Teman Negara

Sometimes when you have a company book/recommend things, they assume you are not an immersive traveler.  This is generally an ok assumption for many Americans, as they oftentimes especially older travelers, people are nervous, don’t want to risk strenuous activity or foods.  When I asked for recommendations for a sojourn between KL and Penang, I noted that we love to hike and have very few travel hangups, generally preferring to stay where the action is.

Apparently the company thought they knew better about what we wanted so this next piece is how to book your own stuff.

If you look up Taman Negara on a map, you see the park office is on one side of a swift river and the other sided is a small town with floating restaurants.  On the park side, there is a resort called Mutiara, which is where we were booked.  I would describe it as a more glamping place that includes buffet meals.  The catch here is that the buffet leaves a bit to be desired and they do have a separate menu, but it is 10x more ringgit than the town.  Now, the town has signs all over the docks and streets saying they are a Muslim town and that no shops will sell you even a beer.  So, prioritizing may be in order, because my travel partner preferred the cheaper local food, but with beer…that was just not happening.  The resort has some walking paths directly off the property, however the signage is a bit odd for the trails and some of the walkways are straight up falling apart. We had hired a naturalist for the night jungle walk, and he was helpful with explaining which ones are safe to explore, but most people just start walking.  There are some trails frequented by aggressive elephants if you choose the wrong path, huntsman spiders, scorpions, pythons and pit vipers and the Asian bengal tiger in the jungle.  The nicer animals including birds, monkeys and macaques, tapir, etc. can also be encountered, but when we saw our first viper, I would not have seen it in time.

The jungle is massive and only about 1/10th of it has marked trails.  The naturalist was able to point out a wide variety of animals, but also herbals like pandan, anti inflammatory roots, poison  sap for blow darts (Ipoh tree), tea ingredients, sandlewood, and a wild lemongrass that you can wrap around a wrist for mosquito repellent.  Really fascinating.   The weather was not super cooperative during our day hikes, however, and our one outing down a huge waterfall was canceled due to a sudden monsoon.

So, cool jungle, good food on the town side and transport is 1 ringgit across via boat, but they are very prohibition like so if you want a beer, the tiger area it is.  The town side has one road out and apparently there are small hotels/backpacker places there in case a more adventurous accommodation is requested.

The biggest downfall of the time there was that the main attraction, the canopy walk, crashed to the ground from almost 120 feet over the fall after excessive rains and trees toppling onto the suspension bridges.  There is no solid timeline for reopening, March at the earliest but not likely from what we could see of it.  Apparently that is the best thing there, so before planning your trip there, check that it is open.

Final note, unless you have some serious trekking planned, get a boat upriver to the town mid day, do some hiking and enjoy the town, night walk, and then another jungle walk the next morning, but I would leave after that and visit another area.  Two and 1/2 days was a little too much there and we could have used a little more time in other spots, like Malaka because we just missed it altogether.