Original Jungle massive

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So, I havent updated this for a while and its quite a long one. I hope you are well. So the last night Singapore was pretty uneventful. The people I had met and hung out with left for Kuala Lumpar and all I had to do was wait to leave for there myself. I had ooked myself on the overnight train from Singapore. It cost about 12 quid and was going to last about 9 hours, it left at 10,30pm and arrived at 7ish in Kuala Lumpar. i figured I would save on the nights accomodation and not the waste the whole day travelling. So i just kicked around Singapore for the day, killing time until my train left. Obviously I had to pop into Hooters for a few more beers to pass the time.

The train journey was quite good. Passed by without any problems. I had my own bunk with some curtains for some privacy, which was nice. The train was packed. I had been on there about half an hour, just settling into a book and jst got comfortable when we had to get off the train to pass through immigration again. I already went through it
Performers
at Singapore before I got on the train so that was annoying.

Kuala Lumpar

I arrived at Kuala Lumpar train station, well KL Sentral as its called there. It was basically rush hour and everyone was rushing around trying to get to work and theres me, looking like crap with a huge rucksac, spot the tourist anybody? I then had to work out how to get to the hostel. The transport in KL is goood but not quite as good as Singapore. I had to get a monorail to Chow Kit station. I managed that after some tooing and froing on the main concourse. I eventually got there slowly losing all of my body fluids out of every pore. The area Chow Kit was pretty manky and after the cleanliness of Singapore I was a bit tamking aback. I wasn't used to this. Anyway I checked into the hostel and it seemed pretty nice. As it was only about 8am, I woke everybody up. Now the people in the hostel have been pretty typical of the people I have met s far bar a few. There are alot of 18 years olds fresh out of a-levels on their
Petronas Towers
'gap year'. Its not too bad and most of them are pretty nice, but it makes me feel old. I have found myself saying to them, when I was your age....blah blah blah. Surely that doesnt start before I am even 30. The can hold their drink though. When I get up in the moring with a hangover, they spring out of bed and are ready for the day. Damn I remember those days.

So that was the first hostel. I moved out of there after 2 days in search of somwhere more central. So i rented my own room with aircon for about 4 pounds a night in Chinatown. It was quite nice except the fact it was above a chinese restaurant and smelt like Chowmein most of the time. Still it had aircon and that means alot out here believe me. Chinatown was ok, pretty manky if I am honest but it had everything I needed right there. It even had a massive night market selling moody clothes, bags, watches and sunglasses of every make. Gucci, Tag, Luis Viton and many others. The food in the area was also excellent, my favourite being the chicken satays.

Statue

Probably the best night out I had in KL was the opening of the colours of Malaysia festival. I think they were celebrating 50 years of independance. It featured performances by pretty much every ethnic group that live in Malaysia. It was very colourful and included something like 2000 performers from every corner of Malaysia. It was great to see all kinds of people partying together and I think Malaysia should be an example to all countries with lots of diferent religions, as they seem to live side by side without many problems at all. The night ended with me being forced to dance with all these different groups of people and lots of people asking me to have a picture taken with them. Incidently this is quite a common happening. At least about 5 times I had a family come up to me asking about a photo. I thought they wanted me to take a picture of them together, but no. They actually wanted me to pose for a picture with their children. I was trying to imagine them showing the picture to their family and people asking who the hell is that. Having spoken to other travellers especially
Batu Caves
blonde people, they have been through the same thing. I have to say though Malaysians are among the most friendly, helpful and honest people I have met. I thoroughly enjoyed KL and will definitely go back there some day.

On the last day in KL I visited the Batu caves. This was a pretty impressive Hindu temple that was actually built into the the limestone caves in the GOmbak district north of KL. As you approach the caves the first thing you notice is the 42m high gold statue of Lord Muragan, which took 3 years to build. He is the god of war and patron daity of Tamil. Seems strange that in such a peaceful place they would have a god of war statue but what do I know. Every year around 1.5 million pilgrims visit the site on a full moon for Thaipusam ,covered in multiple piercings. These include skewers through the cheeks and arms and hooks in peoples backs dragging things up the steps. Very bizarre and some of the pictures up there were pretty horrific. You have to climb the 272 steps that lead into the caves and the place is literally swarming with monkeys.
From the boat on the way into the jungle
I don't trust those little buggers although they apparently only get aggressive when there is food around.

Taman Negara

So the title of this blog is because for the last few days I have been in Taman Nagara which is basically a national park comprised of around 4000 sq km of primary rainforest. The national park encompasses 3 states, Pahang, Kelantan and Terengganu each with its own legislation on the welfare of the jungle. I was due to be picked up from the hostel at 8.30am to get a bus to the jetty to catch a boat. I was ready by 8.20am and those of you have witnessed this thing that I do will know just how annoying it is. I had been storing my passport and tickets in a locker in the hostel and just when I was about to leave I realised i couldnt find the locker key. i started paniing whn the bus turned up as I still couldnt find it and obviously leaving my passport there wasn't an option. I was running around emptying my bag an I couldn't ind it anywhere. Eventually they had to break the lock for which I had to
Lizard in my shower
pay. But it meant I could catch my bus. Just before getting on the bus as I was getting the ticket for the bus out of my bag, what id I find? The bloody key for the locker. What a numbskull.

I caught the boat from the jetty along the Tahan river that took 3 hours so we were quite deep in the jungle by the time we got there. On arrival I headed up to try and find some accomodation which was basically a hut in the local village. For the rather expensive sum of 15rm which is about 2 pounds i had my own aircon hut. My main reason for going to Taman Negara was to take part in a 3 day trek through the jungle. As I was the only person who wanted to do it, it would have been pretty expensive unless a couple of other people wanted to do the same. The problem was you had to have a guide and to be quite honest I didn't want to have find my way through the jungle by myself. Anyway, a Dutch couple turned up and wanted to the same thing so the next morning
Cave
me, Neils and Lionna set off with Nik our guide. Nik ws a strange little man who was going to be carrying all our food and cooking equipment for the 3 days in a bag that was almost the same size of him. The boat journey to our starting point took around 2.5 hours. So by this time we were miles away from anywhere. As we got off the boat, Nik pulled up his socks past his knees. As I only had trainer socks on I asked him why he was doing this. He replied something about leeches. I changed into longer socks and thought to myself this is going to be a long ew days I thought.

So we set off into the jungle carrying our beds and everything we would need for 3 days with us and almost instantly I was dripping wet with sweat and there were leeches everywhere. They are horible little things that seem to be able to sense where fresh blood is. The three of us were constantly stopping to check ourselves for the little buggers. The problem with leeches is even when they are sucking blood from you, you can't feel a
Nik cooking
thing. After about 3 hours into the jungle we stopped for a break. Neils was already bleeding from about 5 different leech wounds but Lionna and I were so far unscathed. We set off again and almost straight away I fell and ripped my long shorts all the way down the front completely exposing myself to the bugs and leeches of the jungle. Remembering a scene from the film Stand by me where one of the boys gets a leech somewhere where you really don't want to find a leech, I thought I best get changed as i took my shorts off, I noticed a huge leech on my thigh that had been there for a while as it was quite fat and filled with my blood. Your not supposed to pull them straight off.This is because they create this natural blood thinning agent and if you pull them of you just don't stop bleeding. The problem is you fel a slight panic and putting salt of burning them off isn't an option so you just have to bleed. So another 3 hours passed and just before nightfall we finally reached our stop for the night. It was a huge
Jungleman
cave deep in the jungle. I felt really apprehensive about spending the night here as you could already see and hear the bats flying around. Nick sat down and started cooking us up a beef curry from scratch, I was beginnin to like this strange jungle man. So I got my bed set up, which was just a mat and a manky sleping bag that had been given t me. Me and Neils set about finding some wood for a fire and it wasn't long before we had one going. My clothes were soaked and I was hoping to be able to get them all dryed for the next day. We sat about chatting and eating our beef cury. After dinner, neils got out these huge Cuban cigars and I was give a lesson in the fine art of smoking cigars. It was quite surreal sat in a cave full of bats, puffing on this huge cigars with a strange jungle man and 2 Dutch people.

As night fell the jungle came alive with all kinds of weird noises and things fying around. It was only when Nik started telling storie of wkaing up to find elephants and panthers
Leeches
in the cave that I started getting really worried. A few hours passed uneventfully, we all dozed off. i was woken at about 3 am by Neils who said he had seen 3 animals surounding us. I passed it off as his mind playing tricks on him until I saw them for myself. They looked like beavers or something like that but we still don't what they were. We tried to wake Nik our guide, but this man could get into a deep sleep no matter where he was. He muttered somthing about bats then went back to sleep. Myself and Neils had to deal with this ourselves. So we tried toshoo them away but they weren't in the least bit worried about us. We eventually started banging huge logs on the ground and the scarpered, we couldn't get back to sleep. It was then I noticed a really nasty smell everywhere around and on closer inspection of our beds could see that during those few hours of slep we had been shat on by the hundreds of bats that were hanging on the roof of the cave. Seriously it was disgusting and I had to shake my bed to
steps to batu
clean it off. It was getting light by this point and I laid back down, safe in the knowledge the bats had gone somewhere to sleep for the day. We woke again at around 9am and Nik was preparing breakfast. We set off at about 10am and walked through the dense juingle for about 5 hours until we reached our next sleping place which was a wildlife watching hide. As soon as we got there we could here lots of noises of things moving around and Nik shouting that we should all run up the stairs into the hide. As you can imagine I din't ned asking twice and was up the stairs before Nik got there. It turned out to be some wild boars but I think Nik thought it was elephants and he said they can be quite aggresive.

The hide was basically a hut on stilts with no windows but it was a 5 star hotel after that nasty cave. It over looked a clearing which hopefully would enable us to see all manner of wildlife including the elusive elephants that we hadn't yet seen. By the time we got there I was covered in Leeches
Petronas
and had to go outside to rip them all off resulting in lots of wounds with blood pouring out of them, not nice. By this time I had had enough of the jungle and wanted to get somewhere where I could dry my feet(I had wet feet fo the entire time) and where I could have a shower as I was sure I could still smell the bat poo. Nik cooked another excellent meal and we settled down with out torches to look for some wildlife. As night fell, the now familiar sounds of the night started up. lots of frogs and crickets. Then the fireflies appeared floating around in front of us flashing each. It ws a really memorable night as there was also a huge thinderstorm and with the fireflies in was lovely.

At around 1am I went to bed as we hadnt seen any animals, but I couldnt really sleep as the place was infested with rats and we could hear them sqeaking and running around. One of these rats had earlier nicked a slice of bread from plate and ran off and sat in the rafters looking at me eating it. The other problem was
Original Jungle Massive
that the beds were rock hard wood and not wanting to use the bat poo infested mat I had to just sleep on wood. We woke in the morning and I gladly set off for the 45 min walk to meet the boat to take us back to the resort. We eventually got back to the resort and got changed and I through away the clothes I had on as they were beyond cleaning, covered in blood and dirt. I then had a huge meal and went to bed early.

So that was the story of the jungle. A very memorable experience, but probably not one to be repeated. The jungle is a pretty unforgiving place. The only disappointing was not seeing much wildlife, except for a few snakes and lots of bugs. I even went on a night safari the night before we set off on the trek and all we saw was a domestic cat and a snake which I swear was rubber and had been put there for us to see earlier in the day. Oh and of course the leeches which I reckon took about half a pint of blood out of me. I hope
Hide
I never see them again. But it was a great fun and the dutch were great fun and Lionna did surpisingly we considering her huge fear of insects. We parted ways the next day and I am now on the Perhentian Islands http://www.perhentian.com.my/

They are just off the North East coast of Malaysia. I won't write about those now as this blog is way too long and I am sure you have work to do hehe. I got really sunburnt on the first day though and am spending most of my time in the shade and sleeping, life is tough at the moment hehe. Anyway I hope you didn't get too bored of reading this, in fact I don't care as I am using this as a way to try and remember everything that has happened myself.

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Comments

[tony]

dont forget sally and me