TAMAN NEGARA
Leaving Melaka, we took a bus to Kuala Lumpur, crossed the city by LRT metro, and hopped on another bus to Jerantut, a small town on the outskirts of Taman Negara National Park (ie National Park National Park) which is apparently the world's oldest rainforest. We stayed in our cheapest hostel so far in Jerantut (£3) and had dinner of steamed tilapia fish in the market managing to avoid the KFC which seems to be a ubiquitous sight on any Malaysian high street no matter how big the town or village. We made sure we ate at the Chinese stalls because the Muslim ones couldn
Early next morning we got a bus to the village of Kuala Tahan, home of the park headquarters on the banks of the Tembeling river. We found some cheap accommodation across the river from the jungle and a longboat ferried us across to the other side where we spent the day trekking through the trees and listening to the wildlife. We say listen as most of the animals proved pretty difficult to spot apart from the occasional beating wing or rustle in the bushes, but then we saw a group of playful greyish white monkeys scampering around from branch to branch. Sadly we didn
Next day it took us three buses to get to Kuala Lumpur via Jerantut and Temerloh but we were very excited as Kuala Lumpur meant seeing Dunc
't sell alcohol. After dinner we got chatting to one of the stall owners who seemed to have an uncanny knack of counting to ten in any language possible. He regaled us with Malay, Mandarin, Burmese, Hindi, Thai and Indonesian to name but a few so we taught him Spanish in return.'t see any more monkeys as clearly they have got wise to the fact that humans have built the world's longest tree canopy walkway nearby. Nevertheless the walkway was great fun as we clambered across a series of planks and DIY ladders strung up between the trees high above the ground giving us a bird's eye view of the jungle. We sweated our way deeper into the jungle including hiking up and down some steep bukits or hills, passing huge ants, beautiful butterflies and two blue/red pheasants, although regrettably we didn't make it to the brilliantly-named hide of Bumbun Kumbang. Despite this we felt that we had really earned our dinner later on at one of the floating restaurants moored at Kuala Tahan. At dusk we watched jealously as a group headed into the jungle to spend the night in one of the hides in the expectation of seeing deer, tapir and potentially elephant or leopard. However, we were much less jealous later on as thunder and lightning hammered down on us as we sheltered in the warmth of our room. 's old university friend, Modge, and his family.