The park is reputed to be the world's oldest jungle and it is situated near the center of Malaysia.
From Kuala Lumpur we took a 5 hour bus ride and a 2 hour boat ride to arrive at our destination.
The travel books about Taman Negara talk about the many leeches a visitor may incur while hiking through the lush rain forest, and this scared the crap out of me. Our first evening there we took an evening walk and most of our tour group, including myself, tucked our pants into our socks to prevent the leeches from attaching themselves to our bodies. It was a pretty easy walk with little to no way of becoming acquainted with the blood sucking fiends.
The next morning we ate breakfast at a "floating restaurant" designated for our tour group and then off we went to go on a canopy walk through the jungle. We walked on a total of 7 or 8 swinging bridges connecting one tree to another rising to heights of about 40 meters (132 feet) off the ground. It was required to walk 10 meters behind the person in front of us. I was definitely afraid at some points of this walk...especially when the walkways were more than 20 meters long, but it was really cool all the same.
After the canopy walk our group went on a several hour hike through the jungle. For some reason I thought that wearing jeans would be a good idea for the trek, but as you can imagine, trekking through a jungle in Malaysia can get quite hot and sweaty (even in January) and jeans weren't be best idea. Oh well.
The hike was relatively easy and if it weren't for the heat...it would have been a cinch. We hiked to a cliff of sorts to get a good view of the rest of the forest.
We continued up about 50 more meters to get another sight of the jungle.
And then we climbed back down and retreated back to our hostel in the jungle.
We found out that this guy who shared our hostel with us went on a hike on a different route with another group and he ended up being covered in leeches! Uck.
Later that afternoon we went "rapid shooting" through the river. This was kind of like white water rafting, but in a canoe. It felt really refreshing after the hike earlier that day. Since there were about 15 people in our group we had to take two boats and every time our boats came near to one another we would splash each other with water. It was a lot of fun!
Part of our tour included a visit to an "orang asli" (original peoples) village off the river. I'm sure that they received some money from the tour group to show the visitors how they live and how to make a poisonous arrow, but I felt kind of uncomfortable going into their community and taking pictures of them as if they were in a zoo, so I just didn't. Ryan, however, took some neat pictures of a little kid poking his (or her?) head through the thatched roof of its home.
That evening there was an optional night safari trip, but Ryan and I opted to stay back at our hostel and relax.
The next morning we got back onto the boats for another 2 hour ride and then another 4 hour bus ride back to Kuala Lumpur.
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