Nick’s world tour

Or translated, quite literally “National Park”. Occupying a huge section of interior Malaysia, it’s 130 million year old rainforest. So it’s quite impressive!

I left hazy KL on a random collection of buses leaving the amusingly named Pekililing Bus Station reached on the monorail from Titiwangsa station. The last bus to Jerantut being hugely amusing due to an Indian man explaining his theory on finding your inner self. Though as I was tired, I think I offended him by dropping to sleep during the conversation…

From Jerantut it’s a 3 hour ride on a long tail boat upstream to the small hamlet of Kuala Tahan, opposite the watery entrance to Taman Negara. A completely alcohol free town with a tiny muslim population, it’s perched on the bank above some floating family restaurants.

We stayed at a really interestingly decorated place, called Tahan Guest House, located between a mosque and a building site ensuring sleepless dawns. The entrance is marked by garishly painted oil drums decorated with similarly coloured jungle boots filled with flowers. The building is covered in nursery school style paintings of wildlife, and had childrens teddy bears and dolls hanging from the roof… Quirky is the word for it, and that’s why it must have been the most popular place to stay.

The park itself is easy to get around, and the jungle canopy walk is the highlight. Think wonky ladders and boards held together with rope (only 4 people at a time, so said the sign), and hang them 40m above the ground. Makes walking an extreme sport, and not for you if you don’t like heights.

There’re lots of lizards catching flies in the late afternoon sun, and at night the array of creepy eyes reflecting your torch light back at you. I still didn’t see a snake, though some girls saw a king cobra, which was kind of scary. I went to the amusingly named bat cave, which was full of bats and very smelly, but Batman himself wasn’t there.

On a completely uncultural note, we took a boat to a local “orang asli” (indiginous people) village, and learned how to find drinking water in liana creepers, light a fire and to kill monkeys and birds with home made blow pipes and poison arrows. I wasn’t very good at hitting the (stuffed) animals, so it’s a good job I had the option of paying for someone else to sort out my dinner.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 10th, 2006 at 3:40 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.