Day 97: Tanah Rata to Taman Negara
Trip Start
Sep 21, 2006
1
92
228
Trip End
Jun 01, 2007
Tanah Rata,
Malaysia
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
The road to Gua Musang enters low cloud. Once the bus emerges, there is a brutal contrast between lush natural forest and butchered hillocks shorn of trees. Few saplings replace the ancient woods which we pass as rusty trunks chained to trucks. The red soil left behind slips into the rivers.
At Gua Musang we switch to a train, but it's delayed two hours due to weather (so it's not only in the UK). The station sits below karst peaks and beside a brown river but the town has little of interest and I am stumped again as a vegetarian looking for restaurant food
01 Gua Menang Station
. A decision is made to continue by minibus to guarantee us getting to Taman Negara tonight rather than a (free) night in Jerantut. We skirt the national park where the primary forest has been cut back and replaced by monocultures of oil palms and rubber trees. It's depressing to see, instead of a home for a variety of animals, many endangered, a repetitive grid of identical plants, with grazing only for goats and cattle inbetween.
We reach Tanah Rata in the last hour before sunset and I book into Durian Chalets, a set of wooden huts in gardens five minutes away from the town centre. With the place to myself, it's cosy and with a small peaceful terrace, the perfect place to sit out the showers.
I head into Tanah Rata to pick up my park permit. Most of the restaurants are floating just away from the pebbly shore. Some you have to wade through waters to reach. Boats, called over to the restaurants, cross the river to the park entrance regularly, for 1 ringgit.
