In order to reach the 130 million year old jungle of Taman
Negara, we spent the majority of our day in transit. Departing from Kuala Lumpur, we bussed several hours to
Kuala Tembeling, where we stopped and had lunch, bought our permits for the
park, received “free” T-shirts and registered our cameras. We spent another couple hours aboard a slow rickety
boat, traveling 60km up the muddy river to a floating barge situated on the
bank across from the park entrance.
Our musty hostel was on a dusty cliff over looking the
riverfront barges. There were about six
different restaurants (all serving the same Asian food and sandwiches), a
couple basic tour agencies, a minimal mini-mart, and a “river crossing
service” available from every barge. Many
of Malaysia’s
nomadic aboriginal groups continue to live in the jungle of Taman Negara and we
saw several local villages both active and long abandoned in the park.
The sunlight
sparkles through the canopy in the jungle, vines wrap around neighboring trees and the
golden silence is only broken by the hoot of monkeys or call of cicadas. We spent a morning shooting the
river rapids followed by an afternoon cave tour. I screamed when the first bat flew over my head while the tour guide was looking for a huge white snake he (thankfully) never found. By the end of
the cave tour, I was standing under hundreds of sleeping bats and crawled out
of the wet cave towards sunlight.
Taman Negara is not only home to bats but rare sightings of
tigers, elephants, leopards and rhinos. We didn’t cross paths with any of the above animals but saw a
couple monkeys in the trees, a tapir near the park entrance and a small kitten
crawled under our bedroom door at night.
Then there were the leeches...hikers beware.
We hiked one day with a couple from Sweden and were
joined by an endless family of leeches.
The leeches were literally leaping from the forest floor onto our shoes,
socks and pant legs – penetrating any surface for a taste of blood. We had stopped for a snack along the river
and I checked my sneakers for leeches.
When I found one inside my shoe I flung the shoe, instead of the leech
about ten feet into the river.
I was not happy about going into the muddy river and
felt content to walk the rest of the way with a plastic bag on my foot... Thankfully, one of our Swedish friends swam
into the river and retrieved my shoe. My hiking companions all had blood soaked socks by the end of the day, yet I somehow escaped
the bite of the leech with just a wet shoe.
Leeches aside, the beauty of the oldest jungle in the world
speaks for itself. Taman Negara
National Park was my Malaysian highlight and completely worth the bat poop,
musty hostel and bug bites.
