Awash in the Jungle
When a few little mistakes on a riverside trail lead two hikers into a big adventure

This story appears in Seal Press'  The Unsavvy Traveler: Women's Comic Tales of Catastrophe, 2005

first met Tara at a Javanese guesthouse, the week after I was nearly attacked by four Indonesian men posing as travel agents. The men had lured me into their "touristic office" in eastern Java—not a big challenge for them, given the 110-degree heat that day and my impending one-hour wait for a bus—and then offered me "insider" information on a popular hiking area nearby and a wildly overpriced ticket for one of their tours there. When I refused the ticket, one man grew enraged. He began shoving me around, and then grabbed my shirt at the throat, crinkled it up in his hand and raised a fist as if he were going to punch me. His friends stood nearby, but none of them moved. I looked down at the angry man, who was several inches shorter than my five-foot-four frame, and shouted, "Watch it!" I don’t know if it was my height or the colloquialism, but he instantly let me go and didn’t even follow as I quickly left his office. I was furious and frightened over the incident, yet determined to continue exploring Asia. After I met Tara and found out we were heading in the same direction—west through Java and then north through Singapore and Malaysia—we decided to stick together for safety.

We were the most mismatched of travel companions. Tara’s an accountant from Ireland, who’s up by 7 a.m. every day, goes to sleep by 10 p.m. and follows a steady routine in between. I’m a writer from New England, whose brain won’t function before 10 a.m. and works best after 10 p.m., and I thrive on constant change. Tara is one of nine kids; I’m an only child. She hates the water; I love to scuba dive. She also prefers a slow, easy pace, while I thrive on pushing myself to the limit.

Despite our differences, Tara and I shared an interest in exploring, and we soon discovered that traveling in a pair opened up all sorts of doors: We felt more confident staying in strangers’ homes, hitchhiking through Malaysia and trekking on our own through a jungle. Three weeks after meeting, we decided to do a nine-day hike through a Malaysian rainforest to climb the region’s tallest mountain, Gunung Tahan. It was an eighty-five-mile trip, described by our guidebook as "the trek for the really adventurous," with elephants, tigers and spitting cobras. Adventurous we were; experienced we were not. Tara had spent time walking hills near her home in Ireland, but she’d never camped or taken any long-distance hikes. I’d camped dozens of times and covered quite a few trail miles, but my backcountry treks hadn’t taken me far from paved roads. And all I’d ever encountered were cows, garter snakes and a feral turkey.

The Malaysian jungle would be different than the pine and maple forests of New England or the oak and birch woodland around Tara’s home in Tipperary. The jungle, we imagined, would be wilder, damper, muddier and more humid, with tangled vines, moss-covered trees and underbrush dripping with fungus and odd creatures. I figured I would be fine; Tara’s only concern was maintaining her stamina for nine days.

This is the closest I’ve
come to hell, Tara declared, once she’d mustered the energy to talk.

Our hike to Gunung Tahan would take us through Taman Negara, a national park filled with palm trees, sandalwood, orchids and tualangs—some of the tallest trees in the world, measuring upwards of 250 feet. The park also contains deer, gibbons, geckos and birds, not to mention leeches, monitor lizards and forty-two thousand species of insects per hectare. It is home to Malaysia’s Orang Asli, or "original people": nomadic hunter-gatherers who live off the land or trade jungle resources like sandalwood and rattan for rice, teakettles and tarps with local Malaysian businessmen. In exchange for other items the tribespeople wanted, like radios, flashlights and massive quantities of Energizer batteries, several Orang Asli men used to lead tours to Gunung Tahan for Malaysia’s Department of Wildlife. (They no longer do so because the government is trying to move the tribes out of the jungle in order to "modernize and civilize" the country, according to several park rangers.)

The Malaysian government requires hikers to hire local guides to reach the mountain, due to the poorly marked route and tricky river crossings. But guides cost $250 per person, not including entrance fees and food, and Tara and I didn’t want to blow our budgets. We figured we could make it on our own for forty dollars, tops.

Since the monsoon rains were coming, it wasn’t the best time to be in the jungle, but the region had only been experiencing short late-day showers so we weren’t very concerned. It was also off-season, meaning we might be the only hikers along the trail. We talked to a few locals in Kuala Tahan, a small village at the start of the trek, at the southern end of Taman Negara: Saberi and CD, two friendly river guides in Taman Negara, and Ani, a thirty-year-old woman who was training to be a trail guide and had climbed Gunung Tahan three times. They had all grown up in Kuala Tahan, with the jungle as their backyard and playground. So when they told us we’d find our own way, no problem, that was all I needed to hear. This was an opportunity for adventure.

We set off at eleven o’clock one morning from Kuala Tahan. Since we didn’t want the rangers to know we weren’t taking the mandatory guides, we slipped past the park headquarters office and made our way into the woods. 

We walked along a moderately level trail that proved easy enough to follow, despite the absence of blazes (trail markers) and other hikers. Taman Negara is the world’s oldest and, in sections, densest rainforest. As we walked farther, large sections of the trail became covered in brush.

We had full camping gear and food for ten days, plus the only map we could find, a locally produced, hand-drawn, not-to-scale "artistic rendering," which was photocopied and given to backpackers like us—for free—by the manager of our guesthouse. It measured six by nine inches and contained sketches of hikers who appeared as tall as the mountains, and exotic-looking birds and butterflies three to four times larger than the hikers. The top of our mini map read, "An Unforgetable Vagation that is Close to Nature: Taman Negara." The most distinct element on this map was a dark, thick line that cut straight up the middle of the picture—Sungai Tahan, a mountain-fed, green-hued river measuring about seventy-five feet wide (though it can double in size during the monsoons).

According to our plan, we would spend the first two days of the trip wending our way through the thick forest, then another two days walking alongside, crossing over and, where possible, fording the river. After that, it was anybody’s guess—our map simply depicted a black line (the river), a triangle (the mountain) and an extraordinarily tall hiker leaping up the left side of the triangle in a single bound.

Tara and I took our time hiking that first day, stopping often to look at the unusual vegetation. One bush radiated fifteen-foot stems topped with leaves the size of doorways. Massive fig trees stood so wide it would take twelve people with outstretched arms to fit around each one. Others had twenty-foot-high buttresses that resembled fins on a rocket ship.

Typical river crossings in this dense Malaysian  jungle require hikers to traverse fallen logs.

The first night, we pitched our tent in the middle of a steep, slanting trail, unable to find a clearly marked campsite. After a quick dinner of noodle soup, we rolled into the tent and used bags and bug nets to create level sleeping surfaces. We had accidentally left the tent unzipped during dinner, and as I lay in bed, I could hear dozens of jungle ants scuttling around inside our nylon dome. Jungle ants are big enough to leave footprints along dirt trails and an inflamed lump where they bite you. They are not something you want to sleep with. After evicting the last one around midnight, my makeshift bedding shifted underneath me, and I fell asleep in a ditch, sandwiched between two rocks, a root running up my spine.

Twenty minutes into our hike the next day, we found a campsite located in a flat, dirt-packed clearing next to a stream, where we bathed and topped up our water bottles. Then we set off for a grueling hike across twenty-seven hilltops on a ridge called Bukit Malang, or "Unlucky Hill." We were still having trouble deciphering our map, and it grew dark again before we found the next campsite. This time we pitched our tent beside the trail, on top of leaves, roots and moss-covered branches, and I lay in bed listening to a chorus of jungle sounds—cicadas buzzing, birds squawking and strange, unidentifiable chewing noises. I wished we were closer to the river. There is something very eerie about being deep in the woods, in an unfamiliar forest, with big animals and a bad map. I have always found being near or having access to water reassuring—not only to keep hydrated and clean, but also for the sense of space it provides and the sense, however false, of having an escape route from the forest. I barely slept that night, especially after hearing two dead trees tumble over nearby.

"We really need to scope out our campsites better before pitching tent," I said to Tara the next morning.

The sights along the way made up for some of the discomfort. We trekked through brilliant, sunlit forests with aqua-colored palm trees, bamboo stands and wait-a-whiles (long, prickly vines that look like whips covered in thorns—if you get snagged by one, you’re supposed to "wait a while" and take your time unhooking yourself). We didn’t see any elephants, tigers or spitting cobras—just as well, since we didn’t have a defense plan figured out anyway—but we did spot a three-horned frog, a brown snake and a wild boar.

The end of day three took us through dense jungle and along a hillside where the narrow, steep path was slippery from wet roots and yellow, clay soil. Leeches were plentiful, so we had to do regular "leech checks" as we walked to see if they had planted their suckers into our legs. As the path wound down along the river’s edge, walking grew more challenging. Leaves, fallen trees and big branches littered the trail, but it never occurred to us why there was so much forest debris along the embankment. Tara and I fought our way through the brush until we could eventually walk along a section of dry, rocky riverbed. When we stopped for water around four o’clock, I watched Tara slump onto a rock and fade.

"This is the closest I’ve come to hell," she declared, once she’d mustered the energy to talk. If she had known what lay ahead when we set out, she never would have followed me thirty miles into the jungle.

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