Hello everyone.
We made it to Malaysia! This will be as far south as our journey will take us. Originally we had planned to visit Indonesia, but it turns out that this would be impossible with the time we allowed ourselves. Anyways, the trip south from Thailand was good (no border difficulties), but very long for the distance we actually travelled. We got to the city of Trang, Thailand and found out that there is serious unrest near the southeast border crossing. (Muslim minority insurgent group wants their own country and blows things up and be-heads Buddhist monks). We wanted to take this border because the town in Malaysia we wanted to go to was right on the other side, but because of this unrest and the the time of day we left Trang (We were gonna risk it), we had to cross on the western border crossing. At that border, we met this nice Malay guy who helped us get to his hometown and got us on a night bus across the peninsula to the town we actually needed to be in. Blah blah blah... sorry. Long story short, it took us 6 buses, one really crappy old " "jungle train", and about 36 hours to get to this National Park. Its really beautiful here, and they claim that this is the oldest tropical forest in the world. Today we did a little hike to and through a canopy walk way (wood plank bridges suspended up to 150 feet above ground on really tall trees) This was awesome and reminded me of guiding on a similar attraction up in Montana. Tomorrow we head deeper into the jungle to sleep in a "hide", which is a little chalet that people sleep in to hear the crazy jungle sounds at night and to possibley see some animals. There's many crazy critters that dwell in this area: Tigers, bats, teranchulas, monkeys, wild elephants, cobras, vipers, pythons, etc. Leeches are almost inevitable on the trail so we will definitly become blood donors tomorrow. Anyways, this place is strait out of the Jungle book with vines hanging everywhere, lush green plants blanketing everything, and crazy noises all around you. The forest is so dense with plants that getting around without a well maintained trail would be almost impossible. After tomorrow, we take the bus to Kuala Lampur (the Capitol). We'll write from there!
