Malaysia: Jungle Lite

Having a wonderful time here at the edge of the jungle. Rode into the park entrance area this morning on a slow boat ride that took roughly 3 hours. I was fortunate enough to have a very friendly gentleman seated behind me who was taking his wife and 5 children to the park. As he had been speaking in Cantonese with his family for the first half of the trip, I was pleasantly surprised when he started to converse with me in English. We managed to talk about quite a bit and during the course of it all, he and his two sons taught me a number of useful phrases in Malay.

Once arriving here, I hauled all of my luggage down the beach and up the stairs and down the road to the very furthest place to stay, the Durian Chalet. My two travel companions (a French couple I had made friends with on the bus from KL to Jerantut) and I were a bit regretting out decision to book at this place as the chalets were quite rustic and the location remote...but these feelings of regret evaporated when we dropped off our bags and took lunch at the small dining area (located in the same space as was used for guest reception).

Some traditional Malaysian home-cooking - eggs, a spinach-like vegetable and some-type of fish in durian sauce (I forget what it is called)

The family that owns the operation is extremely friendly and it turns out that we had decided to eat lunch at the same time the family was eating. The family was having a home cooked meal not on the menu...which a cousin, visiting the family from the US on school holiday, invited us to try. The conversation that followed thereafter was quite pleasant and it seemed as if more than simply staying at some cheap hostel, we had been welcomed as guests into someone's home.


In the afternoon, I split off from Nicolas and Cindy to go on a tour of the Ear Cave while they went to shoot the rapids. The members of my tour consisted of three young men from Windsor who had just graduated from college (high school) and were traveling around the world on a "gap year" and a very nice Indian American family from Ohio that has traveled extensively throughout the world (the two children, aged 10 and 7 respectively, have probably seen more of the world than I have). Our guide, unfortunately, left much to be desired. He didn't really talk to us at all...In fact, I don't recall him saying a single thing to us through the entire "tour." He simply drove the boat to the start of the trail, led us on the well marked trail through the forest to the cave and then led the way through the cave. Every question we asked was answered with a simple shrug of the shoulders. I'm guessing he didn't speak that much English.

The cave was cool...filled with bats and as one would guess, guano (bat poo). Between the eight of us, I think we did a pretty good job of cleaning the guano off the rocks of the cave with our hands and clothing. Still, there was a group of students screaming and shouting in Cantonese behind us that went even deeper into the cave and therefore, deeper into the poo. Most of the kids were dressed in nothing more than short-shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops (or simply barefoot!) and all seemed to have a grand old time slipping and sliding through the soupy rivers of bat poo flowing through the passageway below. Watching them, I couldn't help but feel ashamed at my own squeemish hesitation to follow them...but at the same time, I was thinking to myself, 'Uh-uh. No. Hell no.'


Descending into the Ear Cave and posing with its sleepy inhabitants

A centipede, one of the few things we spotted on the night walk.

After finishing up the hike, and returning to the chalet for dinner, I met up with Nicolas and Cindy (the couple from France) again and we hopped on a boat across the river for a guided night tour of the jungle. The tour was nice...didn't see much in the way of fauna aside from a few stick bugs, a gigantic yellow black poisonous centipede and another gigantic woodsman (?) spider, but the guide was fantastic.

As a bit of comic relief for the night, as some of you may know, I've been tripping out about the possibility of leeches getting me on the trail in the jungle. So for most of the walk, I was constantly scanning the ground to make sure no leeches were hopping on my shoes to crawl up and bite me on my leg. But we got the end of the walk and not a single leech was to be found.

Then I felt something on my neck.

Touching my neck lightly, I felt something long and thin and not me.

"Um, I think I've got a leech...could somebody check my ne--" I said, trying to remain calm and suppress the panic tinging my voice. And in that instant, Cindy looked over, screamed and raised her hand to swat it off as I shouted, "No wait, don't--," not wanting leech teeth left stuck in my neck (if you pluck a leech off, rather than burning, salting or waiting for it to drop off on its own, the wound may scar). But it was too late.

Fortunately, it seems that Cindy's quick reflexes caught the leech (if it had been a leech) before it could bite. According to Cindy, it had been crawling up my neck when she got it.

I didn't manage to get a picture of the little bugger on my neck, but earlier in the day on the way to bat cave, I took a mini-movie of this little guy we spotted doing his darndest to chase after us (I had shown this same clip to Cindy earlier in the evening and she said whatever it was that had been on my neck was moving in the same way).

Anyway, it's pouring buckets (I guess they don't call it the rain forest for nothing) outside of the internet center and i'm waiting for it to lift so I can get back to the chalet and get some sleep...