Activity Summary
Saturday 15th October - Day 44
Travel from Cameron Highlands (Tanah Rata) to Taman Negara (Kuala Tahan)
Sunday 16th October - Day 45
Taman Negara ‘half day’ tour
Taman Negara hike - route 1, 3, 4, half way to 19 (Teras waterfall)
Rapid shooting (boat) river ride
Orang Ali village
Summary
Taman Negara national park was exactly as expected. Dense forest with some great hiking routes, the harder ones requiring guides most likely due to the wildlife risk. Our day hike tour was a perfectly adequate amount of time to see and do most things available in the park as Tanah Rata where everyone stays has very limited things to do or quality food.
Accommodation
Liana hostel - 2 nights - £5.50/n/p
About as basic as a hostel will get but served us well. The hostel appears to be made much like a pre-fab with a tin roof but there are only 8 rooms so it was quiet enough. The communal bathroom and showers were more exposed to nature with a whole host of mozzies frequenting these parts. Luke’s love handles got a nice nibbling on the last morning, having not been bitten once in the jungle. However the cost of the accommodation absolutely offset the expensive jungle tour.
As expected, without aircon the rooms are absolute ovens and with air con it become very very cold. We couldn’t quite get the balance but through no fault of the hostel. Fortunately we didn’t have to share The two empty bunk beds in the room with anyone else.
Travel
TO
Tanah Rata hostel -> [minivan] -> Jerantut [change minivan] -> Kuala Tahan -> [walk] -> hostel
Diary
The minibus to Taman Negara left at 8.30am and picked us up directly from the hostel. The ride was pretty aggressive and we both were unable to do anything on this bus productive (such as writing the blog) so basically listened to audio books, fell asleep and then were jolted awake after falling all over the place for the 5 hour journey. There was a short stop in Jerantut to change minivans which have us some time to nosh on some dhal and roti’s (delicious). The only sad part being we were told the wrong time to be back so rushed our lunch when Luke could’ve demolished another couple rotis.
Once in Kuala Tahan main town, we had a short walk over the riverside and our hostel. Checked in and basically just slumped after feeling so tired. We forced ourselves out for a coffee at one of the riverside floating restaurants (which wasn’t good at all), booked our day tour for Sunday and then spent the rest of the day hiding away from the glaring sunshine and booking many a flight to Singapore and New Zealand. Not fun but needed doing as the prices were rocketing up.
Having had a productive afternoon we went for dinner at Kuala View restaurant for some banging fried rice and noodles.
The tour started at 9.30am but sadly we chose the most hopeless tour operator in the village and she got the time wrong. We were ready to go at 9am so ended up having to wait a little. We met our tour group of 4, all German (two friends and a couple) where we again found out about the inability of the tour operator - we had looked to go on a night safari the night before but were told it wasn’t running when clearly it was. Absolute moron.
The walk started off by getting a ferry boat across the river and paying entrance fee (MYR1 each) and a camera fee (MYR5) before gently sauntering through routes 1 and 3, stopping frequently as the guide (Zam) gave us information about the forest. He was good crack throughout.
Route 4 is the canopy walk which fortunately was open despite the rain the night before. The walkway itself felt more like a tame go ape course but was cool to be that high in the trees although there wasn’t much else to see.
We met the tour guide at the bottom of the route and then began the harder part of the hike, moving away from the boarded walkway to mud, roots and scrambling. It was incredibly warm so everyone was dripping in sweat that refused to dry but that’s just part and parcel of it. One of the German girls however should not have been on this walk. She was unfit and incredibly slow so the whole pace of the walk was a painful trudge that felt more like the seven dwarfs marching off to work in the mines (in Luke’s opinion). Luke spoke to the guide about the pace and he said it was possibly the slowest walk he’d done and his knees were hurting because of this. The walk itself however was pretty cool - it involved a lot of ascent and descent, scrambling around various obstacles and at one point effector abseiling down a hill face. Zam was sharing an abundance of stories of encounters with various animals; once seeing and fleeing a tiger that tracked them for 2 hours (apparently they smell terrible), a couple weeks ago was faced with wild elephants and had to run, one time with a honey bear and various other ‘fudge me’ moments. Very early on in this walk however he said he could smell an elephant that was close, immediately dropping his sarcastic tones and becoming incredibly alert. This really shit Nicola up but fortunately for us we did not cross one but really did give hammer home that it wasn’t risk free at all.
We stopped off for lunch at the side of the river having been given a prepared box of rice and egg. One of the German girls at this point had to pry off two leeches and a lighter was used to great effect (although EVERYONE has a different opinion on what’s effective).
Post lunch we continued the walk and what appeared to be an increased leech onslaught. Nicola was effective in stopping 5 leeches just before they started crawling into the top of her boots and Luke smashed one on his foot against a rock and picked one off his leg before it could make its way through his matted leg hair (good spot from Nicola).
We arrived at a river crossing where we were directed to just keep walking upstream by ourselves as 2 of the 4 people in the rest of the group started feeling ill. We were wholly confused about what was going on but continued plodding along by ourselves anyway (would have much preferred the guide showing us the way). We were reassured to find that another tour group was chilling in the Teras waterfall but given we had completely left our group we had absolutely no idea how long we were supposed to be there. We opted for a quick lower leg dip rather than full blown swim and then continued back to the rest of the group.
Reunited we walked a couple minutes downstream to the Tembeling River. We were due to be picked up earlier in the afternoon by our boat to go ‘rapid shooting’ but as we were so slow we missed our slot and then had to wait for it to come back so sat around chatting and throwing particular leaves like they were a cross between a crossbow and paper plane.
With the boat finally arriving, we ended up sitting at the back of it which turned out to be the worst place. Bombing it down the river while sitting under the waterline meant we got absolutely soaked in the 10 minute ride down river to the point where Luke ended up having to use the bucket behind him to start bailing water.
Having been continually slapped around by the river we were happy to arrive at an Orang Ali local village where we were given a demonstration in how to use rattan branches to start fires and prepare and shoot poison darts for hunting. Both of us were terrible at this.
Sensing rain, Zam directed us back to the boats and the last part was far more gentle back to our hostel. Absolutely shattered, we spent the evening trying not to go to bed at 6pm and went right back to the same restaurant as the night before.
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