Getting lost in Malaysia’s jungle
Without a guide, we trek through a dark, scary forest on a wing and a prayer
TAMAN NEGARA NATIONAL PARK, MALAYSIA— The Malaysian official in a khaki suit with a stern face insisted my boyfriend and I hire a professional guide to escort us on our overnight hike into the world’s oldest tropical rainforest.
The price, at 950 Malaysian ringgit (about $315 Canadian) was too expensive, we insisted. We’ll be OK.
The plan was to arrive at the Kumbang Hide to sleep in a wooden cabin raised 10 metres off the ground, inside Taman Negara National Park, a dense, deep jungle, covering 4,343 square kilometres, an area almost seven times larger than Toronto.
The park is about 130 million years old and one of the most preserved and untouched forests on Earth.
Like many explorers before us, our arrogance and naïveté got the best of us. The decision not to hire a guide would soon come back to haunt us.
Taking our sweet time getting up, we set out at 11 a.m., with only a map the size of my palm, a toy-like flashlight (even in the morning hours, the jungle is dark), some canned goods and a whole lot of water. With socks knee-high, coated with leech-repellent, we stepped into the damp and impenetrable jungle for a trek we thought would take no more than six hours.
Inside the buzzing jungle were thick grass, bushes and small trees that formed a sweeping mosaic of hues ranging from fern to dark olive. There were also wild banana plants, palms and bamboos arching their branches over the tangle of vegetation. We carefully hopscotched around the giant web of roots bulging from the ground, sometimes climbing over fallen trees.
Then came the true giants, trees that thrust their bare trunks 50 metres into the air with an explosion of branches and foliage falling over the forest floor. It was like nothing I had ever seen before.
Upon first entering the jungle, a damp silence blanketed the trees. But as the light faded and darkness approached, the jungle came alive.
It’s extremely rare to spot the forest’s bigger inhabitants, such as tigers, elephants and panthers. But the sounds of the long-horned grasshoppers, monkeys and birds were getting louder and louder. An eccentric and irregular range of buzzes, screeches, whistles and wails made the hair on my arms stand up.
Boom. A startlingly loud noise beat through the trees. Broken branches crashed down on to the path ahead. We realized we were lost, frantically looking for trail markers.
Our map was completely smudged due to the humidity. We decided to take a food and water break, and devoured our canned chicken and chugged our water, taking a tremendous amount of weight off our shoulders.
Leeches took every opportunity to latch onto me, and I was going crazy trying to burn them off with a lighter. I knew we needed to get to our cabin. It was pitch black, and we had been trekking for more than nine hours.
There was no way I would sleep on the jungle floor, waiting to be a tiger’s next meal.
We used the flash of our camera to light up the way ahead, hoping to scare off any ill-intentioned animals. We walked aimlessly and reached a dead end. My heart thumped. There we were, in front of a river, inside of a jungle that was ready to swallow us whole. We were definitely screwed.
Luckily, my boyfriend still had some cool left in him. He noticed a rope hanging across the river. Could this be real? Were we actually supposed to cross the strong current? We dashed to the rope, holding on tight, and crossed one hand at a time as the water swooshed powerfully past us, reaching our chests.
We made it, drenched and desperate, when we saw a campfire from afar. We ran to it and found a local guide huddled around the fire with an Australian couple at our destination, the Kumbang Hide.
Mixing rice, simmering over red coals, the guide, a rough-looking man, stood up with his eyes wide open. He couldn’t believe we made it through the jungle at night.
I climbed up to the hide and took off my socks, praying to the forest gods that no leeches got the best of me.
Most Torontonians spend their time on autopilot getting from one place to another, but the jungle heightens the senses. It forces you to stay sharp and contemplate the complexities of the jungle.
If you find yourself in Malaysia, Taman Negara, with its untouched forest, is not to be missed, even if it means getting lost and finding your way. Emanuela Campanella is a Toronto writer.