In the hope that I can finish all my stories before I get back, I am writing this from my iPhone. Currently I am sitting in a nice restaurant on Koh Phi Phi in Thailand, together with Anatole (Germany) and Daniela (Argentina). But no stories about the here and now just yet; first Taman Negara, the oldest jungle in the world.
After my (too) short stay in KL I left with a bus to Taman Negara. I generally don’t like arranged packages but since I had already ‘lost’ a day travelling via KL and it was public holiday I bought a package which included transportation, two nights and breakfast, to avoid any further delays. The trip was quit amazing: bit by bit the surroudings got more densely vegetated as we were slowly approaching the jungle. After a trip of 5 hours we exchanged the bus for a very narrow, long river boat. From there it was 2 more hours following the river upstream seeing nothing but trees and the odd ‘Orang Asli’ settlement. For four nights I stayed in Kuala Tahan, from where I started my hikes.
In the hostel that I was staying I met a group of Scandinavians that were planning to make an overnight hike into the jungle. I was glad to join them as these hikes can only be done with a (quite expensive) guide. The first day we did a day hike to a walkway through the jungle canopy, which reached heights of 30m! After that some of us went on for another 3 hours to hike to ‘the Bat cave’. What a great experience! The cave was quite long but narrow and you had to crawl through water and small holes to reach the end of it. See the pictures for the many bats and the snakes that we spotted 
The next day we left for the deep jungle with our guide, who was one of the original people of Taman Negara. Our group consisted of 3 Icelanders, 2 Swedes, a Canadian, a German, a Welsh guy and myself. From the start it was clear why we needed the guide: the paths were hard to see, and where they were there were enough unmarked junctions to get me lost in 10 minutes. Two hours into our hike it started raining, which really made the rainforest come to life, what a sound! The big tropical raindrops falling on the leaves and on the ground not only made an incredible noise, but also brought out the leeches. The type of leeches you find here are brownish, thin and about an inch long (2.5 cm). You sometimes see them standing on the ground supporting themselves on their rear end while moving their front around like a periscope to attach themselves to any passer-by. I found that they are pretty good at climbing up and into your shoe, biting straight through your socks to get to your blood. Luckily it doesn’t hurt or itch when they bite, but since they sometimes do carry diseases we tried to take them off as soon as we saw them.
With everything but our covered backpacks soaked we arrived at the cave where we would spend the night. The Elephant Cave as it was called is at times used by elephants to shelter from the rain, though there weren’t any now. Dali -our guide- quickly had a fire going so we could make our food and dry our clothes. After a good meal and some cave exploration we had a good night sleep.
Before we left on our trip we were warned that it was flower season which meant butterflies, wasps and bees. This became very clear to us on our lunch break on the second day. We had found a nice place along a stream where we could eat and take a swim. Within no time the butterflies had discovered our shoes, and the bees settled on our drying shirts. On my shirt alone there were 30+ bees. Although the swimming was nice and bee free, we shortened our break because of the bees. We had planned to stay an extra night in a hide where we could watch wildlife at night but as we were told that this place was also teeming with bees, we decided to shorten our trip by a day. A short boat trip brought us back to downstream to Kuala Tahan, where we spent our last night in the jungle.
Since this was my first time in the jungle, I really enjoyed my stay here. We may no have spotted any tigers or elephants, but the leeches and the dense forest with hard to find paths made it a great success!
For pictures of bats, snakes, caves and leeches see below.
) and around the 27th I will be heading to Zurich. I’m glad the weather is so good here: 24 Celsius makes it much easier to readjust!
