some point, thought about Mimaland.

Dinosaurs used to walk the earth here in Malaysia

(Photo source: http://shw.25th-anniversary.fotopages.com/12352672)

Mammoth (not Court's!)

(Photo source: http://shw.25th-anniversary.fotopages.com/12352672)

I'm surprised some people actually have photos (scanned or otherwise) of these dinosaur structures in their collection

(Photo source: http://shw.25th-anniversary.fotopages.com/12352672)

Water slides... like I said, before Sunway Lagoon

(Photo source: ksdr.org.my or myenthusiasts.org)

The water park

(Photo source: 9teen87's Postcards at flickr.com or myenthusiasts.org)

What happened to Mimaland?

I googled it and found little but precious visuals and information about it. I had even used Google Maps to locate it, but it cannot even be found on the map. Clearly, it's long forgotten even before Google Maps started on the Web hence no such labels were identified.

I had read in the Star article on 25 January 2008 that the park ceased operations in 1993 and had officially closed in 1994 due to landslides. 15 years on today, I checked to see some images of the place and was shocked to see the once-glorious park is now just left abandoned in a very sorry state of disrepair.

Here are some visuals that I managed to retrieve from various sources:

The front entrance to Mimaland with the overgrown resident creepers

(Photo source: eddie.lau via pelita89.blogspot.com)

According to The Star, this was the office of Mimaland

(Photo source: The Star Online)

The road into Mimaland -- a shadow of its former self.

Now broken beyond recognition.

(Photo source: The Star Online)

The bus stop that used to carry many a crowd to and fro Mimaland at 11th Mile, Gombak

(Photo source: The Star Online)

Apparently, the land is owned by someone who is waiting for the right price to sell it off. But before that, my question is: how did it come to this?

At the rate it is decaying away, the future of this place looks uncertain. I can think of so many things that can be done to this place but would they? And when?

There is no happy ending to this blog entry because there is not a foreseeable future that holds for this place which is akin to a ghost town, as The Star calls it.

There is only a happy past we can look back on which brings a quiet smile to our faces and somehow cringe in the embarrassment of guilty pleasure that we had enjoyed Mimaland and had lived through it -- but only if you're in your very late 20s or above.

How simple our lives were back then.

For more info and if you can read Malay, do check out these resources for more info:

http://arkibnegara.blogspot.com/2011/02/pembinaan-mimaland-1971.html

http://penpatah.blogspot.com/2012/09/kisah-di-sebalik-penutupan-mimaland.html

http://miazarraannur.blogspot.com/2013/10/memori-mimaland-suatu-waktu-dahulu.html

http://tashadakbaek.blogspot.com/2012/12/mimaland-dalam-kenangan.html

http://www.ohtidak.com/oh-taman-tema-pertama-malaysia-mimaland-1971-1994/

2015: Fresh Start

I have always wanted to restart a blog but had difficulty deciding on its theme, its purpose, what type of audience I would like to attract to my blog, or how I am going to sustain it in the long run (this is, for the most parts, my biggest concern).

I have seen blogs come and go during my lifetime in cyberspace, its sudden rise post-9/11 resulting from the gaps in the news on the reporting of the said event, and how citizen journalism rose from that end, and its quick and sudden decline resulting in part from the 140-character byte-size revolution so called Twitter. Some of these blogs went on to become a medium for advertising either as a place where Internet advertisers are able to embed their banners or even some of them showing pictures of the bloggers modelling products on sale in the very same blogs. While it's not a bad thing, understandably, I wanted to have some kind of direction in this blog.

Do I want to start a blog about my interests? If yes, which one? Am I in it to fulfill the need of a specialized group of audience, or a large homogeneous one, or perhaps a niche audience? Or do I really want to use this blog to pursue a greater good of something? Maybe something related to my professional working life... but having just let that thought out of my mind and into this blog, maybe not the professional life. I have enough hours of work in a day, why should I still be using my free time to talk about work? If I was self-employed or even a business owner, then I believe it's reasonable enough for me to talk shop all day long (Note: a good gauge of whether you are talking too much about your own business or work is when you friends stop meeting you up because you are too involved with your own work to the extent of losing conversation pieces with people). To bring the topic back, I have spent enough hours at work so using a blog to expand my work is not ideal. I'm not too sure I want to make this into a diary blog as well. I don't particularly fancy telling the whole world what sort of day I went through, or what food I ate with whom and et cetera. Apart from the obvious concern of opening my life out to public scrutiny, I am hard-pressed to see the need for it.

Maybe starting this blog will be therapeutic for me. As my (potential) reader or a follower of this blog, please bear in mind that I am under no obligation to write an entry every day, or every other day for that matter. But do drop by here as and when you feel like it. I am still not sure of the theme and direction of this blog but since it's 2015, it's a good time to start something new. Since blogs don't need an ending like some good books or movies, I am not pressured to finish what I am starting today. When I don't have the time, I just won't write. When I want to post something but don't have the words, then maybe I'll make room to upload some pictures. And when I'm running on empty, then that's what it'll be: empty.

But I hope this blog stays as long as it can. I had one diary blog in the past. There were some brilliant posts (if I should say so myself) that were feature-styled and drew some decent crowd despite the lack of advertising on my blog, and some personal ones which were cringe-worthy if I were to ever revisit that blog post again. So hopefully this one will work despite the proliferation of blogs and the audiences' tiredness and selectivity of these blogs.

Fingers crossed.