Taman Negara (Malaysia)

My last trip in Malaysia before heading back to Kuala Lumpur to fly back to Korea was to the National Rainforest of Malaysia, Taman Negara. I had the opportunity to go on an overnight hike and sleep in a cave, join a canopy walk, and learn how to hunt with a blow dart all in the company of many awesome people from all over the world. Thanks for making it a great experience everyone!

Taman Negara from the level of the canopy.

The rainforest has trails that can be followed but many trails have fun obstacles included along the path provided by Mother Nature herself~. Yes, this log is in the air probably 15ish feet above the ground so good balance is helpful on these trails! However, if you are the adventurous type like me you accept the challenge and have fun with it! Just be careful so you don't break a leg!

These are the places you can hike to in Taman Negara. We went to all of these places crossing them off the list as we passed them! 16 Km is not too bad! :)

The beginning of the trail started by the river. We took a boat from our campsite to the beginning of the trail and began the long trek accross the rainforest to observe the beauty of the wilderness and hopefully find some wildlife like the Malayan Tapir (my favorite animal!!).

Along the way we were invited to join a village to learn more about tribal culture of the many tribes that still live in the rainforest today! This is me using a poisonous blow dart to practice my newly aquired hunting skills! Poor Doraemon was the victim of target practice.

There is our awesome tourguide!! If you go to Taman Negara I hope you get this tourguide because he was awesome. He was friendly and taught us many interesting things about the rainforest and even told use useful information on how to survive if we some how got lost. He even showed us which plants have medicinal purposes and how to make the paste to apply to cuts.

Here is a child from the village where we learned how to use blow darts. She was adorable!

When we got to the cave we set up camp. This is the river we got to rinse off in, however there are a lot of leeches so you shouldn't stay too long. I did get a few leech bites but you honestly cant feel them on you. I only noticed I was being munched on when I looked down and saw my leg was covered in blood. Also, you should burn them off, don't just pull.

Here is our dark campsite in the cave. We had a fire started in the middle of the cave to keep elephants out so nobody woke up in the middle of being impaled by elephant tusks. The smoke is what keeps the elephants away from the cavesite (which was also an elephant cemetary where elephants that are dying come to rest in peace).

The next morning after sleeping on the hard floor of the cave. It wasn't too bad but there was a porcupine that came to visit in the middle of the night! From this point we split into two smaller groups for the hike. My group left earlier and we needed some pictures with all of our equipment.

I think this picture and the first picture turned out the best. It was fun hiking with Melode! :)

This was our dinner which was pretty good for mostly coming from cans that we carried to the cave. It is chicken in curry sauce over rice. We cooked it over the fire and ate like a family.

This is what our campsite looked like. We all had little mats and sleeping bags that we carried in our backpacks to sleep on.

And you could see the moon outside of the cave where there weren't as many trees to block the view~. It was prettier in real life. I think this is when we went out of the cave to look for fireflies and nocturnal animals that might have been lurking about.  Our roommates in the caves were bats. They were sometimes loud but it was a good experience. Bats are cool animals. They definitely protected us well from the mosquitoes.

Preparing for dinner.

The cave while it was still lit by the natural sunlight.

The exoskeleton of a bug.

Magic fungi. These are the kind that can glow in the dark.

More fungi!

We also went on a canopy top walk while in the rainforest.

It was high and really cool! I could only see birds in the rainforest though. I think a lot of the animals were probably sleeping, but still a good experience.

This is the tour we took. I highly recommend them! They offer great prices for the amount of fun you will experience (although it helps if you are fortunate enough to find yourself in an awesome group of people like I was). You can sleep in a tent or a capsule pod. They offer food for dinner and breakfast, which is amazing tasting (they have really good homestyle cooks so if you want authentic I recomend giving it a try)! At night time they have a big bonfire on the beach where they will bring down their guitars so you can all sing campfires while looking at the stars and if you are lucky you might even see a tiger on the other side of the river.

We did two tours with them, one was the night safari and we saw a malayan tapir (my number one goal of coming to Taman Negara) on the first night we were there! And then we did the tour of hiking through the forest for two days and sleeping in the cave for one night!  

Some of the trees in the rainforest produce a poisonous sap that the village people use on their blow darts when they go hunting. They shoot their prey with the poison soaked blowdart and wait for the poison to work its magic (doesn't take long). Once the animal is dead they cut out where the poison has spread and keep the rest of it for food and other purposes.

This is definitely one of the most amazing experiences I have completed on my travels abroad. I am thankful for my opportunity to traval here and hope to come back one day soon. I highly recommend it. Cheers!

I would like to give photo credit to Melode Rozenkrantz, Seik Tar Khor, Thomas Mgl, and Christelle Bda. Thank you to you all for contributing to my blog! ♡