Tinkerbell lives in Tanah Rata
I can almost hear the chorus of resounding slaps from jungle-ophiles everywhere, but honesty requires the admission that I was a little disappointed by Taman Negara, peninsular Malaysia's largest national park. Before we'd even left Australia it was the first place I pointed to in our guidebook and announced to Doug "We have to go there, it sounds amazing".
It's not that Taman Negara wasn't amazing. It was certainly big. Big as in, trees that put skyscrapers to shame and bugs right out of B-grade creature features. The problem was simply that it was such hard work. Doug and I have done plenty of hiking and we've done some very decent jungle exploration in other parts of Malaysia, but never have I slogged so hard for so little reward. There were spectacular sights at every turn, but unless I wanted to expose myself to hordes of marauding leeches and stand ankle deep in slush, I couldn't stop to look at anything. We were always on an arduous mission to get to whatever leech/mud free spot we'd picked to trek to. Don't get me wrong, I'm not afraid of a few leeches, but I wouldn't trade the several bites I got for the several hundred I would have had if we'd stopped every time we wanted to. The moral of that story is probably that if you wish to visit, don't do so in the wet season, not even the very beginning of it.
Almost every traveller to Taman Negara goes in the hope of seeing some of its famous wildlife. Most people are sensible enough to realise that they won't see the very rare and elusive big cats, or an elephant, but I suppose everyone hopes deep down they'll spot at least a tapir, or some monkeys and deer. In the entire time we were in Taman Negara, though we tried to be quiet and unobtrusive, we never saw more than a single rat. None of the other visitors we spoke to had seen any animals either. In the hide guestbooks, noone reported any mammal sightings, just a lot of bugs. That wouldn't have surprised us so much if we hadn't been positively spoiled with critters great and small on the east coast of the country, but it probably has something to do with my first point, that Taman Negara is so big that animals can go off and hide far away where people won't bother them. At the end of a long days sliding, slipping, squelching, hauling and heaving, mud-caked and sweat-soaked, peeling off blood sodden shoes and socks, I'd wonder at the fact that I hadn't seen so much as a skink, where half that effort expended on Tioman would have left me simply boggled at the catalogue of swooping, skipping, slithering and swinging wild things I'd seen.
Imagine my delight when we discovered that only a couple of hours away there is a slice of utter loveliness in the Cameron Highlands.
After 9 days of trudging around Taman Negara it took Doug a little convincing to get me out of the sweet, misty highlands town of Tanah Rata with its scrumptious food, bright flower gardens and adorable little shops and out onto the walking trails again, but it only took 10 steps into the magical world of high altitude rainforest for me to class it as an unsurpassed faeryland.
Oh I loved it there. Not even the bright platinum and aquamarine beauty of the Perhentians inspired such location-admiration in me. The thick mossy carpets, mountain springs and wild orchids of the Cameron Highlands stole my heart in an instant.
There were no leeches, I could stop and gaze as long as I liked at dinosaur-sized ferns and epiphyte-laden branches that many serious gardeners would knock out their eye teeth with a chisel to have in their backyards. There were lichen and fungi and tiny flowers in every colour of the rainbow. There were broad, solid leaf-strewn paths and even walking for hours up and down and around the contours of the hillsides I never broke a sweat in the cool, fresh air that floats around the trails at 5,500 feet. The intense roar of insect sound that was an inescapable part of Taman Negara's sensory environment was replaced by the purest bell-sounds of individual birds and I could identify the location of each froggy croak and cricket whirr. Every now and then a steep cliff (usually graced by a gurgling stream or sometimes a cascade) would herald a break in the close canopy and a view for miles across watery sunlit valleys and cloud wreathed peaks.
Where else would faeries with good taste want to live if they existed? Not spiteful Grimm-like gnats of faeries, but real tinkerbelly sprites with gossamer wings. They'd blend in with the bloom-hopping butterflies.
How could I possibly complain about the minor effort I'd expended when the path suddenly dropped into a flower farm in a valley thick with pretty perfumes and then wound back along the road to a 1920's era teahouse hawking fresh pots of local brew and sporting a verandah overlooking the emerald slopes of the plantation?
I didn't feel like complaining one bit. I just plonked my butt down on a chair and tucked into a scone while Doug took some photos up by the road. A Malay lady with her family approached me and asked "Are you alone? Just one person? Would you like to take tea with us?" and her children all waved and grinned at me and shouted greetings. Later, they asked many questions about our travels and wished us well on our journey so sincerely that it kept us smiling all the way back to the village.
Admittedly, we only saw one snake and a few cute birds in the Cameron Highlands, but I hardly felt ripped off.
I couldn't have asked for a more perfect filling, sandwiched between the slog at Taman Negara and the reasonably hectic house hunting we are now doing in Ipoh. The Cameron Highlands were the perfect restorative. It's amazing what you find when you travel a couple of kilometres into the sky. Heaven is a lot closer than it seems.
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