Well, If I remember correctly Taman Negara means national park. It is the first. It also claims to be the oldest continuous rainforest in the world. It certainly is muddy and wet. But then if it was not, it would not be a rain forest. I was not really planning on doing a walk like this, but there was a very nice German couple who I met the night before and they had booked a tour which had a maximum of three people and asked if I would like to join them. So in the end I said yes, over breakfast after sleeping on the idea for the night.
We headed off in the courtesy bus, met our guide by the tourist office, then over the ferry to the Head Quarters of the National Park. Here we were shown the marker of the last big flood (74 meters!) and walked past the various buildings and lots of signs to distant places.
This map completely fooled me. We walked way of the edge of it.
Once out of the headquarters bit we headed off along a forest track. In places it was wide and flat, at first it had quite a bit of board walk, but mostly it was muddy, narrow and wet. In parts we had to cross log bridges, in parts we were perched on above a steep drop into the river with a rope tied between trees, in some places the trees holding up the ropes had fallen over. It was perhaps the hardest walk I have done. But then I was also not 100% on the health side. At times the track was well sign posted. At times it was not. Sometimes it disappeared. I would never have made it all the way on my own. Our guide says the the damage sign had been damaged by marauding elephants.
Our guide explained many things in the forest. We did not see any animals and mostly only head the birds. But we saw lots of plants and small critters.
We crossed lots of bridges. I seem to not have taken any photos of the really scary log bridges with dangling rope handles, but I made it across all of them. If I had been on my own, I would never have made it across the first one.
And of course I took lots of photos of the mushrooms. Our guide did not know much about mushrooms and so was quite apologetic about this.
We now came to a little collection of buildings with a little shop selling can of drink, unchilled straight off the cardboard shipping boxes. I bought a drink. Originally I had thought we were going to do a 4 km walk. We were now at 7.5 km and the water I had brought was not enough. We stopped here for 10 or 15 minutes before heading down a log with steps cut into it. Now let me say, I only got started becuase of the help of our guide. It was totally scary. But I got to the bottom and did not fall off. I do not have a photo from the bottom of the log as I had put my camera in Vera’s waterproof bag.
Billy had spoken of the leaches, the guide book did too. For most of the walk I just carefully walked past them. But at the end, as I neared this camp site, I had become so tired that I got 4 leeches in the space of maybe 20 minutes. I had known that this would happen. I got a few more, like one on my hand when I fell over, but I got them off before they had their feed.
We now wandered up the river a ways. We stopped at a spot that was supposed to be good for resting, but I think that non of the three of us liked it do we went back down stream to where the boats stopped and hopped on a boat. Also once we were past the boats there were lots more tourists, the ones who had come upstream in the boats. This destroyed the tranquillity of the forest.
Before I have the photos of the downstream trip, I’ll show two images. One is taken from the bridge of a boat of tourists heading upstream. The other is taken of the bridge from the boat as we headed downstream.
And then we headed back downstream in our boat. This was a good thing. While I was more tired than the others, I think we all needed to have a rest. They also did a bit of floating down stream with the motor off. We had a man on the front to guide us through the narrower sections like a canoe. And in some parts, I am sure that they moved the stones around to make walls and channels to let the boats through. I’d guess that as the wet increases and the water level increases this is not such an issue.
The main river that we are about to join in the next image, is warm, almost warm enough to shower in. Where as the tributary river was cold. When we reached a point somewhat in front of where this photo was taken the water went from being cold and coloured by tannin (from the recent rains) to warm and coloured by mud.
At the end we called for the courtesy bus and headed back to the traveller’s lodge and our rooms to clean up and have a rest. Daniel and Vera, who had industrial strength and high quality trekking gear managed one leach between the two of them.
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