Taman Negara is one of the worlds oldest rainforests and is also a national park, at over 135 million years of age and has survived two ice ages, seeing the maylasian jungle was somthing simon had wanted to do since he knew we were visiting the country .

we took a bus to a place called jerantut where we got a small motorized canoue down a river into the rainforest , after about 3 hours we arrived at a small muslim village with a few floating cafes where we could arrange a guide and find out where our guesthouse was, the village was on the other side of the river from the national park entrance and we would have to get a boat across and register ourselves in and out.

we booked a guide to take us on a night trek through the jungle hopeing to see lots of animals , we walked to a lookout and saw some deer, well we could see their eyes shining and we saw loods of bugs and spiders but nothing too exciting.

We awoke very early the next morning to the call of prayer coming from the mosque that happened to be slap bang next to our guest house and it was ramadam so the chanting went on for a long time

We went for a trek through the forest visiting a canopy walkway that let us walk over rope bridges suspended about 30 metres up in the top of the trees, and still didnt much wildlife, so we booked a night jeep safari as we were told its the best way to see animals bigger than bugs, and it was, we saw a slow lorris, leopard cats, flying leemas, snakes and other animals

the next day we got our guide to take us to see some bat caves we walked deep in to the forest and arrived at the cave.

it was dark and wet and we had only one torch between the three of us which would of been fine if we could just walk through the cave but we had to climb and crawl through tiny spaces and could only stand up in one cavern in the middle.

the cavern was full of thousands of bats flying about all around us it smelt awful and thousands of bats means a lot of bat droppings and to leave we had to crawl through them about three inches of stinking droppings

We finally came out of the cave and our guide pointed to Emmas leg that had blood dripping from it, she had not cut herself, she had come in to contact with a leech, it had crawled right up her trouser leg. Leeches inject you with a painkiller so you dont feel anything when they bite you it also thins your blood and it doesnt stop bleeding for ages. Simon delighted in taking the mick out of emma for this - not knowing till we got back the cafe that he had one in his shoe and his shoe was full of blood

We got back to the floating cafe stinking of bat droppings and covered in blood and mud with no time to change or wash as our boat to take us back to jerrantut was waiting so we would have to wait, luckily a hotel in jerantut that we got our train tickets from to singapore let us use a room free of charge to clean up and have a rest and wait for the train which was not till 2am

the train, known as the jungle train took 8 hours to reach singapore