Saturday, September 30, 2006

Taman Negara









For some reason Taylor's College decided to send all of their employees on a trip to one of four destinations. My first pick was to go to a beautiful beach and just relax, but I was late in submitting my request so I got my second choice. I got to go on a jungle trekking adventure in Taman Negara. Taman Negara is a virgin rainforest. Tiger, elephants and black panthers roam around in this national park. For some reason, I have become a jungle trekking expert. I have been on four jungle treks in the past two years. Here are my rankings.

1. North Eastern Cambodia (Forget the name of the place). Way off the tourist trail. We hooked the whole thing up ourselves. We saw some tribal people returning from a hunt with the greatest bow and arrow set I've ever seen. Sandra said they should be in a museum. I'll never forget that.
2. Taman Negara is great. I may go back again and do some things I didn't have time to do on this trip.
3. Chang Mai Thailand. Pretty touristy, but we had a great guide and the food was awesome. Visiting the hill tribes is a bit weird (seems like a freak show). The bamboo rafting was awesome.
4. Phuket Tailand. This was my first jungle trek and even at that time I felt it was lame. We rode on elephants, but you could tell that they lived in misery.

Note: The photo of me on that bridge was one of the scariest experiences of my life. It's the longest bridge of it's kind in the world. Crossing it took about 20 minutes. Whenever I looked down I almost fainted. I've always been afraid of heights and this just made things worse.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Damn, Jungle Joe! Nice pics...

Anonymous said...

Eh Dave...got anymore pics of that bridge..looks pretty freaky. Your starting to look more and more like a native...need to send you a couple of cases of Lakeport ASAP!

Anonymous said...

Yeah, but I was honestly too scared to take a photo while looking down. The bridge was wobbling out of control. You really needed to use both hand to hold the ropes.