Travelling in Southeast Asia, one of my goals was to go walking alone in virgin tropical rainforest. In Indonesia, this was a somewhat elusive goal. Gunung Leuser National Park on Sumatra has excellent rainforest, but walking is only permissible when accompanied by a guide, who may prove to be more annoying than helpful. In the Indonesian part of Borneo, most of the accessible rainforest has been logged recently. However, peninsular Malaysia’s huge National Park, the Taman Negarah, more than made up for these disappointments.
Set up as a reserve for the native forest by the British – while they were busy felling the jungle to establish rubber and palm oil plantations all over the peninsula – Taman Negarah (which just means "national park" in Malaysian) is a vast area of undisturbed tropical rainforest that sprawls across the heart of Malaysia. Only the southern part is at all developed for tourists; visiting the northern sections requires plenty of time, money and advance planning.
Getting to the park can be half the fun: a slow but comfortable train runs from the main Singapore-Kuala Lumpur-Penang train line at Gemas to Jerantut, the staging point for the park; from the north, the train runs from the Thai border at Sungai Kolok. There are morning and afternoon boat trips up a river, from a jetty 10 km outside Jerantut.
The river trip, in a low-riding motorized canoe, takes about three hours and is a great way to see wildlife. Brightly coloured kingfishers and huge hornbills fly overhead; large monitor lizards sun themselves on the muddy riverbanks and, on our trip, we passed a long, unidentified snake swimming powerfully across the opaquely brown river, his head waving from side to side in the air from the effort.
The entrance to the park is at the village of Kuala Tahan. On one side of the river are houses, shops, cheap lodges and a string of floating restaurants. On the other side, reached by extremely brief canoe rides, are the park headquarters, an expensive government hotel and tourist bungalows. One of the great attractions of Taman Negarah, the wildlife observation hides, can be booked for overnight stays at the headquarters, which I did before setting off on my long-anticipated walk alone in the rainforest.
One of the paradoxes of tropical rainforests is that while they may be home to the most diverse and dense populations of animal on earth, it’s quite difficult to see any animals at all, other than insects. The undergrowth is so thick, and so little light reaches down to the forest floor, that it is hard to see any distance at all. The most visible large animals are the monkeys, who hang about in large noisy packs on the edge of the clearing where the tourist bungalows are..
An excellent idea that has been put into practice here is that of having a canopy walk. Such a suspended walkway leads from tree to tree, eventually leading up into the giddy heights of the canopy layer of the rainforest. It’s a bit precarious-feeling, and hard on the nerves of those of us uncomfortable with heights, but it brings home the tremendous vertical scale of the forest: at one point the walkway was nearly 70 metres above the ground, and still not quite at the treetops.
It’s a pity that the canopy walk is open only in the middle of the day, as to be in the canopy layer at dawn or dusk, when most animals are at their most active, would be superb. Still, there were some birds to be seen, and the sense of the completely separate world in the canopy was quite striking: no undergrowth, more sunlight, wide branches providing paths from tree to tree. After I’d completed the 600-metre-long walk (it felt longer than that, but this may have been due to vertigo), I looked up and had trouble seeing the walkway from below, so dense was the vegetation and so well-camouflaged was the walkway.
Undisturbed primary tropical rainforest makes awe-inspiring surroundings. The tropical hardwood trees reach tremendous heights (70 metres or more), supporting the weight of their plethora of upper branches with their enormously broad trunks and the huge buttress roots that radiate from the trunk, often twice the height of a person.
Huge strangler figs envelop the trunks of their host trees, smothering them slowly in the process. Thick lianas and thorny vines hang down to the ground, and dense undergrowth produces a claustrophobic feeling of being crushed by the pressure of the relentlessly spreading growth. Although the temperature is not particularly high, relative humidity approaches 100%, and the slightest movement sends sweat pouring down one’s body.