I'll just come out and say it: I was
wearing flip flops. Old ones. This may surprise you, given that I was
hiking six hours each way to spend the night in the muddy equatorial
rainforest of Taman Negara in Malaysia, but I had two reasons.
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| Warning sign as you leave the boardwalks of the easy tourist area for the real jungle. |
First, previous experience with leeches
showed that flip flops allow the best access for removal of the
little bloodsucking bastards.
Second, they were pretty much my only
option after I retired my (somewhat notorious) oversized sandals
after they became Grade A Disease Vectors in Myanmar (don't ask).
They worked well for the first 4 hours
on Day One, then their age became apparent, as the anchoring thong in
the front popped out with increasing frequency. I bought the things
two years ago in Nepal, and they had served me well, but in
hindsight, for perhaps too long.
I didn't mind sticking the little
plastic plug back in, it was the fact that doing so meant stopping,
which gave a much longer opportunity to the vampirous tube-beasts who
were swarming around, doing their little head-waving leech aerobics
as they smelled the approach of something tasty.
Have you ever seen them do this? It
would be cute if it wasn't so sinister. They look like tiny
hyperactive Ray Charles impersonators...who feed on your blood.
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| There was time to stop and admire the scenery on Day One |
Since leeches don't spread any diseases
or do any real harm, my plan had been to just let them do their thing
and drop off when they were done. How very Buddhist of me.
Yeah, no. That plan lasted until I saw
the first one squirming out from my ankle, where it had attached and
bitten through the skin. But the leeches weren't the worst thing.
This was the world's oldest rainforest,
where intense competition has driven evolution for 130 million years
(the area is just slightly above the equator, so even the ice ages
didn't disrupt things). What do you think rules this forest?
Elephants, monkeys, or tigers? Only on
the postcards. All of these are reportedly found in the park, but to
my eye it was clear who dominates this dense world where a single hectare holds 14,000 plant species, 200 mammals, and 240 types of
trees.
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| One of the construction workers alongside the normal workers |
Ants rule this place. Mean ones.
I stopped to take a picture of the
first river of tiny black bodies, but by the tenth I was just
stepping over the glossy stream. It was when I got careless that I
learned more about them. To my disappointment I have been unable to
find exactly what the little buggers were (hell, maybe they were
termites!) so I'm going to make some shit up that makes sense to me.
There were tiny workers in
superhighways half a dozen lanes wide and stretching for unbelievably
long distances, which I learned when they commandeered a guide rope
left to help me climb a steep slope.
Don't grab that rope.
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| Don't grab that rope |
Then there were the construction
workers, unbelievably larger than the workers. At first I thought
these were soldiers, and feared them mightily, but now I suspect
their job is to clear fallen leaves and sticks that obstruct the
path. They seemed to pace the edge of the stream, and they're not the
soldiers because those, I definitely met.
The soldiers. Assholes! I took off my
sandal the first night to find four or five ants stuck to its edges,
legs waving furiously. Curious. They were much larger than the
workers, but not nearly as big as the construction workers. It took
me a minute to figure it out.
They'd bitten my sandal, and they
weren't letting go. I flicked at them. Brushed at them. Still there.
I flicked harder and the bodies fell away...but the head stayed put,
anchored into my thin sole with insectile tenacity.
So when my sandals would come off
anywhere near an ant stream? (And everywhere
is near an ant stream.) It hurt. They're good at getting you
right in the tender spot on the bottom of the arch too. You have to
lift your foot and rip them off, sometimes coming back for the head.
I wasn't enjoying this process much as
I started walking through the mud. Then I reached a nice clearing by
the river. It was pretty...and I definitely hadn't passed it on the
way out.
Crap.
I backtracked, took another path and
came to a wide shallow river...that I also did not cross the first
day.
My sandals had given up completely and
the thong was coming out every couple steps in the sucking mud, so I
had to just take them off and go barefoot. In the jungle. Where
billions of members of two particular species were very ready to go
right through my skin, and I didn't know what else.
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| Someone left these bloody footprints in the hide after their own meeting with the leeches |
I backtracked. Bled. Sweated, stepped,
and slipped. And bled some more.
Getting lost in the jungle sucks.
Especially during the daily Leech Feeding, which is 24 hours long.
The girls and the German were long
gone, so I was very much on my own, and sound just doesn't travel in
vegetation that thick anyway.
I tried another path and ended up at
the stream again, mirrored by tiny red seeps from my feet. I
considered walking out via the water, trusting it would lead to the
main river, but if that didn't work then I'd have a hell of a time
finding where to start looking for trails again.
I turned back again and started jogging
to give the biters as little chance as possible. Left hand on my
shoulder bag, bulky with camera, journal, long pants and raincape
thing, my right held the quickly-decaying plastic bag that held the
remnants of my food, and my elbow pressed the water bottle pressed
against my side.
When I slipped down a slope it gave the
leeches a chance to climb all over me, but I think I escaped
unscathed. I kept running. I was pouring sweat, feeling incredibly
stupid, and lost in the jungle on my birthday.
Is that a good omen or a bad one?
Whatever it is, I decided “Screw this, I'm taking the boat.”
I finally found the right path, jogged
down it, and half an hour later reached the river at Kuala Trenggan,
but instead of a village I found abandoned houses with broken
windows. Not stopping to think about what would happen if it was
totally deserted and I had to start the six hour trek back, I headed
to the water...
Where I found the girls. They were
surprised to see me. Literally within a minute or two the boat showed
up. If I hadn't jogged, had gotten lost once more or fallen a few
more times, I would have missed it and there was no way to call for
another. But I made it.
THAT, I'll take as a positive omen for
the year ahead.
