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The second real day at Nusa Camp had two main events: making
it through Gua Telinga and hiking to a waterfall in the rainforest.
Gua is Malay for "cave". Making it through Taman
Negara's Gua Telinga means finding your way through a cave full
of (smallish) bats. Occassionally, we had to crawl, and it surely
was a stretching and squeezing workout as it got it very narrow
many times. It was rather dimly lit so I was happy we had our
guide and his torchlight with us. It was also quite dirty and
muddy. I didn't feel like saying it to the others, but most of
the mud we walked on or touched with our hands on the walls, stones,
or floor, was probably bat shit. I guess they knew it anyway.
The whole caving experience took about 30 minutes and wasn't nearly
as frightening as it may sound. In fact, it was a lot of fun.
For our caving adventure, we were joined by a group of four women travellers, apparently without a guide, as they took some rather unfortunate shortcuts in the cave. Two of the four women were French, apparently sisters and quite good looking. I guess the recent Latino butt craze in the U.S. will give them less than perfect marks, but who cares. I enjoyed their company.
The afternoon waterfall thingy was another gimmick by the tour
providers: Basically, it was a hike in the forest, again in Pahang
rather than in Taman Negara, to a small waterfall where we had
a swim. The only remarkable thing was the advent of a host of
wasps when we were in the water. The wasps had been attracted
by our sweaty clothing and seemed to feed off it. In particular,
they liked my socks. When we had to dress again, we had to dance
around our clothes in rather slow moves to shy the wasps away
while avoiding being stung. It's a small wonder but we got away
without anyone getting hurt.
Back in the camp we watched a snake of about one meter length
wind its way around the wooden beams of the shack where we usually
had dinner. According to our guide, this pitch-green snake was
very poisonous and of type python. I'm confused. I thought pythons
always strangle their prey to death but were not poisonous. However,
I decided not to debate this with the snake.
The porcupine that had visited us for dinner the days before
decided to stay away. Maybe we really smelled badly.
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