This event happens yearly and usually in July or in the mid year. Jo, Avariel and me registered for The New Paper Big Walk after one of the adventure episodes. It’s $10 anyway and you get a coupon for a goodie bag to be picked up on the day of the Big Walk and a t-shirt when you registered, we picked blue instead of red. The whole distance to be covered is 5 kilometers and the last time I did this was back in secondary school.
I was the first of the three of us to arrive at The Flyer. That’s the starting point of the walk and I got there around 6 plus in the morning? I got my goodie bag and stood around and waited for the rest. Took pictures but they’re mainly blur due to the lack of light anyway.
As I wandered around, I saw some chillies and onions near some trees.
Heh, this means that the organizing team is pretty experienced in holding events and had been doing this for quite a while. You see, at times on very major events you might see it hidden around somewhere. It’s not really hidden but it’s placed in a discreet place so people won’t trip or that it’ll be picked up by cleaners straight away or something.
It’s a traditional superstition where you point the chillies usually stuck on a satay stick then poked into the ground along with some onions so that you’d threaten the sky not to rain or else it’ll be poked/fed with it. I’m sure the sky got the point with that amount of chillies even without being stuck on satay sticks. Those are after all chilli padi.
Dawn approaches, everyone is queueing up to get their goodie bags and hanging around.
The start off time was 7.30am so everyone was just sitting around and eating the breakfast foods or reading the newspaper from their goodie bags.
Avariel reached before Jo who was stuck somewhere in the queue. Meanwhile, I got to see some costumes. One of the competitions there was a “Be Green” costume competition where you had to make an outfit out of recycled materials and a Spot Me contest where the event’s photographers will take your photo and you’ll see if you made it into the papers the next day!
And so we waited for Jo.
And she finally got out of the queue with her goodie bag and off we went! See, even if the starting time was 7.30am, you can just leisurely walk through the route. At least until 12 noon when it all ends and the traffic opens for vehicles once more.
Avariel’s and Jo’s Pokewalker respectively. You can walk your Pokemon to level up and since they’re somewhat like pedometers, might as well bring them along yeah? So this is the starting number of steps. We’ll see how many steps we have at the end of the walk.
Off we went!
No, you didn’t have to stop when you saw the red light. Meanwhile, there were banners at each point saying 1 km to the end point etc etc. They had phone numbers on some of them where you can message them to win prizes.
As we saw those banners though we were going, “Uh, is it that fast that we’re walking?” for 5km in theory should be far right?
It wasn’t far at all! It wasn’t far to us anyway because apparently we walked more on a typical episode of SDS because we usually got lost? This was really a short walk to us! I remembered the first time I did the Big Walk with Miz Divine and we were trudging to the end point tiredly. This time, Jo and Avariel were just going, “That’s it?”. Including the revelation of us probably walking more than 5km when we were out every time.
Oh yes. The end count for the Pokewalkers. So we took around 5 thousand steps.
At the end point was a Big Carnival @ Marina Bay! I don’t know. It’s like lots of events are using @ for at to look cooler or perhaps to save space on their posters or something.
Lots of activities happening and oh, I did get spotted by the photographers when we crossed the finish line so hah.
Lots of tents with activities. We got a balloon from the Nikon tent for Raven since we were going to meet her after the walk. The one teaching about rangoli, apparently the lady is a record holder for being a single artist doing the largest rangoli art!
The crowd from afar and you can see the misters doing their thing. If you were in that area, you’d feel cool and wet from the moisture.
The popular stall there was an Old Chang Kee truck! It would have been so good if the Milo truck was there to compliment it. Also, you could take pictures with the sailboat and windsurfing board there or play some games.
Anywho, here’s the goodie bag. For some reason I didn’t get the mini Rexona deodorant rollon in my bag but eh, I got an orange. Orange not related to deodorant, obviously. Lots of yummy goodies and an umbrella too! It was a really heavy goodie bag though so there we go!
We finished The Big Walk! It was a thing to do and hurray, it can be struck out of the list now.
