My Post-Sabbatical Year(s) in Asia (or wherever): 4/2

Me with the English teachers as I left Seri Puteri School

Friday afternoon I joined a field trip to Taman Negara, a national park and the world's oldest forest. On the way, we stopped at an an elephant sanctuary, a fish farm, and then spent the night at another school. We must have spent about 5 hours in the bus, and I think the women teachers in the front of the bus never stopped cracking jokes and laughing (I wish I understood what they were saying). I experienced this again and again, whenever there were a few women together. Malaysian women must be the happiest people on earth (or maybe it's just the teachers at this school).

One of the students on the canopy walk, the longest in the world at 530 meters (about 1750 feet). At its highest, we were 50 meters above the forest floor.

Taman Negara national park, in central Malaysia, covers over 4000 square kilometers. It is said to be the oldest virgin forest on earth, at 150 million years. Here are some of the facts I learned:
There are nine types of hornbill birds in Taman Negara.
There are only 200 Malaysian tigers left in the wild.
There are only 200 Orang Asli (the original people of Malaysia) left, living in Taman Negara. They are the only people allowed to live in and use the park. They still use poison blow darts to hunt.
There are less than 200 Asian elephants in the wild left in Malaysia.
Taman Negara has over 30 types of ferns and more than 300 species of butterfies.
The largest measured Rafflesia flower was three feet across.
Bamboo can grow three feet a day (that is 1.5 inches per hour - you can almost see it grow).

At about 5PM, after the canopy walk, a trip down the river, a picnic and a swim, the school left me in the park and headed back to the school they are visiting. The teachers were very concerned about me, and kept asking if I would be okay alone. Zuan had to explain to them that I have already traveled through India and Indonesia alone, and I would be fine.

This is where I ate. They make fresh sambal (spicy sauce) here with little dried fish mixed in.

I stayed in these little cottages above the river, paying way more than they are worth - $16 a day. There are chickens which wander around the grounds. I found an egg in the chair outside my room one morning.

A really big tree

I spent 6 hours on two walks through the jungle, to the bat caves and to a hilltop view sight, but it didn't take me that long to remember that I really don't like the jungle all that much - bugs, leeches, not much light, and no wild animals. You can hear the birds, and I did see a huge frog and a large monitor lizard, but besides that, just ants, mosquitoes, a lot of unidentified bugs, a few beautiful butterflies, one leech, and a lot of bats.

I was in the jungle no more than ten seconds and I felt something crawling up my leg. Before I knew it, my shoes and calves were covered by large, red, biting ants. That is my introduction, as well as a reminder that I had spent some time in the jungles of Sumatra 22 years and I didn't like it then either.

bat cave

It took me one and a half hours to walk the 2.8K, up and down through the jungle to the bat cave. I followed a rope in, but was pretty content to just sit at the edge of the cave and look in, until a tour guide came with a group of four Danes. So I decided to follow, and was really glad that I did. It was quite a little adventure crawling through the bat guano - good thing it was very dark (only flash lights to light our way).

Cherating beach - Now this is more like it!

After 9 hours and three buses, I finally arrived at Cherating, on the east coast of Malaysia, about half way up. Getting there through central Malaysia, the scenery was very green and beautiful, though it looks like one big palm tree plantation.