July 29, 2010
To get to the heart of the Malaysian jungle, you have to take a teksi, a 3 hour bus ride, then a 3 hour boat ride. You have to be willing to have one child vomit (as we pulled into the parking lot, with me saying, "Alice, we're almost there - hold it just one more minute..."), and to have a husband who is unable to function due to his nausea. Griffin and I happily read the whole trip.
Taman Negara claims to be the oldest jungle in the world. 130 million years old. You may remember that another jungle in KL also claims to be the oldest jungle in the world. My guess is every country claims to have the oldest jungle, except maybe Iceland.
We arrived to a "jungle resort" which really was a series of "chalets" (read: cabins) with worse painted brick (read: cinderblock) housing with ants that we stayed in for overpriced high season prices. Still, we were determined to spend all our time in the jungle anyway. You had to pay 30 cents each to ride the boat across the river if you wanted dinner in one of the floating restaurants. There were many hikes you could take from the park headquarters deep into the jungle.
We didn't go very deep, until Griffin and I did a jungle overnite -- see next blog posting. Going deep was too long a hike for our crew, so we took little hikes to a canopy walk (again, the longest in the world!) and a quiet swimming hole, often bumping into animals that hung around the cabins -- monkeys, wild gaur (cattle with huge horns), bearded pigs with their babies, wrestling river otters, and a huge spider. We swung from vines.
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