Sim Eng Aun opened his eyes to a blurry world. As he wondered where he was, he felt something wet and sticky on his forehead and face. It was blood.

Regaining consciousness, the 16-year-old boy remembered falling and hitting a rock while hiking up Maxwell’s Hill in Taiping with two friends.

Where were they? He didn’t know how long he had been lying unconscious but hunger was gnawing at his vitals.

He had no more food with him and the water bottle was empty. Sim struggled to his feet but collapsed after a couple of steps.

“I crawled to the stream nearby to get my fill of water. Even after that, I could not stand up. I had no sense of time as trees covered the sky and I couldn’t make out clearly if it was night or day. But it rained often and I got wet,” Sim, now 67, tells me at a coffee house in Taiping.

Only later, when he had been rescued by a search party of Royal Malaysian Rangers and was in hospital did he learn that he had been missing for seven nights.

“For seven days, I was living on stream water,” Sim says. When he could not move at all, rain water helped.

Sim and two friends – Lee Tiong Ghee, 17, and Sim Siong Soon, 18 – had walked up the popular Maxwell’s Hill, now known as Bukit Larut, on Oct 6, 1969.

Tiong Ghee and Siong Soon told reporters later that along the way, under a large tree, they decided to split up and take shortcuts to reach the top instead of following the narrow, winding road up the hill.

However, when they returned to the tree at the appointed time, Sim was not there. After waiting for a while, they returned home to raise the alarm.

“When I got lost, I knew the best way to get down was to follow a stream and I started looking for one, and I found it after a while.

“I began descending but the area was slippery due to rain and I slipped and fell into a sort of depression, hitting my head against a rock,” Sim says, pointing to the large indented scar on his forehead.

“I lost consciousness. When I came to, everything was hazy.”

Did he panic when he realised he was lost, with no way to contact anyone? Was there fear?

“I was in a state of shock, and almost semi-conscious without food, so there was no room for fear or even prayers.”

Every time he felt a pang of hunger, Sim would crawl to the stream and drink some water. He frequently saw and heard monkeys in the trees but they did not disturb him.

Unknown to him, family members, friends and the police had started scouring the forested hill which once served as a place to rest and recuperate for British officials, including governors-general of the Straits Settlements and the high-commissioners.

A 30-member police party, with two tracker dogs, Duku and Mangis, made a sweep of the area over several days.

When they still could not find him, the parents sought the aid of Chinese mediums. On the fifth day, Sim’s mother Lee Kim Eng was told by a medium that he was still alive.

Armed with a charm from the Wong Sam Fu temple, she and her husband Sim Chiew Min, a pork seller, braved the rain to climb the road up the hill hoping for their son to appear out of the forest.

The two friends – Tiong Ghee and Siong Soon – were among the group that accompanied the parents.

When they still failed to find the boy, an SOS was sent to the First Battalion Malaysian Rangers stationed in Taiping and a team of 25 soldiers led by Captain Mustafa Abu Bakar arrived on the morning of the eighth day to search for Sim.

Mustafa guessed that Sim would likely look for a stream to drink water or to follow it down to the foothill and so he began focusing on streams.

After almost eight hours of exhausting search, they spotted some footprints near a stream. Following it, Mustafa found a Japanese slipper and his spirits soared.

He later told the media that he knew they were close to the boy after finding the slipper. A short while later, they found a torn singlet and about 25 metres away, they spotted Sim lying on the ground beside a rock next to the stream.

Radioing back to arrange for an ambulance, Mustafa and his men placed Sim on an improvised stretcher and carried him downhill.

Mustafa was reported by The Straits Times as saying: “When I first saw the boy, I thought he was dead. Then he gave a weak ‘Ah’ in answer to my shout and we rushed towards him. I bent over him, brushing away flies covering his face and saw a deep gash on his forehead. His right eye was swollen and there was another inch-long wound on his chin.”

Sim told me he was lying down, unable to move when he heard some noises. He tried to shout but he was too weak and was uncertain if any sound came out. The soldiers quickly surrounded him and tended to his wound and wrapped him in a blanket.

“I gestured for some food and they gave me some pineapple juice and biscuits. I had the juice but could not swallow the biscuit. “

When the soldiers came out of the jungle with the rescued teen, an ambulance was waiting to take him to the hospital.

“I became fully aware of my wounds and what had transpired, at the hospital. My father gave the search party a treat at a Chinese restaurant,” recalls the father of four and grandfather of another four.

I ask if he had ever forbidden his children from going up Bukit Larut and he says no. In fact, he adds, two of his three daughters walk up a short distance of the hill daily for exercise.

Sim himself has only gone up Bukit Larut once after the incident and that too by the government-operated jeep service. He’s not only quite cool about the incident, he is a cheerful man who takes life as it comes.

Sim, who studied until Standard Five at Sekolah Rendah Jenis Kebangsaan Hua Lian became a waiter after leaving school before setting up his own coffee stall.

For the last 40 years, however, he has been driving a taxi, ferrying people from Taiping to other towns.

Business, he says, has not been good due to the Covid-19 pandemic but in the past, he had regular clients – especially expatriates – who would seek his service to travel outstation.

Several people I spoke to later told me that when Sim went missing, it became the hottest topic in town and people would gather at the foot of Maxwell’s Hill, anxious to know the fate of the boy. When he was admitted to hospital, even strangers dropped by to get a view of him.

Every now and then, someone or other would get lost on Maxwell’s Hill. A few people had gone missing before Sim, just as a few went missing after him. However, they’d find their way back in a day or two or three, or were found by search parties.

Sim was the only one to have gone missing for seven whole days and survived to tell the tale.