Teman Negara

Kris - firstly really really sorry for the long delay. we have been so busy but the internet has been really expensive too! Anyway - TAMAN NEGARA (or national park).  we travelled from Kl to a small village called kuala tembelling from which we had to take a 3 hour boat trip, when you need the toilet the relaxing journey only lasts so long, eventually it starts to hurt...

El- Who are you kidding Kristopher? You were asleep for the majority of the journey! It was lovely though and eventually we arrived at Kuala Tahan which was a place to base yourself while you go off and do all the little Jungle activities (calling it a national park is a slight understatement!!) Anyway we booked a Jungle Safari for the first night, but before that we wanted to organise a two day trek into the Inner Jungle where you spend a night in a cave. So we turned up all enthusiastic ready to sort the whole thing out when the woman told us no one is booked onto that trip for the forseeable future, so you can either pay an arm and a leg for the guide to take just you, or you can find a couple more people yourself...cue Kris...

Kris - yes well i am not stingy but i was not going to pay what they were asking. my mission, recruit  at least 2 more people to reduce the price to the minimum fee.  it took all of 20 minutes haha, first i saw some guy walking off into the distance past the restaraunt we were eating at (The family restaraunt which, by the way is lovely). i chased him over the stoney riverside and introduced myself, the convo went a little like this...

Me:"hey mate are you on your own?"

New Guy: "Yeah..." (looking worried)

Me: "sorry, my names kris and me and my girlfriend were wondering if u want to come trekking and sleep in a cave with us"

New Guy: "erm...yeah go on then"

El- And that is how we met Doug!! (see further blogs for more on Doug lol) Anyway...so Doug came and talked to us for a bit and then, lo and behold, another young guy on his own walks into the restaurant wearing a Burnley shirt, so Kris was like talk to him! So I started the whole "ha de ha I'm a blackburn fan" and he was like "Nice knowing you" etc etc and then before you know it we drop in the offer of spending a night in a cave with me, Kris and Doug. Obviously he accepted and so it was sorted! The four of us would meet at 9am the next morning to start our trek.

Kris- but back to the first night, we squeezed into the back of a pickup truck with way too many other people to go on a night safari.  It wasn't africa so we were never going to see loads of wildlife but we did end up seeing some pretty cool stuff! first off we stumbled across this wild pig, its not amazing but driving through the pitch black palm oil plantaion is pretty random! anyway we saw a baby cat of some description in the distance and different forms of bird and insect before the big one! Two or so metres away a baby leopard cub, one of the coolest things you will ever see! we watched it strolling around oblivious for about ten mins before moving on. we saw owls, snakes and even flying squirrels before we left. we were certainly very impressed with the out skirts of this rain forest so far. we went back to our cheap dorm (yellow house - it really is yellow) and got our heads down for the next day.

El- We woke up the next day bright and early, and walked down to the meeting point by the river. Doug was already there but no sign of Tom…half an hour later…still no sign of Tom. He did show up eventually, and by that time the rest of us were standing there with our backpacks all ready to go (with sleeping bags, roll mats and plates, etc hanging off). Then he disappeared AGAIN! What now? He had wandered off to the shop to buy a new t-shirt and some biscuits! This became a common theme over the next two days, “Where’s Tom gone?” “Oh he has gone off on one of his walks again”. We also had to carry two large bottles of water each. “Can we not get water on the way?” I asked, imagining very incorrectly that there would be a campsite with showers and water near the cave. I was met with many sarcastic comments from the guys about how there was a McDonalds just inside the cave, etc. Anyway, it was time to set off, so our guide Jackie (Kris thought he was called Chakkie and referred to him as this for the full two days) piled us and our bags into a little wooden boat and off we went.

Kris- The journey up the river was really nice, it was to be the only relaxing we would get over the next two days. We jumped out the boat after 90 minutes and were deep in to the jungle, we had some dinner and then set off. 10 minutes had gone and we were sweating and after half an hour we were soaked. Seriously the temperature and humidity was unbearable. The treetops shaded us, but the heat and the fact we were hiking up and down hills, over and under trees and branches meant it was hard work, especially with a big bag on. We stopped to see the different types of trees and had a little talk on what was dangerous and poisonous. “Okay?” “Yeah!” and off we went again. One minute later

Tom: “I have found one!”

Me: “Found what?”

Tom: “A LEECH!”

These things were tiny. Why should we be scared of them? You can see them quite clearly, you can therefore avoid them. Right?

El- Yeah, the first day there were hardly any leeches. Me and Kris were still a little freaked out, but as there were only a few on our socks, we got away with politely asking Doug if he would remove them. As he is from Australia and deals with creepy crawlies on a regular basis, he was a bit less wimpy than us and had an attitude that was like “I eat leeches like you for breakfast”. In fact he was so much less wimpy than us that we made him look like Indiana Jones in comparison. We did some really cool stuff on the first day, like swing on a real vine, but unfortunately all those photos were lost when Kris’ camera broke (he had taken all the photos of the first day). 5 long hours after we started walking, we arrived at the cave. Finally, we get a rest, I thought. Wrong! We were immediately sent to collect firewood before it got dark, even though I looked about 5 seconds away from death. “Need water, must…lie…down.” I can’t really put into words just how knackered I was. The firewood collection was slightly half-arsed on my part, but for the men in the group it turned into some sort of macho contest of who could collect the biggest branch/tree. Once this caveman style competition had been solved, we had to have a bath…in a stream! It was a little old fashioned, and we had to be reassured several times that there were no leeches in there, but it was so much fun. I was also very grateful not to smell like a foot anymore. As I had said at the time, putting deodorant on that morning was like putting a plaster on a gun-shot wound.

Kris: Haha, true. In fact El was dirtier than most of us, earlier in the day we had climbed into a real bat cave, inhabitants= 1000+ bats! And with this in mind you can imagine how much poop there was on the floor, creating a slippery mess. Yes, El fell in the shit!

El: Yes it was ALL over me. The joke’s on you though Kris, I was wearing your trousers!

Kris: True! They are still stained now though! Well I say stained…when we tried to get them washed after the trek the guy must have dipped them in water and pulled them back out again (more about laundry later though). It was a lovely evening, well as lovely as it can get in a cave. We built a nice fire to keep us warm, and dry our clothes. We had a lovely meal cooked by our guide, and I even had a little night safari with Tom. The cave was home to some pretty cool creatures too.

El: Including a deadly caterpillar, which we found 10m from our “beds” (now I was starting to understand why we had to sign that form saying that the tour company was not responsible if we fell off a cliff/got mauled by a bear.) I asked the guide how he knew that the insect would not come over to us and he said it was because of the fire. This reassured me temporarily until he started talking about when the fire went out. Gulp! We had plenty of things to take our minds off our imminent deaths though. We left our food remains across the cave to attract wild animals, and later that night we heard a clatter and saw both a porcupine and a sivvet cat. I had quite a good nights sleep under the circumstances. Kris however, thought a bear was coming into the cave.

Kris: A mixture between the weird “accommodation” and the lethal doxycyline tablets (malaria) really gives you funny dreams. I thought at one point that a bear and wolf were in the cave, it was really scary, I hid in my sleeping bag as the bear came up to me “Jurassic Park” style and sniffed and growled in my ear. I was certain if I stayed still I would be safe, pretty crazy stuff. I am sure that our guide must have slipped some jungle mixture in to our dinner! In reality it was a mixture of Doug and El snoring!

El: Actually it was Tom! I was sleeping next to him and can vouch for the fact that he snores like a sleeping lion! When I woke up, Kris was clinging to me for dear life haha. But to be fair the malaria tablets do give you really crazy dreams so I can sympathise.

Kris: Okay, well at least I didn’t get eaten by the sleeping lion, unfortunately that was the least of our worries, as I woke to the worst thing possible, a thunderstorm and lots and lots of rain. Why was this so bad?

El: LEEECHEEESSS!! The second day was quite hard to enjoy, because there were so many leeches. Literally hundreds of thousands of them. They were on our legs a little too frequently for us to ask Doug to remove them for us this time. My first attempt at leech removal did not go so well! It sucked on my finger and I couldn’t shake it off. I was practically screaming the jungle down “Kris, get it off me!!!”, but he was also scared of leeches and so he wouldn’t help me. Eventually Doug got sick of the screaming and pulled it off for me. I gave Kris a look along the lines of “I’m not mad, just disappointed”. Even though I had trousers tucked into socks and walking boots, I realized I wasn’t safe, as it turned out the leeches had learnt to climb through socks and stuff! Following the Jurassic Park topic, it was like when they realize that the velociraptors can open doors. I was tempted to use the line “Clever girl”. Anyway, fortunately the day was made slightly more bearable when Tom invented the “Leaf, leech and grab” technique. It’s pretty much how it sounds. You grab a leaf, pull the leech off with it and then throw the leaf away. After a few hours we stopped to swim in a river. Time to take off our many layers and see how many of the little fellows had got through.

Kris: I had one on the leg that got through my sock. It didn’t hurt but it bled quite a bit. Tom and Doug had a few more, we even had to burn one off Tom. I think I actually “Leaf, leech and grabbed” one before throwing it at him. Oops! El had the worst bite though. It somehow managed to climb through her sock and up her trousers,the picture tells the story. After some swimming and swinging on the rope, we set off for the last hour that felt seemed like 2 or 3! We passed a few people at this point and realized we were coming back to civilization. I can’t explain the relief of finally reaching the finishing line. We were shattered. Our boat journey home was pure bliss. We enjoyed a cold ribena and drifted back to base.

El: Kris enjoyed the ribena. I was like, seriously after all that you did not even have the decency to bring me a Coke! So I bought two when I got back. (Yes I know…drinking coke again is bad. But I plan to stop again when the weather does not make refreshing bevarages quite such a necessity.) The reason we were so thirsty was because we had been given nowhere near enough water, to the point where we actually all drank from a stream. I was really hoping this was not the same stream I had washed the bat poo off my hands in the previous day, but even if it had been, I was that desperate for water I probably would have drunk it anyway. When we were back at Kuala Tahan, we went back to the dorm at the Yellow House and fortunately there were three beds left-just enough for me, Kris and Doug. Doug hung his trek clothes out to dry in the room and when me and Kris walked in we were like “Oh my god, it stinks, we all need to do some laundry so we don’t anger the other people in the dorm” We handed them to the hostel owner and I think he must have a special technique of washing clothes with knives as loads of our clothes had been torn or damaged. Gutted! We had one day left so we spent it going to the canopy walkway with Doug. This is a series of rope bridges at the top of the trees so you can have a great view of looking over the jungle. This wrapped up our trip nicely. And we were ready for our next destination…the beach!