Teman Negara is a place like few others. Wildly thick vines hang from vines the support a canopy so thick as to be rooflike above the jungle floor. Superfluous adjectives and descriptors come to mind when trying to encapsulate the thicket of jungle that encompasses some of the planet's oldest rainforest. Other adjectives come to mind too. Sweaty, muddy, bloody, uncomfortable and maybe most aptly the three word kicker :"teeming with leeches".
Our route into the national park is via bus then boat. Sadly the bus is late and arrival comes after the boat has already departed on it's three hour journey lazily floating downriver. Compromise and get a minivan with a few Polish geography teachers. Good for a spot of choppy English conversation. Arrive an hour later, still two hours earlier than the fabled boat, though cheated the beautiful views coming in on a waterway winding through the deep jungle. Kuala Tahan is the jump off point for this madhouse. A small town, clinging mercilessly to the river for survival and economic growth. Everything happens on the water here. The town is barely fifty buildings, the economic hub being a mass of floating barges drifting around on the shoreline of the light brown river. Restaurants, tour barges and gear-rental locations abound. Decide to stay at a really basic and cheap hostel which borders the river as well, happily not floating directly on it.
Meet some Brits on the patio, hang out shooting the shit and resolve to make a mission of destroying out bodies and minds at the furthest available hide in the jungle. This is a five and a half hour to seven hour trek through some of the toughest terrain available out here. The kicker is that it's the furthest in the jungle you can wander whilst foregoing the delightfully reassuring company of a guide, which we absolutely intend to forgo. It's now destiny that me, Trouble, and three of our quick witted British friends are going to Bumbun Kumbang, the deepest jungle hut we can stay in.
As epic as this plot seems, it is not to be. The following morning, after extensive packing, repacking, dressing, judging survivability, and re-dressing, the hide is fully booked. This is a massive blow to our five person party, but we send Gill and Andy on to fill the two available spaces. The three straggling remainders of the party manage to book the first beds for tomorrow night, and return our sleeping gear with a promise to come get it the following day. We head back into the jungle to get a practice trek on, see how tough this stuff really gets. We walk a one hundred meter canopy walkway which is surprisingly(and disappointingly) very safe. It affords some views of high up, and some serious army ant swarms, but not much else. Better is the climb up Bukit Teresek, a hill with some sweeping views of the regions size and majesty. Upon descending an Italian couple is enlisted to replace the Brits in an adventure to a murky swimming hole is the fast moving river. After an afternoons trek worthy of a shirt filled with sweat, this watering hole is more than delightful. My passengers resolutely refuse to leave my legs, preferring the warmth of my blood to the relative chill of the river. People constantly point out the vampiric monsters growing fat upon my calves for the rest of the day. People are also constantly confused when receiving the answer that they are a science experiment destined to inform the world of how long a leech will take before naturally leaving a delicious host. Turns out to be a measly three hours or so, in which time they will consume around ten millilitres of blood. All things considered, there are worse animals. Our British companion writes that our party has seen a tiger, and whispers rip through the village, where tiger sightings are rare and exciting. This makes his day.
After the swimming hole, we return sharply to the village and jump on a boat upriver the see the indigenous tribes of the area, first shooting some mediocre rapids and getting rained into a sort of wet oblivion. Shore is reached at the Orang Asli settlement, and depression sets in. These people are basically just in existence as a tourist attraction, and though they have some interesting traditions and features to their culture, it has been heavily destroyed by the advent of a westernised society taking root nearby. Demonstrations of the traditional way to make fire are trumped by the fact that there are empty lighters amongst the garbage which is universally strewn about the village. Demonstrations of the traditional blowpipe and the way to make darts are marred by the all too convenient usage of a swiss army knife (fruit of the rare swiss army tree). Though these put a damper on what was to be a glance into how a people could survive in the jungle, there are highlights. Me and Trouble are the only two foreigners who manage to use the blowpipe accurately, striking the target(helpless teddy bear) directly in the face twice. Even our guide only hit the hand.
We wander the village a little bit, but the inhumanity of wandering into people's homes to photograph the squalor they inhabit is too much for us, and we quickly depart back to the safety of the boat and the promise of a civilization in which we can quietly ignore all the damage we do to those who refuse to partake in our exact method of colonizing the planet. It isn't easy.
Following a short period of dejected showering and some more preparation for the morrow, the mood lightens upon the realization that at this hour the following evening, nothing but the jungle will be around. Resolutions to wake early lead to a reasonably octogenarian hour to retire to bed. Rising alongside the sun glaring in the window and removing the mosquito net, an unreasonable excitement sets in and the trail is begun with vigour after a short breakfast. Outstanding pace through a hellish environment uniquely designed to break human souls is about the only positive to be drawn out of our situation. Around two hours in we meet some fellow travellers heading back the other direction. They inform us of around three and a half more hours of hard trek ahead. This is basically on pace with expectations, though still disappointing to a group of weary trekkers who thought they had been making amazing time though terrain which could ostensibly be used for military training. Trudging on, the path becomes more laden with hills and wet gullies, mud and leeches, rope climbs and slight slopes long enough to test thigh stamina to it's limits. Gratifying in a strange way. Eventually slogging through the final kilometre of nearly exclusively swampy mud holes to arrive an hour under the projected time, finishing in four and a half hours. We are the first to arrive for this evenings sleep and animal watching.
The hide is a large concrete box set atop six sturdy pillars with a metal roof. Four windows, what could at one point be called a bathroom and an array of wooden bunks are the only real elements to the interior. One end has a long bench in front of a wildlife viewing slot looking onto a clearing and water hole. When we arrive, a group of French doctors are stopping to eat lunch with their guide under the cover of the hide. After a quick chat and some noodle sharing on the doctor's part, they depart for the boat back, a mere thirty minutes walk away. Their guide says he can make it back to Kuala Tahan in three hours via the inland route. Challenge accepted.
Others slowly trickle into the encampment, the first and only lone ranger is Tyler, a fellow Canadian and former Carleton university engineer. Small world, this jungle. Perhaps the least prepared trekker all day, looking vaguely traumatized by what just occurred. The decision to wear white pants, which are now various shades of brown and red from mud and blood, is evidence of poor planning. Though my own legs are war-zones, he looks to be suffering. A quick wash up renders into focus a fellow human being, and everyone gets on quite well.
Beds are selected, others arrive, including a very nice Dutch couple and a few Australians who appear to have every intention of talking very loudly and for some time about absolutely nothing of import. One wonders why they couldn't have stayed in Australia and instead chose such an uncomfortable venue for this conversation, but they respond well to demands that they shut the fuck up so no real harms done.
No animals seen, many animals heard. By the time everyone gets to bed a deluge has begun, and the decibel meters slowly reach the levels commonly associated with placing a metal bowl overs one's head and banging it repeatedly with a spoon. Sleep is fitful at best, and the hard wooden beds are not helpful in this respect. Waking up with numb limbs is a common occurrence. Various makeshift pillows adorn the room, no one seems really happy. The following day a trek back via the inland route yields a much flatter, more reasonable trail, but also includes a red herring path which throws us willy nilly into the jungle, causing a half hour wandering game trails in search of a marker. Worries of lord of the flies scenarios begin to cross my mind before finding the main trail again.
Timing is exactly the same back as it is there, disappointingly. Though legs are more sore and becoming lost adds thirty minutes, the pace is still taxing and the path is much easier. Had jungle disorientation not taken it's toll, the time would have been under four hours, highly acceptable for a bunch of Northern Hemisphere dwelling softies.
The jungle has been conquered. No tigers sighted, but Tiger beer is in order.
On time for the trains, split with companions headed divergently to Singapore. Train rumbles into the station, headed directly north into the thicket we just spent a day struggling to escape. After gleaning our lives and limbs in suitable condition for happy existence, it feels almost ironic to board a train headed directly back into it's depths. Alas, thus is life, and happily no derailments take place, though one would have been welcome reprieve from the torturous existence that constituted a night on that train. CIA cold cell treatment is one thing, but when it trundles along awkwardly on rails apparently built to smash passengers up out of their seats at precisely the moment when they are most likely to be asleep, pain takes on new meaning. This was a six and a half hour horror show of wind and misery which due to hearty constitutions and drive to live, we both survived. Trouble fared less well than myself, probably due to the thick fur sweater grafter permanently to my exterior. Upon exiting the train cab, Trouble left his lunch in the local station bathroom and we mounted an illegal cab to the jetty. Much more expensive than expected, always get clarification on prices here, due to the penchant for locals to swiftly change numbers with similar sounds(15 and 50, 18 and 80) into each other. Arrival at the jetty precipitates more projectile from my travelling partner, but a German girl and her Scottish travelling mate are a welcome sight and a spot of conversation ensues, leading to a hostel together after the ferry crossing.
