It was a great feeling finally arriving at Taman Negara because we had to endure a 9 hour journey, which consisted of a boat and 3 buses. We found a nice cheap hostel to stay right on the river and went straight for some food on the floating restaurants, which was an experience in itslef.
Me and Dan planned to do the trek early so we could make our way to Kuala Lumpur in the afternoon. Anton (the lazy fuck) and the girls Erin and Heather, who were now travelling with us had a lie in and said they'll meet us later on. We got up at 7.30 am, got the boat across to get our permit and then made our way to the bat cave, which was in the opposite direction to all the major tourist attractions in the jungle. After a brief visit to a village, where we were lost, we finally trekked on the right trail to the cave and we were trekking for about an hour before we saw a couple who directed us the right way. I was gobsmacked for most of the trek because we were in a proper jungle. We've done treks before in jungles/forrests and none of them looked like this. It was only a small dirt path leading us and a small handful of signs, even though most of the signs had fallen off that took us to the cave and if we were 10m to either side of the trail, we would have easily got lost.
We finally made it to the entrance to the cave and it never looked like an ear (this is what the Lonely Planet book suggested). Apparently you had to wade through water so i wasn't going to go initially but it looked pretty dry so I manned up. The only problem now was that we had to crawl through a dark cave full of bats with no torch because we forgot it. Danny, using his intiative used the light of the camera to navigate us through the cave but that was a risk itslef because my camera works when it wants to and we could have easily been stranded. There is a rope that you can use to help you get through the cave but it's still scary when there's bats flying around your head. There was one bit when I was stuck on this huge slippery rock and accidently sat in bat shit (NICE ONE) but my aim was to get out of this cave through a small crack. I slipped and pulled on this rope, waking up nearly a hunderd bats and they were all flying betwen us and around our head. We quickly got the fuck out of there and after getting lost again for a little while, we finally found the right trail back to the main office.
Next stop was the canopy walk, which every tourist does when they are at Taman Negara. The canopy walk is a suspended rope bridge in the canopy of the trees and at some poiunts, you're 45m above the ground. Quite a few people were clinging on for dear life but they were just holding us up, so we had to wait for them. The canopy walk is definately worth doing but I though it wasn't as good as the book made out. Half the bridges are closed and it's full of tourist, which means you're never going to see any animals while you're up there.
We made our way back, got showered, had lunch and walked to the bus stop to wait for the public bus to take us to the town's bus station, which would have taken us a couple of hourse. But Razzali, the malaysian hustler, offered us a lift to the bus station for more or less the same price as the bus and got us there in half the time. He was busting out his Malaysian music, which sent Anton to koo koo land, and had to stop on the way for a pee pee but was too scared to go in the jungle as 'his snake would get bitten off by a bigger snake' so he did his business behind the car! We got there 5 mins before departure time and enjoyed the nice, cheap and comfortable ride to the capital-Kuala Lumpur.
Taman Negara photo link:
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