Taman Negara

Tomorrow will begin my last week of travel. So I anticipate another 2-4 email updates depending on what I do.

I spent the last 3 days visiting Taman Negara, which is supposed to be one of the oldest rainforests in the world at 130 million years. They have elephants, tigers, rhinoceros, tapirs, and all sorts of funny looking birds. Naturally I saw none of these things. Well, maybe one interesting looking pheasant. I did manage to see a wild boar as it ran away from me maybe 10m ahead of the walking path.

Taman Negara boasts the worlds longest canopy walkway at 500m. While this is true, they really shouldn't be saying it when half of it is closed for maintenance, and it isn't continuous, it's in segments leading from tree to tree (I've never done a canopy walkway before so maybe this is normal). Nevertheless it was neat because some sections were a good 50m off the ground, and they didn't drill anything into the trees so it's just ropes tied around the trees with wooden spacers.

The trees eventually overtake the ropes. Om nom nom

There was a lot of this blue coloured shrub. Makes for nice walkway decorations.

I came across this abandoned shack with two generators. It was like a movie set from any jungle movie with old generators. Neat and creepy.

The trip to Taman Negara includes a 2 hour river ride to the town next to the park entrance. Quite nice, but hard to swallow the price of RM40(~$13) compared to the RM7(~$2) bus ride. ok ok it's still not that much, but when traveling you should spend based on what things are worth inside the country, not what they are worth in your home country.

Some short people stories: I went to buy some mangosteens (a delicious tropical fruit) from a market in Jerantut(the intermediate town everyone stops at on the way to Taman Negara), and the old Muslim woman picked out a bunch of good ones for me since I don't really know what to look for, and after I paid she gave me a few extra fruits of a different kind! A very kind gesture, especially when I already got over 1kg of fruit for RM5 (~$1.70).

For some reason I've encountered a lot of racist people the past week or so. I went for tea with an old Indian Buddhist guy after he sold me a few trinkets (which I'm sure I way overpaid for) and found out he dislikes all Chinese people and would never go there or interact with them in Malaysia. Earlier in JB the French guy I met was saying how he was going to hitchhike to KL, and upon telling the older Malay/Chinese people he was warned to "watch out for the Indians" and don't take rides from them. And finally I met a nice friendly German guy who said how he really tries to avoid Muslim countries and people because of how the Turkish people behave in Germany, and how the maps of Taman Negara he was given were not very good because they were made by Asians.

Oh the people you meet while traveling.