Highland Fling

Qantas The Australian Way, November 2012

More and more visitors are passing through Kuala Lumpur, either to break a long-haul trip between Europe and Australia or to see this fascinating city in its own right. While you’re in town, here are three different and fascinating places to see within three and a half hours of KL’s international airport.

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It is 8 O’clock in the evening when I hear a hammering on my door. It is Sabri, the front office manager of the Mutiara, the only resort within the boundaries of Malaysia’s ancient Taman Negara rainforest. And he is excited. “Elephant!” he shouts. And there, maybe 20 metres from my chalet, is a wild Asian elephant, wrenching a five metre tall travelers palm tree out of the ground with its trunk. Sabri shakes his head. “I’ve worked here 20 years. This has never happened.”

Elephants on the doorstep are far from the norm here, but it’s proof that big game still well resides within this accessible and bounteous chunk of genuinely pristine land. Taman Negara, which covers more than 4,000 square kilometers of vibrant jungle and has been protected since 1937, is believed to be among the oldest rainforests in the world, at 130 million years.

Part of what sets Taman Negara apart is getting there. The usual approach is to get to a place called Kuala Tembeling, about three hours from Kuala Lumpur, and then to board a thin, wooden, tin-roofed longboat for a further two to three hours up the Tembeling river to reach the park itself. Alternatively you can get most of the way to the park by road much faster, but there’s no fun in that.

The boat ride is real Heart of Darkness stuff, powering up the river amid the relentless green mass of the jungle, occasionally passing kampongs (settlements) on the shore. The river gives a perfect perspective on the jungle’s scale and density. A rainforest is a fight for sunlight, and therefore life. It is a dense crowd of plants striving upwards by various devious means: the bullying heavyweights, like the meranti trees, reaching the top through sheer strength and bulk; the parasites, strangler figs, vines and rattan, clawing their way up on the back of stronger rivals, killing their hosts to thrive; the floor level plants, waiting for a gap in the canopy caused by a falling giant in order to seize their moment in the sun – literally – and grow.

The river is where one really gets a sense of all this, where the plants and trees on the bank, having run out of land, lean over of the water in a tumbling, rolling avalanche, as if they might leap it in search of space and light. Jungles on this scale would be unthinkable to walk through away from the trails. You couldn’t make a dozen metres of progress through the teeming, buzzing green.

Within the park itself, the Mutiara has pleasant and comfortable huts and chalets. Forget about TV and internet, but they’ve got everything else you’ll need. On the other side of the river, outside the park and beyond the reach of preservation orders, the town of Kuala Tahan offers many other accommodation options and shuttles people across the river to the park.

Sabri – who grew up in the area and loves it passionately – tells me that tourists almost never see elephants no matter how far they trek in the jungle, and certainly not the tigers who live deep in the forest. That may be just as well; a wild elephant is a beautiful creature up close, oddly peaceful for its evident strength and bulk, but would be dangerous if alarmed. Most travelers will have to content themselves with barking deer, wild boar, monkeys (the Mutiara keeps them out of its restaurant with a deeply unconvincing toy tiger at the entrance), maybe a tapir, and a whole lot of insects.

But there’s a great deal to be gained from a visit. On forest walks, locals will tell you how they find a purpose for pretty much anything: this plant is for pregnant women, this one cleans your blood, this one helps if you have gas. A canopy walkway, over 500 metres long, provides a unique glimpse from above of the many layers of a rainforest; it’s safe, but a touch hair-raising, and you’ll find you have Dean Martin’s Sway running through your head by the time you get down again. Boat trips upriver, over choppy rapids, are beautiful, and the truly adventurous can take longer treks and camp; the longest, to Gunung Tahan, the highest mountain in peninsula Malaysia, takes a week.

Taman Negara also offers the chance to meet one of Malaysia’s indigenous tribes, the Orang Asli, a nomadic group who tend to live along the riverbanks. There is always a certain queasiness at these visits, as they feel voyeuristic, but the tribes greet the arrival of tourists with equanimity and put on demonstrations of how they hunt using blowpipes and darts (in the case of my visit, using a ragged teddy bear pinned to a board as a target). They have fascinating customs: if a member of their group dies, everyone else must relocate, leaving all their settlements and most of their possessions behind and setting up afresh elsewhere. They don’t bury their dead, but build platforms at the tops of trees and hoist the bodies up there to rest. They have strict rules about nature: don’t cut a tree unless you’re going to get a practical use from it; hunt no mammals that live on the jungle floor, only the squirrels and monkeys in the trees. They greatly fear thunder.

Cameron Highlands

Three hours drive north, the Cameron Highlands give you Malaysia in its colonial-era colours. A hill station mostly around 1500 metres in altitude, tourists love it because it gives a cool respite from the humid stickiness of the rest of peninsula Malaysia.

You come here to trek, to see tea plantations, or to do absolutely nothing in one of the area’s spas. It’s probably the tea that creates the lasting images for visitors: tea was first planted here in 1929 on the Boh Tea Estate, which is still here today, and several other estates offer tours. Some have factories where you can watch the process in action, but really it’s the fields themselves that are mesmerizing: neat, sculptured, undulating carpets of livid green along the hills and up the sides of the mountains. These are not just tourist attractions, and produce a wide range of teas you can buy all over the highlands; spare a thought for the tea pickers, who earn 20 sen (six Australian cents) per kilo and will try to haul in 300 kilograms of leaves on a good day.

Other attractions include treks – there are 14 marked trails, and no end of guides available to help – guided forest walks, strawberry and butterfly farms. Rapid tours will take in all these, plus the tea plantations, in a day, or even a morning. But many people come here just to relax.

Accommodation covers a range of options. At the top of the tree is the Cameron Highlands Resort, a Tudor-styled Colonial building of fireplaces and reading rooms and snooker tables reminiscent of Singapore’s Raffles Hotel, where you return from a trek to have your muddy boots whisked away from you and returned pristine to your door without you even asking. Also available are a host of boutiques, some within strawberry fields, and backpackers are catered for too. The better places put particular effort into their spas.

One reason people come to the highlands is because of the enduring mystery of Jim Thompson, better known to most people for his old house in Bangkok, today a museum showcasing the extraordinary range of antiques he collected in his days building the silk business that still bears his name today. In 1967 he went for a walk in the Cameron Highlands and was never seen again, triggering a host of unsuccessful searches and a wide range of conspiracy theories. A guide called Madi, apart from being a naturalist and authority on orchids, runs a Jim Thompson mystery tour out of the Cameron Highlands resort, which is fascinating stuff, starting from the last place Thompson was seen alive – but read up first and be prepared for Madi’s version of events to differ markedly from anybody else’s.

Melaka

Malacca (or Melaka) offers a convenient trip for history buffs, since it has kept alive the spirit of the many and varied forces that have invaded the place over the years. It gained world heritage site status from Unesco in 2008.

Malacca today combines Portuguese and Dutch architecture, Peranakan food, a thriving Chinatown, and plenty of representation of Muslim, Catholic and Buddhist ways of life. While just as hot and humid as any other Malaysian city, its sites are very close to one another, and anyone who finds themselves flagging can hire one of the many flower-adorned rickshaw.

The focal point of Melacca is Bukit St Paul, or St Paul’s Hill, where a Portuguese church was built back in 1521. The hill itself offers views over the city and to the shipping in the Straits of Melacca, with Sumatra on the other side; around the hill are a host of museums, churches and other landmarks, including the unmistakable salmon pink town hall called the Stadthuys, the remains of the Porta de Santiago fortress, and a maritime museum within a replica of the Portuguese ship Flora de la Mar. Less than two hours south of KL, it’s an easy place to be transported to a different era.