We arrived afloat to our next jungle destination, Taman Negara. It is one of the oldest rainforests in the world, estimated to be 130 million years old.
It is a national park with minimal settlement, mainly consisting of floating houses which gives it a little bit of a verdant  “Wild West” (wild east?) atmosphere.
River cowboys playing chess.
We stayed in a cabin by the edge of the jungle and woke up to this view in the morning. One morning I was astonished to see a small hand withdrawing our window curtains, followed by a thievish bearded face… startled I screamed and woke up Joen, who immediately thought a snake was in the room and made a hell of a debacle of terrified shouts and rumbles. I took him hours to recover and calm down.
The simian culprit to the right, we called him Fagin. Monkeys are such little muggers and apparently do not hesitate from breaking and entering.
We went for a hike but were sadly stopped by the abundance of leeches, I have never experienced anything like it. There are not many things that will drive me out of the jungle but we would have become anaemic had we continued. To my deep distress, I had to admit that I am not much of a Mungo Park after all.
Luckily, the leeches were out of reach in the boat that we chartered to go up the river.
It was such a “Heart of Darkness” kind of setting, and I could safely go back pretending I was an 18th century explorer again.
They dropped us off at a leech free area (!!!) and we hiked to some beautiful rapids where I, very bravely I might add, jumped into very dark waters.
Joen always walks with a large stick, not for support but for snake protection. I tend to tease him about this, but we actually ran into a very poisonous looking snake, winding across our path.
We didn’t have the presence of mind to photograph it, but I thought it looked like the green/black one in the top right corner, whereas Joen thought it looked like the more fluorescent green one to the left. This probably demonstrates the difficulty for witnesses to identify criminals in police lineups pretty well.