After 3 days in KL which I spent mostly in bed due to some food poisoning, I escaped the big city on a trip to the biggest and oldest National park in Malaysia: Taman Negara.
From KL it was a 3 hours bus ride, followed by a 30minutes minibus ride and a 3 hours boat ride upstream the Tembeling River. I had packed a smaller backpack for the 3 days and enjoyed the trip without too much lugging around. At the end of the day me and a small group of Dutch, Spanish and Finnish tourists arrived in Kuala Tahan, the gateway to the National park. This village consists mainly of guesthouses (from backpacker to resort-style) and some restaurants built on swimming pontoons on the river.
After dinner I joined a night walking tour to observe insects... might not sound very appealing, but it was very exciting indeed!
In the pitch-black jungle we followed our guide Pisan along a convenient boardwalk, each of us had a torch, but Pisan knew best where to find the creatures. In the Southeast Asian jungle all insects are much bigger than what I'm used to in Europe which makes it scary and fascinating at the same time. See here my best of:
We have seen spiders much bigger than this but they were too high up the tree to take a pic. This one is also impressive, isn't it?
Pisan grabbed almost every insect to show us it's features up close. This one is a stick insect (also called walking stick), which normally looks like a stem of some plant, but he showed us that they do have wings, very surprising:
A six-legged spider... apparently they feed their legs to their babies... not sure how that works when they have more than 8 babies in a time...
No, this is not a man with tiny hands, this is a HUGE cricket:
Want more jungle fun? This is what I found the next day:
The second day I explored the jungle during daylight.
At first our guide led us to the canopy walkway, apparently the highest (biggest? longest?) in the world. It was quite wobbly trying to get from tree to tree and the views were mainly dense, green jungle. Once in the middle in between two trees, being really concentrated on where to put my feet, suddenly a huge tree fell down right next to me. My heart skipped a beat and I almost jumped. Apparently they were doing some woodcutting in the forest. Now a falling tree without advance notice is definitely nothing you want to see while being on a rope bridge more than 30meters above the ground!
The rest of the hike was luckily a lot more unexciting, we followed a boardwalk all the way up a hill of 344meters and enjoyed the views. Unfortunately on top of the hill I had to witness how a German woman explained the German taxation system to a Malaysian tour guide and I was very embarrassed.
For the way back I chose a more challenging way and was by myself and I could spot many more insects minding their business and also some squirrels and woodpeckers. I tried to stomp my feet as hard as possible to chase off potential snakes, so my only worry were the annoying monkeys, but luckily I didn't see any.
The reason why I like watching insects is the fact that they are mostly not disturbed by human presence, I mean given the fact that you don't interfere or disturb them. I watched ants carrying impressive loads, big bee-like flying insects and some smaller spiders...
As I had booked a package, the afternoon activity was predefined by something called rapid shooting (not to confuse with rabbit shooting, as my Finnish companion stated). We were packed in one of the narrow boats and the guide would drive in a absolutely crazy and senseless way so we would get soaking wet. I mean, I don't mind getting wet on a rafting activity. But I hated sitting in a motor driven boat and the only reason we got wet is because the guide went too fast in the turns... I was quite annoyed when we arrived at a village on the river inhabited by a tribe of the Orang Asli (which means "original people of Malaysia") who live without electricity, school, doctors totally remote from civilized world. They looked almost African with dark skin and curly hair. Even though we learnt quite a bit about their way of life, there was almost no interaction partly because of the language (not even the Malaysians knew their language properly), partly because they were so used to the standard procedure every tourist group gets there. The kids weren't even particularly curious. So, after we tried to make fire like they do and tested our skills with the blowpipe (targeting a panda soft toy), we had to get back in the boat and get wet again... huge fun for the guide!
It would have been nice to do more hiking in the national park itself, but as I had booked the package I had to go back the next day and guess what, I was already looking forward to explore the city after all this nature :-)
From KL it was a 3 hours bus ride, followed by a 30minutes minibus ride and a 3 hours boat ride upstream the Tembeling River. I had packed a smaller backpack for the 3 days and enjoyed the trip without too much lugging around. At the end of the day me and a small group of Dutch, Spanish and Finnish tourists arrived in Kuala Tahan, the gateway to the National park. This village consists mainly of guesthouses (from backpacker to resort-style) and some restaurants built on swimming pontoons on the river.
After dinner I joined a night walking tour to observe insects... might not sound very appealing, but it was very exciting indeed!
In the pitch-black jungle we followed our guide Pisan along a convenient boardwalk, each of us had a torch, but Pisan knew best where to find the creatures. In the Southeast Asian jungle all insects are much bigger than what I'm used to in Europe which makes it scary and fascinating at the same time. See here my best of:
We have seen spiders much bigger than this but they were too high up the tree to take a pic. This one is also impressive, isn't it?
Want more jungle fun? This is what I found the next day:
The second day I explored the jungle during daylight.
At first our guide led us to the canopy walkway, apparently the highest (biggest? longest?) in the world. It was quite wobbly trying to get from tree to tree and the views were mainly dense, green jungle. Once in the middle in between two trees, being really concentrated on where to put my feet, suddenly a huge tree fell down right next to me. My heart skipped a beat and I almost jumped. Apparently they were doing some woodcutting in the forest. Now a falling tree without advance notice is definitely nothing you want to see while being on a rope bridge more than 30meters above the ground!
The rest of the hike was luckily a lot more unexciting, we followed a boardwalk all the way up a hill of 344meters and enjoyed the views. Unfortunately on top of the hill I had to witness how a German woman explained the German taxation system to a Malaysian tour guide and I was very embarrassed.
For the way back I chose a more challenging way and was by myself and I could spot many more insects minding their business and also some squirrels and woodpeckers. I tried to stomp my feet as hard as possible to chase off potential snakes, so my only worry were the annoying monkeys, but luckily I didn't see any.
The reason why I like watching insects is the fact that they are mostly not disturbed by human presence, I mean given the fact that you don't interfere or disturb them. I watched ants carrying impressive loads, big bee-like flying insects and some smaller spiders...
As I had booked a package, the afternoon activity was predefined by something called rapid shooting (not to confuse with rabbit shooting, as my Finnish companion stated). We were packed in one of the narrow boats and the guide would drive in a absolutely crazy and senseless way so we would get soaking wet. I mean, I don't mind getting wet on a rafting activity. But I hated sitting in a motor driven boat and the only reason we got wet is because the guide went too fast in the turns... I was quite annoyed when we arrived at a village on the river inhabited by a tribe of the Orang Asli (which means "original people of Malaysia") who live without electricity, school, doctors totally remote from civilized world. They looked almost African with dark skin and curly hair. Even though we learnt quite a bit about their way of life, there was almost no interaction partly because of the language (not even the Malaysians knew their language properly), partly because they were so used to the standard procedure every tourist group gets there. The kids weren't even particularly curious. So, after we tried to make fire like they do and tested our skills with the blowpipe (targeting a panda soft toy), we had to get back in the boat and get wet again... huge fun for the guide!
It would have been nice to do more hiking in the national park itself, but as I had booked the package I had to go back the next day and guess what, I was already looking forward to explore the city after all this nature :-)
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