The 5000 Project

We took a ride in about 5 cars, never waiting more than 10min for each one, driving through the unknown (to our maps) country roads and finally arrived at kuala tahan – the tourist town overlooking taman nagara national park, over a wide river crossing.

Before entering the jungle, I purchased a mosquito net and a sleeping bag for $10 each – starting to find that the problem with buying things only when I need it is that they’re generally a lot more expensive in the needed locations. Together we stacked provisions of tuna, bread and noodles. We had enough water to get to the first camp, the plan was to yet again boil river water that night, or hopefully find rumoured fresh rainwater streams to fill the bottles.

For the next 3 days we were in the depths of a very large and humbling jungle:

– Day 1

We treked for 8.5km, exhausted and full of leeches, we arrived above a river bank with no noticeable path down, we decided to bush bash through the thick terrain. Some thin long vines were some of the hazards, they were covered in sticky sharp spikes that would wrap around the shirt and hair, its a matter of very slowly spinning back around to unravel them, lest feel the pain of the spikes and ripped clothing.

We arrived at a river bank, but the river was far too deep to cross, we waited for a boat that decided to give us a lift over (there were many boats, so this didn’t take long). A half hr trek on the other side and we were in camp Lata beckoh, an abandoned camp, the termites had destroyed most of the shelters and plants were growing in the toilets – it looked like the camp hadn’t been used in months. We spent most of the night boiling water; without the aid of rum it was an exhausting routine:

1. Keep the fire maintained hot enough to boil water

2. walk to the river, fill the 500ml pot with river water, walk back to camp, put pot on fire

3. wait for water to boil, fill Thermos with boiled water

4. Take Thermos and pot to river, wedge Thermos in rocks to cool down, fill pot with river water, walk back to camp

5. Put pot on fire, fetch cooled Thermos from river, empty cooled Thermos water to non-contaminated plastic bottle

6. Repeat from step 3 until 7 litres of smoked barely-drinkable drinking water is bottled ready for tomorrow’s hiking

That night I setup my mosquito net with sticks to prop it up, a little worried about the leeches, I made sure the net hooked under to prevent anything from crawling through. I slept well, until the early morning when it rained very heavily. Thankfully there was a small shelter in the middle of the camp which the termites had not yet raised, suitable for resting before the others woke. The ground around the shelter was now pure mud.

– Day 2

We packed up as early as we could, after the heavy rain subsided, we met a German guy and Turkish lady who had been using the 2min noodles MSG flavouring on the leeches to great success, we still found it easier to just pull them off then try and flick them away when they try to attach themselves to the flicking fingers – due to the mass quantity of leeches this was still the quickest option, regardless of the battle wounds the day after.

After a grueling 8km hike, we arrived at the location of the night’s rest. Bumbun Kumbang, a nature hide, 2 story stairs to a set of 6 wooden bunk beds. There was a wide viewing area cut out of the wooden-box-on-stilts hide complex, which is used to view the jungle wildlife from afar. This was all great, except that there was a giant swarm of wasps near the stairs on the ground entrance, all attracted to the litres of sweat which we were wearing on our clothes.

We noticed a pipe with flowing water and decided that we should shower and wash our clothes, in turn, before heading upto the hide. We were warned about this hazard by some hikers coming from the hide, their advice proved worthy, although there was a lesser swarm still active within the doors of the hide, the wasps vanished as night arrived.

More hikers arrived later to fill the beds, we saw many fireflys and glowing red eyes when looking from the viewing  window, but most of the wildlife was within the hide itself. Almost as soon as we all got into our beds and turned off the torches/candles – a bunch of bats flew into the hide, one directly over my head. Later in the night we were awoken by a scream, one of the girls had a rat in her bed trying to get to the bread that she had in her bag, in the end she was forced to throw the loaf out as a lure away from her bed.

The next morning we woke and left as early as possible, before the wasps flooded the area.

– Day 3

This was the epic 11km trek back to kuala tahan and the hardest of them all, it hugged the river for most of it, going up and  down ravines; what made it frustrating and challenging is that the up was always very steep and the down was gradual. Our water supplies were getting dangerously low, we decided to trust some of the many fresh free flowing streams coming from the hills of the jungle to the river, it was crystal clear rainwater which provided much nourishment for the last tiring leg of the journey.

We spent one night at the backpackers on the other side of the river once we arrived back to civilization, then the french decided to hitchhike all the way to KL. I decided to spend another night without moving my legs, and to spend some time to heal the many leech wounds which looked a bit nasty due to the pulling from the skin instead of burning them off with salt/fire. We shared internet contact details and parted ways.

The next day I met two Singaporean guys who happened to be heading to the same town I was planning on rocking up to myself, the jungle train north to Gua Musang, a few stops before thailand. We decided to travel together, a bus to jerantut was the first step.

Edit: also something I forgot to add, both straps on my bag snapped,10min between each other, I tied them up and the bag is still fine, with knots on both sides. Dodgy cheap Chinese made bag I bought in China last trip :p

Late Edit: Last night in the backpackers, the fan fell down in a loud crash – thankfully not on a bed