Taman Negara- National Park National Park

Taman Negara is located right in the middle of peninsular Malaysia and literally means "National Park" in Malay. So last week we went to National Park National Park. Taman Negara contains one of the oldest rainforests in the world, a place popular for hiking, bird watching, boating, caving, and other forest-y things. Josh and I only spent a few days there, as the humidity lowered our hiking motivation to, well, low. We had a very nice time, though, and saw some strange and interesting things.

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We took a lovely 3-hour boat ride up the river to Kuala Tahan, a small village across the river from the park. We saw some otters playing along the river on the trip there and back, although no crocodiles as we were hoping. Each morning, we would catch a boat taxi from Kuala Tahan across the river to Taman Negara.A definite highlight was the canopy walkway. Supposedly the longest one in the world (I am not sure how much competition there really is), this series of nets, metal ladders and wooden planks makes it up to the top layer of the forest, the canopy, for some great views and forest-y sounds.While we were hoping to see a rare tiger, elephant, or rhino (all at once, preferably; in a big fight also involving monkeys and bearcats, even better), instead we saw some interesting plants, bugs and birds. The tualang tree is the tallest tropical tree in the world and even makes its own layer in the rainforest. Rather than stopping at the canopy, it goes a few meters above into the "emergent" layer. Here Josh is contemplating if this is one of the famous 30-story high types... This is the weirdest bug I think I've ever seen. A Malaysian man told us it was a Lentin fly?? I call it the Pinocchio Bug, Cousin of Rudolph.
More strange plants
Apparently this leaf couldn't decide whether to be one big one or lots of little ones.
These bright red flowers grew straight out of the ground.

Some other un-photographed items we saw were huge beans growing out of tree trunks that were a brighter hot pink than a tokyo girl's miniskirt, lots of weird pink mushrooms, an Asian Fairy Bluebird that I thought was a piece of blue plastic in a tree it was so bright, and a number of otters on our boat trip. We also wiggled our way into a very damp and smelly cave, but the camera was being finicky at that point. Thus, we cannot prove that we really were in a small cavern with a couple hundred sleepy bats. But we were.

We enjoyed Taman Negara, although I am sure we didn't do it justice with our little day-hikes. The boat up the river to the longer ones was just too much money, and we were just too lacking in desire! From the park, we took a boat back to "civilization" and a very pretty bus ride to the capitol, Kuala Lumpur.