Malaysia: One too many times

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This post is being put up a bit late, to be Honest i wasn't going to even bother writing one for the Malaysia leg of our trip due to how badly it fell apart, but hey I'm sure someone will get some amusement out of it!

I have visited Malaysia many times over the past few years and one place i always seem to return to is Taman Negara National Park, it is located about four or five hours north of Kuala Lumpur. There is a lot to be found in the park, there is even still a healthy population of tigers though seeing them is not very likely (I did find a footprint back in 2013). Unfortunately over the years all the trails around the park headquarters have been turned into boardwalks, probably to accommodate all the rich tourists staying at the resort doing their "jungle adventure". So its really best to venture as far from the headquarters as possible in my opinion.

Our plan was to spend four nights at Taman Negara and one of those were to be spent in the Kumbang hide, which is a great place to see wild Tapir, however This is not how it turned out.

The night before we were meant to leave Cohan decided to get into a drunken fight with the pavement… the pavement won, which had Cohan waking up the next morning to a rather sore knee and left limping for the next few days. If that wasn't bad enough he was then locked out of his bank account while trying to transfer money, by this time it was starting to get late so we just decided to head off with what little money we had on us. Its fairly straight forward to get to Taman Negara, you take either the train or Monorail to Titiwangsa, go across the road to the Pekeliling Bus Station and catch a bus to a small town called Jerantut (costs RM18 and takes about three hours) once at Jerantut you can either take the local bus the rest of the way to Kuala Tahan (a small town just across the river from the park entrance) or take a boat. The bus is an hour and the boat ruffly three hours. By the time we arrived in Jerantut we had missed the 12pm bus and the next one wasn't till 5pm, but luckily we were able to split a taxi with a French couple who were also heading for Taman Negara. The last Three times I've visited the park i have stayed at a small place right on the river called "Tembeling River View" though due to last years floods it had been washed away, we did manage to find a place just up from the river but the price was quite steep, RM70 for a Twin room with air-con (which didn't work the first night cause of a power cut!)

After putting our bags down we headed across the river and into the forest, theres a nice swimming spot about fifteen minutes from the headquarters so we decided to go for an afternoon swim. On the way back Cohans leg really started giving him grief and it seemed every steep was making it worse, it then dawned on us there is no way he was going to make it to the hide the next day so we had to make the hard decision and call it off. This didn't bother me to much as i had already stayed in the hide a few years back but it was a bit of a let down for Cohan.

The next day was just spent walking the easy trails and birding around the headquarters, it produced a few nice species such as Black-bellied Malkoha and Black and red Broadbill. Though with money getting very low we could really only afford one more night so it was back to the City, Yay…

I shouldn't be to down about it, at least i was lucky enough to be on holiday and once we arrived in Melbourne we had A few days to do some last minute birding, which got us our main target species for Australia, Superb Lyrebird.

All in all it was an amazing trip, now to plan the next one!

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