Birds at last

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After breakfast I left Kota Bahru to drive to Pulau Banding in Belum. For the first 50km the road meanders through villages in flat, quite pretty countryside, but after the rubber plantation town of Jeli, the east-way highway begins. From here it climbs and descends; it is mainly a one-lane road, although some stretches have uphill overtaking lanes, but from Jeli to Belum it never stops winding in great, sweeping curves. It was the most exhilarating drive I’ve had in years, and it made me realise what a great touring car the Toyota Fortuner is - even given its pick-up truck heritage. Ninety percent of the time I could keep it going at 90-120 kph, some bends needing a drop to 60 or 70, with a few brief hold-ups behind trucks or slower cars. But there is very little traffic really, and this would be a truly amazing road on which to take your Ferrari or Aston Martin for a wild ride.

I got to the Belum Rainforest Resort a little after one. It is a beautifully designed hotel nesting among the trees on a 550-acre island in the middle of the huge, man-made Temenggor Lake. Stunning. But…

The “but” is, it is entirely staffed by (largely) badly trained, inexperienced staff. I doubt there is any experienced hotel management in place, and if so they’ve likely never run an eco-resort in such a wonderful natural habitat. There is, for a start, not a single naturalist on staff. The girl manning the activities desk can barely speak English. And the activity list itself needs a lot of thoughtful work doing on it. If you brought in some Aussie or NZ management, say, with experience in nature hospitality, and a few naturalists, you’d have this place packed to the gills every night, and they could train up the local staff over, say, five years. But, of course, this being Malaysia, it won’t happen. Some Bumi property company called Emkay owns it, and I suspect they are mainly interested in building holiday homes to flog off to affluent urbanites. I could go on……

Later in the afternoon I hired a speedboat and driver to look for birdlife. You can see signs of increasingly exploitation of this beautiful paradise: a slab sided hotel being constructed well above the tree line near the bridge; logging trails winding up through the forest; bare patches where trees have been felled on parts of the lake edge (apparently stopped by the latest Perak State government); a huge Emkay sign emblazoned on the hillside above our resort…and so it goes on.

But it really is a wonderful location. In the couple of hours we were out, we saw two pairs of (probably) Great Hornbills, flying above the trees, a huge flock of at least 100 Wreathed or Plain-Pouched Hornbills flying away off in the distance, a white-bellied Sea Eagle and a large Owl in a tree by the water - most probably a Brown Fish Owl. And we heard the distinctive barking sound of a Wrinkled Hornbill. The peak season for hornbills is apparently May, while from November through March large flocks are seldom seen.

We were treated to a beautiful stormy sunset returning to the resort, and got soaked in a heavy rain squall - a wonderful sight, even if a little chilly! I dried off in my room before having a passable dinner in the main lodge.

I left the room about seven-thirty in the morning to look for birds around the resort grounds. There were lots of calls to be heard, but the birds proved largely elusive apart from many Yellow-vented Bulbuls. I did see and photograph another Bulbul that I later identified as the Red-eyed; and saw a Clouded Monitor for the first time, climbing high up on the trunk of a forest hardwood down near the lake.

Later I had breakfast on the balcony of the café, watching Black-naped Orioles flying in to feed on a fruiting tree, and then caught up on photo processing and emails before leaving at 12.45pm for Taiping. The first part of the drive was every bit as good as yesterday but I hit flat land all too soon and then it was a good fast road to south of Grik. I took a back road from here that twisted and turned through beautiful forested hills (and managed to glimpse a Banded Leaf Monkey hurtle across the road in front of me). I got lost a few times and very nearly ran out of petrol. Fortunately I came across a one-pump station in a kampong and when I asked the owner to “fill up” he nearly fainted. He was clearly more accustomed to putting a litre or two of petrol in 50cc motorbikes, and he commented on how large the Fortuner’s tank was - I even heard him telling a couple of girls who arrived on a 50cc that I had filled up at a cost of over RM100 - probably his biggest single sale of the year!

Eventually I got to Taiping around three, and drove around looking for a hotel. The first I tried, the Furama, was a bit too utilitarian given that I thought I would spend a couple of nights here, and eventually I found the Seri Malaysia, an adequate two to three star job just by the Lake Garden and the prison.

I dumped my bags in the room and went straight back out with binoculars and camera to the Lake Gardens. Maxwell Hill, a few kilometres away, is the wettest place in Peninsular Malaysia, and it was looking like Taiping itself may be the second wettest. Dense black clouds drifted across the sky interspersed with rare patches of grey. It drizzled on and off and I could not walk far without risking an absolute drenching. So, instead, I spent an hour or so driving very slowing round the lake gardens and some of the adjacent roads, stopping for brief forays whenever the rain eased off. I managed to see quite a few birds this way - including some Oriental Magpie Robins, a first for me. The Lake Gardens are perfectly lovely, the trees richly green and dripping with moisture, mist patches hanging over the lake, families fishing under umbrellas, mynahs digging in the grass for insects, aromas of damp vegetation and tropical flowers.

Later I drove around Taiping town, never having been here before. It is ethnically very Chinese, with only a handful of Indians and Malays to be seen (most of them hanging out or fishing in the Lake Gardens). The town is quite busy, but apart from a smattering of new-build mini-malls, and a few chain stores and restaurants, most of it looks like it hasn’t changed in fifty years except for more peeling paint, more mildew, more faded shop signs. Having said that, there are some lovely buildings on the outskirts of town including Malaysia’s oldest church and oldest prison. I liked it all very much, funnily enough.

Back at the Seri Malaysia I tried to make up my mind what to do the next day, dealt with my emails, and ate Taiping laksa and ice kachang at what amounted to a food stall in the hotel grounds.

I was up early yet again, and after a bit of desultory papaya (the watery “orange juice” was execrable) and a bowl of congee, I went back to the Taiping Lake Gardens. What a difference a sunny morning can make! Heavy cloud was still hanging over Maxwell hill, but the rest of Taiping was relatively clear, and the light was as it only can be in the tropics for the first couple of hours after sunrise. Early morning joggers and groups of Tai Chi practitioners were out in full force. I decided these are perhaps my favourite recreational gardens in the world - certainly in the top two or three.

I spent a leisurely couple of hours meandering around the lake. There was plenty of bird life - much of which I heard rather than saw. But I did get some good close up views and photos of a lone white-bellied Sea Eagle, saw Houdini-like Chinese Pond Herons for the first time (completely buffish brown when at rest, but very white when flying), and managed to spot an elusive Yellow Bittern deep in a reed bed. Plus several Long-tailed Shrike and a Black-crowned Night Heron. All new to me, so a successful walk as well as being immensely enjoyable. For a newbie, it was actually the best birding spot of the trip so far.

After an early, light lunch, I drove an hour northwest of Taiping to Kuala Gula Bird Sanctuary. The journey was another reminder of how maps of Malaysia are merely descriptive approximations; yesterday this resulted in me getting lost a couple of times, today the map made the route look more complicated than it was, and I breezed it.

I arrived at the “Park Headquarters” for Kuala Gula to find that the attached chalets were being renovated, and that the information office was, for some reason, also closed - I imagine it had been like this for months. Outside the office was a notice board with a few faded press cuttings about the Sanctuary, and a copy of its brochure: all in Malay only, of course. Bugger the tourist promotion effort. No map of how to see the place, in fact no useful information at all, even if it had been in English. Kuala Gula is a mangrove and estuary mud flats reserve, so it is not just a matter of wandering off down a path into the forest. In fact, there are no paths whatsoever from the headquarters. I happened to have with me a printout of an article I had found on the web (from the Malaysia Nature Society if I recall correctly) that mentioned two routes. One trail referred to a landmark that appears to no longer exist, but I managed to find the “The Bund Trail” at the back of Kuala Gula kampong about a kilometre away, a village where they looked at me as if I were from outer space. No-one spoke enough English to understand that I might be interested in renting a boat so I drove at a walking pace as far as I could down the trail, getting out to listen and watch every few minutes. Unfortunately, I was expecting some mud flats and shore birds, but neither could be viewed from this trail. It was all very frustrating, and the sort of things that still maddens me about Malaysia, even after thirty years of experience...

Still, I saw quite a few birds, and the area was quite interesting - especially the squalid village of largely ancient wooden houses extended with corrugated iron and plastic - a typical Chinese working village. In this case, the whole village sat on empty cockleshells, and the tiny pink cockles inside were dried and used - I assume - in some kind of balachan paste. A large new temple in the middle, a couple of very smart green corrugated swiftlet barns, and a few brick houses were all that indicated I hadn’t been transported back to the 1960’s.

I returned to the hotel at sunset, not that you could see it since the late afternoon weather had turned out like the day before - heavy dark cloud cover and intermittent rain.
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