We set off to the world’s oldest, 130 MILLION year old primary rainforest: the Taman Negara National Park, on the 22ndJanuary. This was enough excitement for us quite apart from a minor coach accident we had along the way: It was raining, we were going downhill round a sharp bend and the coach just veered off the highway into a wall. No one was hurt. The bus got a bad scrape and the doors were initially jammed shut from the buckled metal but we were just thankful it was nothing worse. We then went on a small wooden boat for three hours which took us up river right into Taman Negara National Park. Before we had even entered the park Neil had already spotted a croc in the river, I saw a hornbill fly right over our heads and Neil handled an apparently harmless wild ‘green snake’ in front an impressed crowd of tourists. We counted a total of 30 different animals over the journeys to and from, and the 2 days 3 nights we spent in the national park.
Neil and I went on our own four hour trek in the rainforest the following morning, including an exhausting climb of the Tohan mountains to the viewpoint at 344metres. We experienced our first ever leech bites (pulled them off immediately even though we both knew full well we weren’t supposed to), saw butterflies, ants, termites, stag beetles, several spiders (yuk) and 2 Crested Pibeck on the forest floor. These are large partridge sized birds, the female in browns and the male black and white with a startling peacock-blue head and neck). We ended the trek with a treetop canopy, at 40m high and 500m long it is the longest in the world. This offered great views across the park and the river and whilst we were up there we even made friends with 2 European girls who were on holiday here. In the afternoon we went on a boat-trip through rapids on the river which got us all screaming and soaking wet! We stopped off for a swim and a rope-swing on the river bank and Neil did summersaults into the water in attempt to win some beers.
The next excursion was to see the native tribes people of the Taman Negara rainforest: the Orang Asli. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but I was most surprised as to how they looked. They could have been African. Their skin was black, the women’s afro hair was kept back with wooden combs, their noses flat and wide- they even wore cloth wrapped around them (like you would wear a sarong on the beach) but just like they do in Africa! They carried their babies in a cloth swung across their bodies, and had very small huts with woven rattan walls and palm fronds roofs, outside of which they would gather to sit around, or cook over a wood fire. It was much like a typical Ghanaian village I had been to. There was maybe a dozen or so of mostly women and children who wandered around listlessly, clearly not interested in the group of tourists who regularly came to visit their small community on the riverbank, despite the monetary returns we were assured that they received from the tour guide operators. This ensured that a small group would always stay there for the benefit of tourism and meant they could not live in the depths of the rainforest like the other 600 Orang Asli, all that now remain.
We learnt of how they are a typically nomadic tribe, moving from one place to the next every 3 or 4 months, rebuilding their huts as they go, which takes about a day. The most ritualistic event is if there is a death. The person’s body is carefully prepared then placed in the uppermost branches of tree, the height of which is denoted by the age – the older the person, the higher they go, to as high as 25m off the ground. This is because they believe the spirit leaves the body and rises up to the sky. No one can go within a 2km radius of this tree; if they do, they will die. They tribe must then leave after a death. The men hunt and make the fire, the women’s ‘role’ is simply to cook and to reproduce. They may have up to 16 children, and ‘marry’ from as young as 14 for girls, a few years older for the men. I was fascinated by coming so close to such a hidden away a race, with such primitive ways of life and belief systems, so simple and so far removed from ours. It was also so special to see people representing an ethnicity with just 600 people remaining – no thanks to the rapid speed of their natural habitat being depleted from deforestation for rubber and palm oil plantations which dominate much of Malaysia’s landscapes.
We learnt of how they are a typically nomadic tribe, moving from one place to the next every 3 or 4 months, rebuilding their huts as they go, which takes about a day. The most ritualistic event is if there is a death. The person’s body is carefully prepared then placed in the uppermost branches of tree, the height of which is denoted by the age – the older the person, the higher they go, to as high as 25m off the ground. This is because they believe the spirit leaves the body and rises up to the sky. No one can go within a 2km radius of this tree; if they do, they will die. They tribe must then leave after a death. The men hunt and make the fire, the women’s ‘role’ is simply to cook and to reproduce. They may have up to 16 children, and ‘marry’ from as young as 14 for girls, a few years older for the men. I was fascinated by coming so close to such a hidden away a race, with such primitive ways of life and belief systems, so simple and so far removed from ours. It was also so special to see people representing an ethnicity with just 600 people remaining – no thanks to the rapid speed of their natural habitat being depleted from deforestation for rubber and palm oil plantations which dominate much of Malaysia’s landscapes.
We were given demonstrations and had the chance to try their more superior/quicker way to make a fire, and even more impressively, how to use the bamboo blow-pipe. This is used by the men to hunt, mostly monkeys. It is a long piece of rare hollow bamboo with a rounded resin mouthpiece which they put to their mouth and shoot out poison-tipped arrows to kill. The source of the poison can vary from the sap of a tree to the poison coated on the skin of frog. It takes 10 days to make the blow-pipes by hand. I was very impressed, having seen tribes from South America to Papua New Guinea use this weapon on David Attenborough documentaries, and I bought one as a souvenir; slightly shortened but nonetheless identical to theirs. That evening we watched a large pack of monkeys including several young, cross around the back of the building where our dorm rooms were into the undergrowth, as close as 5 meters from us. We also saw 2 large tapia’s feeding from right outside the Park’s Information Centre. These are large mammals similar to a hog, completely black apart from a large block of white on their middle – they have a long snuffling snout like an anteater and were so used to people they let me sit right by them and stroke them.
On our second day in the park we decided we would trek to a hide and spend the night there, in hope of seeing larger mammals. So we spent most of the morning preparing, and Neil then went off for a couple of hours of fishing. We set off early afternoon, our small backpacks laden down with tins of fish, beans, sleeping bags and plenty of water. After trekking for 2 or 3 hours we took the wrong path and found ourselves pushing through foliage growing over a hardly used path. Pushing aside vines and scrambling over fallen trees we walked into more spider webs than I care to remember! We finally got back to the original path and then faced our major obstacle to the hide. Crossing a fast flowing, rapid filled river – no bridge, no boats, and we were carrying cameras we didn’t want getting wet. So Neil intrepidly crossed the river first– waist deep and wading slowly using a stick! I managed to cross, very slowly, carrying our shoes and precious water supply whilst leaning very heavily on a stick to support myself – without which, I know that at I would not have managed to cross. I was truly facing the full force of nature, the power of the water surging down the river banks and cascading over boulders in its path made me feel so meek and powerless by this oppression of water. I knew if I fell or tripped, I would be helplessly dragged down and under the water. We managed to cross safely, with all our possessions intact and mostly dry, but the crossing took us about an hour and a half.
We were greeted in our hide by a young European couple and an enthusiastic Chinese man, about half as skinny as me, who presented us with oranges and bid us Happy (Chinese) New Year. After unpacking our things onto the hard wooden raised platforms that were to be our beds for the night, we rustled up some baked bean sandwiches and tinned sardines on crackers for dinner – it wasn’t as bad as it sounds! At nightfall we did glimpse the bright lights of animal eyes across the clearing which Neil believes could have been a jennet cat. We saw a small striped deer through the undergrowth when we went off for a night stroll around the hide, but best of all, a large east-asian porcupine just 10 meters from us, 2 meters from snout to tail, black in body with long white spines from halfway down its back. Unfortunately I had one too many close encounters with some exceptionally large and hairy spiders so I am not sure if I would do it again…..but it was a great experience to be that close with these animals in their natural habitat.
On the 25th January we took the rickety old train from KL down to Singapore where we stayed for a couple of days with my brother and sister-in-law until our outbound flight to Brisbane on the 27th. My parents were also visiting for a week so it was brief family reunion, a few thousand miles from my Oxfordshire family home. We shared stories and photos and of course I had to show them my bamboo spear gun! We had a safe and comfortable night flight with Qantas from Singapore, touching down at 7am in Brisbane, Australia. As promised, our friend Heath from Thailand (see Thailand blog) met Neil and I at the airport and us and our luggage and we were off, our Australia adventure just beginning.
No comments:
Post a Comment