Mersing to Singapore

It rained heavily in Mersing all night long.

We woke up the next morning and was greeted with a drizzling weather while having breakfast at the hotel we stayed.

As the drizzle did not stop, we proceeded to the river side for brunch. The river was swelling with all the rain, which was not a good sign for us.

We had a fresh sotong (Malay word for squid) with chili and roti prata again.

When the rain finally stopped, we headed to the first location at west of Mersing to visit C. cf. xpurpurea (or C. cf. jacobsenii as my friend recognised it). The rain luckily did not flood this habitat too much and we were able to still locate the cryptocorynes. 

C. nurii 'Mersing' habitat was thoroughly flooded. The river had even flooded beyond the banks into the forest as could be seen from all the  mud deposits on the forest floor. The cryptocorynes could not be seen at all from the edge of the river.

I saw some pretty wild ginger species there with yellow flowers which had plantlets growing from the flowering points.

We had a durian for snack along the way back from Mersing at a road side durian stall.

We took a detour to Sedili and was greeted with another  destructed habitat sight. The C. sp. 'Sedili 6' habitat had been destroyed by excavator to form water drainage for the nearby oil palm plantation. Sad...

We were stuck in a traffic jam for close to 2 hours on our way back into Singapore due to the holiday season and had Ampang Yong Tou Fou for dinner at upper Thomson Road before ending our 2D1N road trip.

C. nurii 'Central Pahang' bloomed

My C. nurii 'Central Pahang recently bloomed after more than 2 years of cultivation. This is the specimen with very small spathe. See below for the photographs of the spathe.

C. nurii 'Central Pahang'

After eating wanton noodle for breakfast, my explorer friend brought me to the habitat for C. nurii at Central Pahang.

The habitat was a wide river with water level at about shin height. The water flow was rather fast and all the cryptocorynes were fully submersed. The river had sandy bed and the water had neutral pH, i.e. about 7.0 to 7.5.

Below are the close up photographs of the submersed leaves.

We found 2 opened submersed spathes and a few unopened ones as well. One of the spathe's protuberance tips were whitish in colour. Note also the long peduncle (flower stalk).

As usual, we cut open the kettles of a submersed spathe as well as an unopened spathe for review and were rather surprised at what we saw. Look closely at the female flower portion.

The phenomenon was more apparent in the kettle of the unopened spathe.

Did you noticed that there were actually 2 layers (one on top of the other) of female flowers present? What caused such mutation? Was it because of the specimens frequently being submersed under water?