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Published: August 15th 2009
We had planned to reach Taman Negara by the Jungle Railway that runs funnily enough though the jungle from Tumpat to Gemas. We'd read that it would involve an early start to catch it but didn't realise that we'd need to be up for 04.18 to get it! We were quite used to these stupidly early starts though so booked ourselves 2 tickets from Wakaf Bharu to Jerantut which is the jumping off point for further transport to Taman Negara. Best of all the tickets were a mere RM15 each (£2.55).
Because of the early start we needed to find a room in Wakaf Bharu for the night and struck gold here when we found the Wakaf Bharu Garden Guesthouse which faces the train station and is owned by the uber friendly Yan Eng. As part of your welcome to the guesthouse you are provided with fruit and teas, this plate of fruit included the infamous Durian which we hadn't tried yet so here was the perfect opportunity! Dale went first and his screwed up face didn't fill Sophie with enthuiasm but after a few more mouthfuls he got used to the cheesy, foul taste with the avacado texture and
quite enjoyed it. Sophie didn't think it was so good after sampling a mouse sized bite and refusing to eat any more.
We didn't actually meet Yan Eng until the evening after we'd returned from the local Satay shop. Already stuffed from copious sticks of cheap satay he proceeded to make us feel right at home by chatting away and giving us bowlfuls of fruit from his garden. He really was a friendly guy and we had a great night learning all about his travels whilst watching Alien vs Predator 2 eating melon & rambutans! He even slept on the floor outside our room so he'd be awake to let us out the door at 04.00 and handed us a bag full of rambutans for our journey. This guesthouse is highly recommended if you are ever this way!
At 04.18 on the dot the train pulled in and we found our seats only to be penned in by a lady who brought the entire contents of her fruit & veg stall for Jerantut on the train with her. She was not alone in this so we can only assume that this train is the main delivery service for
these ladies to sell their goods which seems quite economical. It is however a real pain when you need to go to the loo and have to step carefully over the mountain of Durain, Manguosteens and Green Beans whilst also trying not to fall out the constantly open door!
Dale really enjoyed the 7 hour journey there and it did go though some spectacular scenery as promised. While he was taking photos of himself hanging outside the door, chatting to the locals and generally making the most of the whole experience, Sophie slept the entire way only waking up about 1/2 hour before they needed to get off at Jerantut at 12.30. As soon as we arrived in Jerantut we were ambushed by the touts and taxi drivers trying to get us to go with them to the pier in Kuala Tembeling which is where you get the boat up to Taman Negara. We hadn't quite decided how we wanted to get there so took the free ride into town and made a decision from there.
We finally decided against the boat trip and chose the reliable and cheap public transport option so took a walk down to
the bus station to check on times for that afternoon. There was a bus leaving at 5pm but the helpful bus boy made a few calls to his friends in the village of Kuala Tahan which is where the Taman Negara accommodation is found. His friend said that most places were already full so the chances of us getting a room at around 7pm when we would arrive were looking slim to say the least. Again we changed our mind and decided to stay the night in Jerantut and get the first bus there in the morning at 05.30am because we really didn't fancy a repeat of the Perhentian Islands scenario. So left with an afternoon in Jerantut we went out to have a look round this place where they advise you to 'stock up on everything' before your trip to Taman Negara.
What exactly you are supposed to stock up on we have no idea because there is nothing here! We looked for a Pharmacy to get some insect repellent.. there wasn't one... we thought we'd go on the internet to try and book a room... we found one internet but it was clearly just for the locals
hidden away down an alley above a shop... it really was very dull. In the end we retreated to our box room to have a sleep before hitting the tiles that evening! No.. needless to say there is even less to do in the evening but we did manage to find a line of nice seafood restaurants where we got a good evening meal before hitting the sack.
In the morning we got the deserted 05.30 bus which took us the 1.5 hours to Kuala Tahan. We arrived just as the sun was coming up and it was predictably quiet. The village is very small so it didn't take us long to find a guesthouse on the outskirts which had a nice room available and we were just glad we'd arrived so early to guarantee a space. This was confirmed when we overhead many conversations over dinner with people commenting on how they'd come on the tourist boats only to find all the rooms full.
As we were there early we made the most of our first day there by setting straight off to the canopy walkway which is set high up in the jungle treetops. It's a
Fungus watch part 1
Sophie took it upon herself to record all the weird & wonderful fungi she spotted along the way.1.5km walk there which gave us a bit of a taster of the paths though the jungle. We'd arrived just after 9am which meant that we'd beaten the crowds by a long way and didn't have to queue for our time up there. The walkway is basically a load of ladders with plywood on top held up by ropes! It swings about quite a lot which is probably the reason that only a few people can go on it at any one time and it took Sophie quite a while to get up the courage to have just one hand on at a time while Dale loved it and skipped off in front!
Having walked the walkway and returned to the village we had the afternoon free so decided to book a tour to visit one of the Orang Asali settlements. We were keen to go here on our own but after getting no joy from the supposed 'Wildlife Department' on where we needed to go we had to book a tour from the tourist office. At 3pm we got a ride in a small boat with 4 others to the settlement which was a little bit less spectacular
than we had hoped! A settlement would describe it perfectly because there were just a small handful of women and children sitting around who didn't seem to be too impressed with the arrival of 4 boatloads of tourists. We are told that the villagers do receive some of the tour money but how true this is we are not sure. Most of the Orang Asali people actually live deep in the jungle living the hunter gatherer lifestyle that they have always known so we figure there must be some reason they endure boat loads of people rocking up every day because they would just move on otherwise.
Whilst in the villlage we got to see some of the men show us how to make fire... without the aid of matches or a lighter that is! It was quite impressive to watch just how easy it is so Dale decided he wanted to have a go too! If he could master this there it would be another SAS skill to add to his belt. He actually did quite well and got the smoke going and a few flames but it all fell apart when he tried to add the tinder
to the wood and it would not light but we both felt confident that wtih a bit of practise he would master this skill perfectly so he was quite pleased with his efforts.
The next thing to see what a display on how to shoot a blow dart.. a device that is still used to this day by these people and very effectively too if in the right hands! We were shown how they record the number of animal kills by putting rings around the 'blower' and shown by the experts how to shoot it at poor Garfield who was used as a target! Like the fire we all got to have a go too with varying degrees of success.. namely the boys trying as hard as they could to shoot poor Garfield and the girls laughing too much to have any chance of hitting anything. It was all quite good fun but we are not sure how well we would fare if we were in the jungle having to hit moving monkey targets high up in the trees so we were glad to leave it to the experts.
We'd come to the jungle with the main aim
of doing a hike though it to one of the hides in the park. After reading a blog on how easily it could be done on your own we stocked up on essentials (food) and set off into the jungle on the 11 - 12km (depending on what map you read) hike to Bunban Kumbang Hide with high hopes of seeing some of the wildlife that makes Taman Negara their home. We didn't expect to see the really exciting Tigers or Elephants but a Tapier or small deer would keep us amused!
The hike there was a nice one, we didn't really see any exciting animals on the way and didn't expect to but we sighted a few squirrels and an unidentified small mammal running across our path and heard lots of groups of gibbons high in the trees in the 6 hours it took us to get there. At one point we got a little worried that we'd taken the wrong path because we hadn't seen a sign for a good few hours and thought we'd have crossed the river on our map by now. Dale was dreaming of a night in the jungle to further test his
SAS survival skills while Sophie just hoped that we would come to the river soon which of couse we did! The river wasn't very high so we crossed with ease and then it was only another 500m to the hide itself which we were more than happy to set our eyes on.
You have to book one of the basic wooden bunks in the hides with the Wildlife Department which we'd done the previous day when the hide had been empty. Sadly we'd also checked how many people were booked in before we'd set off and were told it was full which we just knew was a bad sign. When we arrived there was just one lovely Italian guy there who was spending his 2nd night in the jungle, we chatted quietly to him for a while then set outselves down in silence to try and see some of the famed wildlife visit the salt lick that the hide overlooked.
It wasn't long before we heard a commotion outside and a huge group of people passed by on their way from the Bat Cave to the river. Thankfully they weren't staying but came to have a nosey in
the hide anyway making the most noise they could while they did it much to our dismay. After they had passed through we had about another 1/2 hour of silence before an even bigger group bounded up though the jungle and worst luck they were staying. We made it quite clear we were trying to sit there quietly and some of them recognised this asking if we'd seen anything yet but it was a group of 12 people, mostly teenagers so we quickly realised that the chances of there being silence to see anything from this point on were nil so settled down to eat our tuna mayonnaise sandwiches and cakes.
Led by their guide the group did have the courtesy to set up a fire and eat a short walk away from the hide but this didn't mean silence because this distance seemed to give them the green light to make even more noise than they had in the hide and all we could hear was screaming, shouting and loud laughter from dusk onwards. We persevered with trying to see things until well after the sun went down but only managed to spot some fairies (Sophie's name for
fireflies) and some bats so not very exciting at all. After hearing from the groups guide earlier that you had to be really really lucky to see anything here these days, and the reasons for this were quite obvious, we gave up at 8.30pm and went to bed being lulled to sleep by the screaming and shouting and jungle noises that went on until the very early hours.
We were so annoyed that big tour groups are allowed to basically book out the hides as part of their trips, worse still that the guides don't even care that private people might be there and tell their groups to keep the noise levels down. We left with the feeling that Taman Negara is now being abused and overrun by the tour companies leaving those people who like to do things on their own feel totally excluded and we would not recommend doing this type of thing to anyone coming here. The hike there and back was nice enough, especially as we didn't see a sole for the whole 11km but as for staying in a hide we would say do it but don't expect to get much from it.
In the morning we were awake at dawn after our very early night so set off to make the most of the cooler morning temperatures for our hike back. We found most of the tour group sleeping outside by the river and were dying to jump out and scare them but rose above it and just stepped over them.
We got a scare ourselves when we were walking back and heard a huge animal running though the jungle just in front of us. We couldn't see it but from the noise it made as it went though the bushes we could tell it was quite a size and were even more nervous when we heard it's barking call. With visions of Ko Tao fresh in our minds we were a little worried that a pack of wild dogs would rush out and eat us but the animal was clearly moving away so we relaxed a little. The walk back was animal free too apart from a small frog and a monitor lizard so all in all Taman Negara did not score highly for animal experiences for us which was a shame as we were so looking foward to seeing
at least one thing. A little let down we managed to return to Kuala Tahan in just over 4.5hours which made us quite pleased with ourselves.
We returned to the lovely Durian Chalets and spent the afternoon washing our stinky sweaty trekking gear and generally resting our tired legs. Jungle trekking is really tiring as it's so hot and you are constantly going up and down whilst stepping over the tree root ground so you don't fall over. Well most people manage not to fall over but Sophie took a stumble at one point right into some bushes which amused Dale for the remainder of the day!
With another jungle trek under our belts we headed out of the jungle the following day catching the first bus back to Jerantut then another onto Kuala Lumpur. We were to stay 5 days here whilst we organised our Indonesian visas and were a little bit unsure of how we would fill this because there isn't really 5 days worth of things to do in KL but we managed to fill them nicely.
Lots of our time was going to and fro from the Indonesian, Philippines and Australian embassies.. mostly
by foot which is a lot of walking in 35 degree heat. We got our Indonesian visas with no touble, found out what we needed on the Philippines & Australian visas and then had a few days to visit the multitude of shopping centres that KL feels the need to have.
There really are a lot of shopping centres here, way too many really because most of them are deserted but we enjoyed walking around in their air conditioned comfort whiling away the days until our flight to Indonesia. The biggest and maybe best shopping centre is the enormous Times Square shopping centre which is complete with 6 floors, a cinema, bowling alley and even an indoor Theme Park with a rollacoaster. In our book this was pretty cool and even though we didn't go on the rides we got quite excited that you can have this sort of thing in a shopping centre.
On our final day in KL we decided we really should squeeze in a few of the tourist spots so took a walk to Medaka Square which is home to the largest flag pole in the world, then we walked up to the parks
which was a welcome relief from the busy roads around Chinatown. That evening we went up to have a look at the Petronas Towers by night which is possibly more impressive than by day and Dale never tires of looking at these incredible buildings that Malaysia is very right to be so proud of.
So our time in Malaysia was yet again at an end. With our huge to do list completed we were on our way to our 14th country of Indonesia and were both really excited at what we had planned for here...
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