The minibus trip was hair raising. I was the only occupant and the driver was in a wild rush. We went past one accident on the way, but it didn’t slow him down. I was pleased to get out in the end. The area was full of backpackers who were waiting for their bus out of the park. So, I went and had some breakfast to try and kill the hour or so before my trek would start.
It turns out that you needed a backpack for the trek, and all I had was a small light daypack and a drybag. For 20 MYR, they lent me a small pack that over the next two days would break in about six different areas, requiring some McGyver skills to sort out the issue. In the end, it was only my pannier straps that were holding the thing together.
The first day involved registration where they recorded the number of clothes items, plastic items, water and bags etc. Strange, because they didn’t check anything on exit. After that, we got into a boat and headed to the canopy walk which was about 40m up in the trees. It was really impressive. I’ve never been afraid of heights in my life, but this setup felt unnstable, and the rotting timber didn’t help. Again, pleased to finish. One of the guys was really afraid of heights. He was painfully slow and outwardly fearful the whole time. Can’t have been a great experience for him.
After that, it was back into the boat and upstream for an hour to the starting point of the walk. We lathered up with insect repellent and tucked our trousers into our socks for leeches and set off. We had a couple of stops along the way, but lots of stream crossings, mud and leeches. After about 10 minutes I was completely saturated from herad to toe with sweat.
We made it to the caves, our night spot, after about 5 hours, had a quick wash in the creek and our guide cooked dinner. Sleep was uncomfortable and the night wore on. The guide maintained a fire to keep animals away, but there was a persistent porcupine that broke into another tour company’s stash of food, and woke us intermittently.
We had a light breakfast and headed off for another 4-5 hours, this time full of smaller ups and downs and more stream crossings where we all shimmied along logs, jumped from branch to branch or rock to rock, but we usually ended up with more mud than we started with.
Again, pleased to finish, where we had some lunch and waited for the boat for the quick trip back to the town. We managed to clean up and get changed here. The backpack was ruined, my trousers were ruined and everything el;se was covered in mud and sweat. It would take a few attempts at cleaning and drying over the next few days before my shoes were wearable again.
All in all, the rainforest was beautiful. We heard Toucans high up in the canopy, saw elephant poo, and bear claw marks on trees but the porcupine was the only interesting animal we saw. The rainforest trees were absolutely massive and this was probably the most impressive part of the trip. A really worthwhile experience, that I’m so glad I did.
