A couple of days side trip from Kuala Lumpur to explore Malaysia’s largest, oldest and most popular national park, and a British hill station. Taman Negara is about 3 & 1/2 hours drive north from KL, over 4,000sqm of rainforest protected since 1939. It is the second oldest tropical rainforest in the world, after Australia’s Daintree Rainforest.
We arrived into the only accomodation in the park itself, Mutiara Taman Negara, in the early hours of the morning, crossing the Tembeling River.
Taman Negara Canopy Walk is one of the longest suspension ropewalks in the world, stretching for over 500m up to 40m above the ground.
It was reached by easy boardwalk with a view.
Couple of photos of the Tembeling River in daylight.
We explored another part of the park heading out to (but not far into) Gua Telinga cave. We weren’t very prepared for heading into a rainforest, in particular leeches were unexpected and quite unpleasant! They attach to your shoes, work their way through the smallest gaps, and latch onto your feet. They’re not painful but are disturbingly present in your shoes. I was glad for the shower block at the end of the hike where I removed probably a dozen of them, and washed away the blood. I have been far more careful in rainforests ever since!
On the drive back we stopped at Bukit Fraser (Fraser’s Hill), originally established in 1890 as a short lived tin mining community, turned into a tourist resort opened in 1922. At nearly 1,500m above sea level it is cooler than Kuala Lumpar two hours drive away. Many colonial era buildings remain, built in mock tudor style.
To finish with more rainforest on a short walk along a stretch of Bukit Fraser’s Pine Tree Trail.
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