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Published: February 18th 2006
Water level ran nearly six feet higher the day I traveled up river towards Taman Negara National Park. After a brisk three hour bus ride from Kuala Lumpur, I quickly realized that the Jungles of Malaysia was not the type of place that would have ATM machines on every corner and I’d literally be up shit’s creek without a paddle. Before boarding a glorified canoe with a canopy and a motor, the local booking agent was able to coerce the chef of bus station to give Royal and I a thirty minute ride into town to acquire some cash for the trip.
Ringgits in hand, I began what is normally a two hour ride upriver but took nearly three and a half due to the speed of the current downstream. After waking from my nap aboard the Albatross, I noticed that we had arrived in the sleepy little fishing village that catered more towards hikers than fish. All along the banks of the Jungle, there lined floating restaurant after restaurant serving identical menus of noodles, rice and what they called meat accompanied with the finest canned sodas this side of the Atlantic. It wasn’t until a day after arrival that
I noticed that each and every one of these restaurants were owned by Muslim families because there wasn’t a beer to be had anywhere in town.
I didn’t realize that the river was particularly high but as stated earlier, I did notice that the current was moving exceptionally fast. It was while inquiring at the first hostel we approached that it came to light that they weren’t used to water this high. We were turned down for a room because the owner of the hostel anticipated his entire establishment to be under water by nightfall. Enter Hostel Liana!
As evidenced by the pictures, Hostel Liana was high enough off the water to prevent from flooding but as it turned out, the owners were in fact expecting water to reach the dorm levels but decided to rent us a room anyway. After settling in and enjoying our first meal aboard a bobbing restaurant, the sunlight faded and left no time to enter the park. Our first trek would have to wait for the morning.
Our accommodations weren’t bad if you have a loose definition of bad. The room contained space for 4 but since we were the only
two in the entire place, we had room to spread out. I doubled up my mattress, hoping that two crappy ones could combine into one adequate one. Bad decision. I’m not sure which mattress contained the bed bugs but they had a feast that first night on my arms, legs, chest and forehead. I thought I had broken out with the chicken pox in the morning because I had so many bites all over my body.
In the Jungle, I figured that there was no better way to get over a bad night’s sleep than a good day trekking. The trekking that we did that day was good despite being limited to only two trails out of fifty. The river had run another four feet higher totaling nearly ten feet high and flooding nearly all of the trails in the entire park. There was only one main trail open and another branching trail heading up to a peak overlooking most of the valley of Taman Negara.
The Canopy Walk is the bread and butter of Taman Negara and for good reason. I kept trying to make parallels to the Valley of the Giants in Western Australia that I
had traversed only a few weeks before but the only similarities were that we were walking around at the top of the trees. This canopy walk was far more unsettling, far more dangerous and far more inexpensive to visit that Aussie. To begin, You have to take a water taxi across river to the park and then you get a good little hike in prior to being hit up for 5 ringgit which is less than two US dollars. The walkway is no wider than an average man’s shoulders and its suspended from the trees above rather than built up from the ground.
You were directed not to walk any closer than 5 meters behind the person in front of you and for damn good reason! This walkway shook more than a bobble head doll having a seizure! Because the park below was situated on a hill the distance to the ground ranged anywhere from about 15 meters where you could jump off and survive with minor scrapes to 100 meters where you could not even see ground. When precise measurements aren’t available, I reverted back to my childhood days when you could judge the distance of anything by
how long it took for your spit to hit the ground. Below two seconds and you could fall or jump with no real danger. Between two and five seconds you are bound to hurt yourself but would likely survive. Anywhere between five and seven seconds and your chances of surviving are based on how lucky of a person you are and above seven seconds is essentially imminent death. Barring a few exceptions, the majority of this walkway was between seven seconds and unknown because you couldn’t see the landing on my childish spit test.
From the Canopy Walk the only direction to go was up towards Bukit Terisek which held a pretty breath taking view of the park. At the top of the hill I met an American girl who had her socks off and was picking at her skin. I watched her strange behavior until she noticed the look on my face, one of mild disgust but more intrigue, and offered the information that she was picking leaches off her feet. Now at the Park office, there were a few people talking about getting leaches the previous day but that was only because they needed to wade through
waist high water in order to return home. They were caught in the rainstorm that flooded the trails and had no option but to get wet. This information had prompted me to put on my bandana, tuck in my shirt, tuck my pants into my socks and cover just about any part of my exposed skin that might look appetizing to a leach. I had already been dinner for bed bugs, I didn’t need to become lunch for some leaches.
This girl however, didn’t wade through any waist high water, she had simply walked around some puddles attempting to find a way around the blocked trails. Two leaches in her shoes and another few on her legs. She was wearing shorts with ankle high socks so I could understand how she would be susceptible to some blood suckers but that didn’t prevent me from having a minor freak out session worrying if I had already been attacked. With a few hour tramp behind us, it was time to head for lunch and a beer, though I would learn no beer was served anywhere at hand for a reasonable price.
No leaches on my body and the end of
the sunlight rapidly approaching, It was time for a cup of hot Mile, (Asian version of Yohoo) and a good book. I’ve temporarily given up on Anna Karenin because I simply couldn’t get my hands around the story. Exemplary writing but its of a time and place that I know absolutely nothing about, 19th century Russian Aristocracy. With that complaint in mind my next novel choice makes about as much sense as buying a snow cone during a blizzard but Memoirs of a Geisha had my complete attention. I chose this novel mainly because of it was a debut novel written by a first time author and because nearly every bookshop I walked into had three billion copies all over the store. I Geisha in about three days and would recommend it to anyone interested in a fictious version of Japanese culture prior to WWII.
Day two held an extended sleep in the morning due to tremendous downpours and another new set of bedbug bites. I slept in my sleeping bad attempting to remedy this annoying nocturnal insect situation but did no more than introduce a new environment for them to enjoy a meal. A full day of internet
and novels underneath torrential rainfall gave way to a minor excursion of the Resort located within the park at sundown. It was during this twenty minute walk that I must have attracted my new leach buddies but I didn’t notice that I had parasites in my shoes until the end of the night over eight hours later.
I may have gathered the leaches during the night walk we took to discover some interesting insects of the jungle that night, but I doubt it. We saw deadly poisonous snakes, taranchlas the size of my hand, tree mice, stick bugs and many more, but it’s the leaches that take the day as the most dominant life form.
My socks had been soaked through with blood so much that the soles of my shoes were red. The real scary part about finding out that I had leaches on my feet wasn’t the blood dripping off my socks but the fact that neither of the leaches, one from each foot, was to be found anywhere. I find it hard to believe that a leach is smart enough to realize that its had enough and crawl back out of my sock and back into
the jungle. Royal offered the explanation that I must have crushed the leaches by simply walking around all day but there were no traces of leach anywhere at all. To say I was completely freaked out about the situation would be an overstatement until the thought occurred to me that maybe something had crawled into my skin and into my feet? This was not the most opportune time for Hostel Liana to run out of running water. No shower to cure my bed bug bites and no way to wash out my leach sucked feet. A dry scrub was the best I could manage until my exodus from the jungle the following day.
The morning of the third day it was apparent how just how high the river had been. Some of the pictures can articulate better than my words but it was the actions of the owners of the hostel that led me to believe that they feared the water would reach higher levels. The maids came back to work cleaning the hostel and other guests began arriving. We hitched a ride on the 9am boat down river and put the jungle behind us.
Next stop, the Pernehitian
Islands…
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M. Iacono
non-member comment
Spiders!!!
Yo John! I thought I would be the first to add a comment on this one. Spiders freak me out man!!!