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I set off from Tanah Rata once again unsure of my destination that night.  All I knew was that it would be a far easier day than the one I had getting up to the Cameron Highlands.  For the first 15km I hardly touched the pedals as gravity did its thing as I zoomed down the mountain. I think that I was enjoying the view too much as Calamity James struck and I ended up 10 feet down a drainage ditch and flew face first over the handlebars into the smelliest mud imaginable.

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Luckily, I was riding an uphill section at the time, so was not carrying too much speed, and hence no broken bones. What happened was that I was cycling along when this bug, which was a hybrid between a wasp and a moth, landed on my right arm and either decided to have a munch or just stung me, I’m not sure which but it bloody hurt.

As I went to swat it off the bike lurched left and I thought that I had managed to catch its momentum, but alas no, and the bike went straight down a 10ft drainage ditch with me still attached to it.  As it is rainy season the drainage ditch was full of mud and vegetation. When the bike hit the bottom I went superman style over the handle bars and landed face first in the mud.   

When I got up the bloody bug was still attached to my arm, but it never lasted much longer I can assure you. Two locals on motorbikes stopped and helped me pull the bike out of the ditch and back to the main road.  When I tried to explain to the two guys how I had ended up in the ditch they couldn’t stop laughing.  Even I could see the funny side, but man did I stink and I still had another 100km to cycle.  

All along the drainage ditches are pipes which are pumping water back up the hill which I assume will be used in the greenhouses which line the upper valley.  The water is pumped under high pressure and every now and again a section of the pipe has split and you get a fountain of water erupting (think american movie where a car hits a fire hydrant).  As soon as I reached one of these I was straight of the bike and had a shower.   I was going to get the soap out but public nudity is slightly frowned upon the further east I go.

Nothing on the bike was broken although the front derailleur took a bash. I got the tools out and tried to realign it but in the hot sun and with a fully loaded bike I couldn’t get the gears to sit properly without grinding.  I gave up and just aligned the bottom two chain rings and would have to do without the top ring until I got to a bike shop.  As I was still in the mountains I was not too concerned that I didn’t have the top gears and could still roll along at around 25kmph on the flatter sections. Any faster and I was a proverbial hamster on a wheel with my little legs spinning uncontrollably.

At least I was in one piece and back flying down the valley.  The view was spectacular as the road followed a stream and just above the stream I could see the huts of the indigenous people who still live in the forest.  That must be a hard existence though.

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It is amazing that you still have people who live this ‘simple’ type of life when less than 3 hours away by car you have Kuala Lumpur which is one of the most modern cities in Asia.  Malaysia has such a diverse history and culture that you do not really see until you take the time to look, and cycling definitely gives you that time.

The flip side to the simple life that the indigenous people lead is the impact of modernisation that you see all across Malaysia as the growing cities need to keep the lights on.  In many of the upper tributaries I cycled past Hydro Electric Power Stations that were being built.

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As I zipped down the mountain you could see scale of deforestation that was taking place as the numbers of logging trucks on the road increased:

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There really is little natural forest left once you get below about 500 metres, and once the natural forest has been stripped out it is often replaced by oil palm plantations.

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In the picture above the uniform trees on the left is oil palm whilst the ‘barren’ area has been graded or stepped ready for the next oil palms to be planted.  In a way it is another sign of progress because native trees in the ground are not worth much to the economy of any country and as you see everywhere across Asia the speed of modernisation is like a galloping horse.

This was the main reason that I was now cycling the 300km or so that I needed to cover to get to Taman Negara National Park as it is a sprawling rainforest that has been largely undisturbed since the park was created in 1938.  The rainforest in Taman Negara is said to be 130 million years, and depending on the condition of the road ahead of me it would take 2 or 3 days of cycling to get to the town of Kuala Tahan which is the main entry point and base for treks through the jungle. The park is reputed to be home to tigers although I doubted very much that I would be seeing one, but you never know.

That night my target was a more manageable 130km to Kuala Lipis.  This still represented one very long day in the saddle as although the first 15km had been downhill with very little pedalling I was now on the ‘dragon’s back’ and the road was a constant roller coaster ride as it went straight over the ridges in the landscape.  None of these were very steep, it was the constant nature of them that began to take its toll and I was in need of food.  The only problem was that I had passed nowhere to stop in the last couple of hours.  There really is nothing but trees in this part of Malaysia, and you can see why there is so much deforestation taking place.

The thought of food would have to wait as on the next uphill section the bike suddenly felt very squishy and I was bouncing out of my saddle.  I knew what this meant and I looked down at the rear tire and yep I had a slow puncture.  The tyre was not flat but was slowly deflating.  I pulled over and pumped it back up as much as I could as the section of road I was on was too narrow to try and fix it safely so I needed to carry on for a bit.

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When I removed the tyre from the wheel it was obvious what the problem was – the tyre had split along the tread and small stones had worked their way into the split and eventually broken through the lining to puncture the tube.  I replaced the tube with a new one (i would fix the puncture at the hotel later) and put some tape on the inside of the tyre.  I had nothing to fill the split in the tyre though and the only thing that I could think of was to crush some leaves and stick them into the split.  I mixed the crushed leaves with glue and used these to fill the split.  I then got a brew on while I waited for the glue to set.  Believe it or not it actually worked and when I pulled over 5km after setting off to check the glued leaves were still in place; they were and doing a great job of preventing new stones from getting lodged in the split.

I only needed the tyre to get me to Kuala Lipis where I would find a bike shop the following morning to change the tyre.  Hopefully the bike shop would not be busy as they now had to change my tyre and fix the gears, and I still had well over 160 km to cover the next day.  On flat coastal roads this would take me a good 10 hours to cover and given that I was still in the hills I may have to cover the remaining distance over a couple of days.

I still had the small matter of finding food and just when I was about to pull over for a pot noodle I came across this food stall by the roadside.

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They had a sign which said Roti Canai that I would of had in a heartbeat but they had sold out.  What they did have though was something that I had never seen before called Roti John so I said that I would take one of those not knowing what it was.  As long as it was food it would be fine.

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It turned out to be a very sweet omelete sandwich – bread, egg and lettuce topped with a sweet sauce and about a foot long.  Just what the doctor ordered.  They also had a sugar cane machine.  It was like I had stumbled across nirvana (I may have just made this saying up but at this point I was too happy to care)

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The sugar rush that I would have once I had left was going to be amazing and I was one happy camper.  Even the lad sat at the table next to me who was playing a video game on his phone at full volume was not going to interrupt my natural high.

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My sugar charged body was ready to hit the hills and I decided that instead of stopping in around 20 km at Sungai Koyan I would push on another 45km to Kuala Lipis.  This would give me a shot at getting all the way to Taman Negara the next day.

I rolled into Kuala Lipis just as the sun was going down.  There is an old and a new part of town and I headed for the old part as it is on a bend of a river and fancied that as the view to wake up to.

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I found what I term a ‘Chinese’ flop house and got a room at the front overlooking the river.  The only problem was that the room was on the fourth floor.  It took me 4 trips to get all of the bags and the bike into the room so you could say I had walked upto the 28th floor (I will let you check maths on this one) by the time that I had finished.

All that was left to do now was the normal routine of washing the cycling clothes, washing me and then heading out to get some food.  Once I had eaten I asked the locals where a bike shop was for the morning and the nearest one was only a couple of streets from where I was staying.  Once found it wasn’t long before I was back in my room and asleep as I had another very long day in the saddle ahead of me.

The next morning I woke up early as I wanted to get to the bike shop before it got busy and the view out of my window was worth all of the flights of stairs the night before.
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This was the first place that I had stayed that did not have a kettle in the room.  Instead they had a flask and you had to go to reception and use the water fountain to fill it with boiling water.  Still, without much effort I had a cuppa to wake up to.
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Without having breakfast I took the bike straight round to the bike shops that I had found the night before.  The first shop was a ‘mom and pop’ type of shop where they sold lots of kids scooters and paraphernalia but did not have a mechanic.  The owner just looked at my gears and said that he couldn’t fix them.  He also only had cheap Chinese tyres which would probably last about 500 km before needing changing so I didn’t bother buying one.  The second place that I found was even worse as the owner went and got a pair of pliers and started trying to bend the metal on my derailleur

I put a quick stop to that and asked if him if I could borrow his tools to fix myself.

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It took me about 40 minutes of fine adjustments and riding up and down the road before I eventually got all of the gears into a sweet spot.  The shop didn’t have any tyres that I wanted and my leaves were still in place so I just decided that I would carry on with that until I got to the next big city.

It was time to head back to the hotel and repeat my mammoth stair climb to get all my kit back onto the bike.  I was  now wondering whether the 5 minute view was worth it as I was dripping with sweat by the time that I had finished loading all of the panniers and bags onto the bike.  By the time I was ready to roll it was past 10am which meant that as I was still in the hills there was no way I was not going to cover the 150km or so that I needed to cover to get to Taman Negara before it went dark.  Instead, my target that evening was to get to Jerantut which lay about 80km away.

After 6 weeks on the bike even 80km throught the hills does not seem that far and when you only have a relitively short distance to cover you cycle with a different mindset.  The pace drops and you take side roads instead of the most direct route.  I found myself on one of these and it turned into a stroke of genius which meant that I could get to Taman Negara that night.

The path that I was following took me to a river and I got talking to one of the boat guys at the dock who told me that there was a path on the other side of the river which would take me to Taman Negara.  The path was not on either the Locus map that I use or google maps but if this guy said it was there it was good enough for me.  He called over one of the lads who were sat around and spoke to him in Malay (I think) and the man told me to follow the lad which I did.  He led me down to the river and whistled at a passing boat that then turned and came towards us.  After some discussion he agreed to take me across for a few ringgits.

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Once on the other side of the river the boatman pointed me in the direction of the track and I pushed my bike about 100m along the river bank before finding the track.

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I still had at least a good 50km to cycle but looking at the map I estimated that this little short cut would save me the same amount of distance.  I had a couple of hours of daylight left which meant that I would once again arrive in the dark but hey ho.

For the next hour or so I cycled through small villages but did not see a single vehicle on the road.  My only company were the odd cow that roamed freely.  No idea who owned them or how they ever found their cows again.  Maybe they are like homing pigeons and head back home at night?

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I was nearly out of water and stopped at a house to ask if they could give me some water which they did. The houses that I passed were back to being very basic wooden houses but at least they had electricity.

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The track that I was following had now joined up with a slightly larger road and the odd vehicle passed me and I was back on the map.

A little further up this road an area of land was being cleared and I saw two guys sat by the roadside just up from where the digger was felling trees.  As I approached I found out why the guys were sat there as a tree came crashing across the road.

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The guys jumped up and one of them had a chainsaw.

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Within three minutes the tree had been chopped, the pieces removed and they returned to sitting back on the grass just up from the digger. A perfect example of teamwork in action.

I was now passing loads of fruit trees which were full to bursting with my favourite fruit – hairy lychees or Rambutan.

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One of the villagers was busy pulling them off one of his trees and shared them with me when I stopped to watch.

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Shortly after this I rejoined the main road.  For any cyclists who are reading this then this is the sign that you need to look out for if you are cycling out of Taman Negara towards the Cameron Highlands.  If you stay on the main road then it is over 160km from Kuala Tahan to Kuala Lipis.  If you turn off the Jerantut road here and follow the track to the river it is just over 100km to Kuala Lipis. (take a look at my GPS tracks page for exact route info)

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Now I was back on the main road to Kuala Tahan it was head down to cover the last 20km or so to town and just as it was going dark I passed under the arches which signaled my arrival in Kuala Tahan.

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After cycling over 200km through the hills in a couple of days I was not sure that I would be up for treking the next morning as my legs could do with a day off.  This meant that for the second time I would be spending at least 3 days in the same place. As I had now covered over 3000 km this wouldn’t be a bad thing.

All that was left to do was to find a place to stay and boy did I find a gem but more about that later as I need to get on the road and on with the little matter of cycling around the world.

Cheers

Stewart

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The road to Taman Negara (Malaysia)
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