FOCUS When I decided I wanted to find out more about the River of Life (RoL) project, I had a crazy thought. What if I were to actually experience the River of Life in the river itself? By going down the RoL in a kayak ?

After all, upon full rehabilitation, the RoL project is supposed to turn the Gombak and Klang rivers from a Class III-Class V level rivers (not suitable for body-contact) to a Class IIB (suitable for body-contract and recreational usage) rivers.

Hence, the idea for a River of Life kayak expedition!

To help me plan for this expedition, I roped in a former intern of mine, Tham Pei Ting, who is an outdoor enthusiast, and so happened to have some free time.

Pei Ting then roped in Jeffrey Lim of Studio 25, who led the initiative to create a cycling map of KL. Not only did Jeff share his invaluable knowledge about the RoL, which he obtained from cycling many times along the Gombak and Klang rivers, he also got me hooked on to cycling on the streets of our capital city!

We spent a day each to recce parts of the Gombak and Klang rivers, which are in the KL portion of the 10.7km RoL project. The recce of the rivers from the vantage point of a bicycle was an eye-opening experience in many ways.

Firstly, I realised that the city centre is actually a very compact city and very cyclable (although not bicycle-friendly). One of the key reasons is that the city centre is not bisected by any toll highways.

Secondly, I noticed many sights and sounds from riding the bicycle, which I would otherwise have ignored if I were in a car.

I paid more attention to the signages of old buildings, the conditions of low-cost flats, the presence of small temples off the main roads, the graffiti on some of the walls along the rivers and the importance of trees to provide shade for pedestrians and cyclists alike.

Thirdly, I was able to see for myself which parts of the RoL were accessible to foot or cycle traffic and which parts were totally cut off to pedestrians. This is an important point if the objective of the RoL to make the river accessible to the people is to be realised.

Fourthly, I (or Pei Ting, to be more specific) was able to identify the obstacles along the rivers that needed to be managed for our kayaking expedition.

A few thoughts arising from our recce trip:

(i) As indicated in the RoL website, there has been some work done along the river to clean it up. I spotted a number of new silt traps in some of the big monsoon drains which feeds into the Gombak and Klang rivers.

Gabions and other structures had been put in place in order to strengthen the river banks.

A large retention pond in Kampung Puah along the Gombak River was built as part of a larger flood mitigation initiative. (Sadly, many villagers had to be moved out as a result of this).

(ii) Rubbish and polluted discharge continues to be seen in large quantities. While I don’t expect the river to be cleaned up overnight, the fact that large quantities of rubbish could be seen accumulating along the river indicates that the community/stakeholder engagement portion of the RoL project needs to be stepped up.

(iii) More worrying is the highly-polluted discharges that continue to flow from some of the monsoon drains and tributaries (such as Sungai Bunus).

It is money down the drain if billions are spent cleaning up the river but nothing is done to stop factories and other large-scale polluters from putting their untreated discharges into the river.

(iv) The 5km cycling lane from Mid Valley to Dataran Merdeka is a great initiative, but severely underutilised.

Although this is a separate initiative from the RoL, we were able to use this cycling lane to recce the Klang River. (Incidentally, this was also the day I cycled to Parliament, after the completion of our recce trip).

We were the only people who were using this lane on a weekday. From our vantage point, we were able to see that public access did not seem to be a priority in the RoL project from the Dataran Merdeka/Masjid Jamek portion down to Mid Valley.

(v) There are already parts of the Klang River (next to the Datuk Keramat LRT, for example), which can be accessed by the public and turned into an urban park. These parts are big enough for cars to enter but are severely underutilised public spaces.

(vi) There are many kampung along the Gombak river, where the residents probably don’t have land titles and are ripe for commercial exploitation.

Basically, the RoL can be (and has been) used as an excuse to relocate some of these residents and the likelihood of their kampung land being taken over for commercial development is very high.

This recce trip was not just helpful in terms of logistics planning for the RoL kayak expedition.

More importantly, it provided me with a ground-level understanding of the potential of and challenges faced by the RoL project.

Next, we will go onto the river itself!

Tomorrow: Dodging trash and toxicity in KL’s polluted river

Part 1: The River of Life Expedition

Part 2: Why care about the ‘River of Life’? Try RM4.4 bil for size