BootsnAll Travel Network



Taman Negara, Malaysia (Post #94)

Hello! Its Tuesday, March 7th and we’re in Singapore (13 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time and 16 hours ahead of West Coast Time). Michele and Mike here….

On February 28th we headed to central Malaysia where we planned to go treking in Taman Negara National Park, a 130 million year old jungle. It is somewhat complicated to get there independently and greatly simplified by buying a transportation and accomodation package.  The trip would require a bus from Kuala Lumpur to Jerantut (the closest large town to the park headquarters), a transfer to a second bus to get to a river jetty and then a three hour boat up the river to Kuala Tahan — a small village across the river from park headquarters.  We did a lot of research while in KL and finally decided on a transportation and accomodation package through NKS which we felt was a great deal.  The package included:

  • a bus ride from KL to Jerantut, Malaysia
  • bus ride from Jerantut to river pier/jetty at Kuala Tembling
  • 3 hour boat ride in low wooden boat from Kuala Tembling to Kuala Tahan, the village where we stayed
  • double room with Air Con in Teresek View Motel in Kuala Tahan village
  • breakfast for both of us on two mornings
  • double ensuite room in a hostel in Jerantut while we were waiting for the train to Singapore
  • transport to the Jerantut train station
  • two economy class train tickets from Jerantut to Singapore

Because we’ve done the overnight travel thing many times, we knew we wouldn’t be able to sleep sitting up in seats on the train so we paid a small supplement to get beds in the sleeping carriage.

All the transportation described above went smoothly. The 3 hour boat ride to the village of Kuala Tahan was very scenic and was pretty relaxing (although sitting in a small space on a wooden boat made our legs, butt, and feet fall asleep from time to time).  Here is a picture looking at the river from the village we stayed in, Kuala Tahan:

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The main river is fast flowing and it’s brown (as you can see in the picture) from the mud at the bottom constantly being stired up. The blue water is a side stream that stays still most of the time and interestingly, doesn’t seem to mix with the fast flowing river.

Upon arriving at the LBK floating restaurant where NKS has its Kuala Tahan tour counter, we listened to a 10 minute briefing about the activities we could book through them.  We didn’t book anything immediately because we needed some time to decide what would be worth paying for and what we could just do on our own.  Next we found our way across town (10 minute walk) to Teresek View Motel and checked in.  We were pretty happy with the room they gave us until 45 minutes later when about 1000 ants came pouring out of our air condition unit.  Michele went downstairs to ask for some ant spray, came back and thoroughly sprayed the wall with the air-con unit inside and out.  This only seemed to further aggrivate the ants and even more poured out of the A/C, making it look like some kind of horror movie.  We asked an employee to come take a look with the hopes that he would just move us to a different room.  That was exactly what happened.  Our second room was about 4 ft shorter in one direction but at least it was ant free.  Later that night when it got dark, some huge locus/fly things about 4-5 inches long and 2 inches wide were buzzing and flying around.  Michele did not like this at all. She said she imagined that they would fly into her and get stuck in her hair. As we would soon find out, everything is huge when you’re in the jungle including all flies, ants, roaches, and other insects. 

Kuala Tahan is a small village with just a few streets and it totally dry (no alcohol) since 100% of the residents are Muslim.  There are six floating restaurants that sit in the river where we ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner everyday.  There is a picture of the floating restaurants below.  Note that you can see from the photo that it is very important that the satellite TV picture come in clearly so that no one misses out on music videos or soccer games. (In case you can’t tell, that’s a satellite dish tied to a chair in the middle of the water.)

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The first and last day we were in Kuala Tahan, we simply took a water taxi (for about 13 US cents) across the river and did our own hiking around the trails.  One day we also did a canopy walk across a series of long tree top canopies.  Here is a picture of Michele during our canopy walk, about 40 meters above the ground:

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There is a 5-star resort right at the base of the national forest. While doing our own hiking we saw several animals both on the resort grounds and in the jungle.  Below are two photos of the animals we enjoyed seeing the most. The first is a wild pig and the second is a monitor lizard. The pig is only about 2 feet long but the monitor lizard is more than 3 feet long. 

Wild Pig:

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Monitor Lizard:

Is this an awesome photo or what?! Mike took this with his new camcorder.

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We also went on two guided excursions. On the first excursion, we followed a guide through the Ear Cave, a cave that had many narrow passages and a river flowing through the bottom of it.  Inside the cave we saw bats, toads, snakes, and shrimp. Here is a picture illustrating that yea, there was a bat or two in the cave:

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The second excursion was a night walk through the jungle.  While this was not nearly as exciting as the Ear cave adventure, we still saw several creepy crawly type of creatures such as this one: 

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We left Kuala Tahan and the Taman Negara National Park after being there for only 4 days. The time went fast (as it usually does on our trip). On Friday, March 3rd, we took the boat ride back down the river, got picked up by a bus, were transfered to Jerantut, and given a transit room to stay in until we were transported to the Jerantut Train Station at 1:45 am on Saturday, March 4th.  Our train from Jerantut, Malaysia to Singapore was on time, arriving at 2:30am.  However, we didn’t quite arrive in Singapore on time. Let’s just say we were more than a few hours late.  More on that in the next blog….



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