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Published: June 14th 2013
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For my Grade 6 Excursion week we went to Taman Negara jungle in Malaysia. First we took a flight to Kuala Lumpur, and then a 5 hour bus trip (it would probably take 3 hours 45 minutes by car) to Kuala Tahan. On the way there, we ate at a Chinese Restaurant in Kuala Lumpur. Then we took a small boat trip across the Tembling River to the
Mutiara Tamen NegraResort and we were assigned our cabins.
The next day we went on a long hike up to 448-meter-high Bukit Teresek and went down to a canopy walk. The canopy walk was about 500 meters and went quite high above the forest floor and had magnificent views of the surrounding rainforest and the Tembling River. The whole hike including getting to the canopy walk was about 2km roundtrip and took about 45 mins. I recommend doing the canopy walk but I don’t recommend the hike up Bukit Teresek (unless you like strenous hiking) because it is very long with lots of stairs (around 300 meters vertical) and the views are ok but are about as good as the canopy walk. I saw some cool animals in the jungle like a family of wild boars,
monkeys, small deer and a large moth about 0.5 meter wide. The rainforest guide told us this moth only had one day to live which is kind of sad. One monkey was pretty smart and was trying to press the doorbell of a cabin. At night, the monkeys were yelling all over the place. But we didn't see any snakes or any tigers, partly because our group of students were kind of loud and probably scared all the animals away. I think if we went on with smaller group, you might see some more animals.
We also went on a boat trip to a place where you see fish. But there were no fish because it had a rained a bunch and the river was muddy. The fish don't like muddy waters so they went downstream and there wasn't a fish to be seen. But the boat ride was cool because the trees' branches created a dense tunnel, the trees were really tall, about 25 feet high, some of tallest trees I've seen because they are old growth, around 100 million years old.
On Wednesday, we went to an Orang Asli settlement via boat. The settlement was made out of folded
palm leaves tied (by leaves) to sticks/poles. Most of the people there had clothes but a few had only white underwear which kind of looked diapers. We learned that they made fire by rubbing a vine against wood which created some fire and that they cooked their rice in bamboo. The Orang Asli tribe are nomadic and are traditional hunter gatherers. They use a poisoned blow pipe to hunt animals that paralyzes their prey for about 3-5 minutes. They mainly target tree animals like monkeys because they fall down to the ground and that's what kills them. The poison doesn't work as well on ground animals because if it eats a lot of dirt, the dirt neutralizes the poison. The Orang Asli are also a superstitious people. When someone dies, they hang them on a tree across the river because they believe spirits can't cross rivers. If too many people die, then they move their village. The children of the Orang Asli don't go to school. This is partly because the Orang Asli live a very traditional life, different from modern Malaysia. Also, the Orang Asli are not Muslim like the rest of Malaysia. The Orang Asli chose to live their traditional life as they have for centuries because they don't want their culture to disappear. For example if their kids went to the school, they would become modern and settle in the town and their tribal village would become depopulated and eventually disappear. I think it's good for the Orang Asli to live like this because their lifestyle doesn't put a strain on the natural resouces and they don't need much (unlike us).
Then we visited the Kuala Tahan Primary School in the town. The school showed us a traditional Malay Wedding, a traditional dance, there Martial Arts, and the games they usually play at recess. We each brought a gift for one of the kids. The girls all wore headscarves and around 25% of the boys wore a hat because they are Muslim. It was two stories and the classrooms were on an open air hallway. I am not sure if the classrooms were airconditioned. But it was like my school in some ways because they had computers, lived in a town, and they had soap in their bathroom. The bathrooms were pretty clean, they probably cleaned them up before we came. The kids played some of the same games that we play at our school. They also had this game that my Mom has from Africa, a board with holes and little beans, although in this case it was factory-made not carved out of wood. Also, the rules were different from my Mom's African game but it looked the same.
That night we had a dance party back at our resort. Everyone took their shoes off and later that night, when some kids put their shoes back on, they got stung by wasps hanging out in their shoes. Somehow, that evening a horde of wasps descended onto our resort and some went into our cabins and laid eggs. Overnight, wasps had laid a million larvae in our cabin. My cabinmates panicked and sprayed the whole cabin with toxic Deet. Luckily, I didn't get stung. I was very annoyed about the toxic deet because it says clearly on the back of the deet not to spray it indoors. Luckily, we were leaving that day so I didn't have to smell the Deet.
On Thursday, we took the long drive back to Kualu Lumpur.
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