This morning’s plan was to trek up Bukit Teresek (Teresek Hill), but Lawrence and I did not want to slow down the others (!!!) so decided to skip this activity. We joined them at the Mutiara Resort for lunch, this is the only hotel in the park itself. Then we had a boat ride to an Orang Asli village, where the nomadic Batek ethnic group live. They asked us not to take photos of the villagers, so I will just describe them as having short curly black hair distinctly different from the long strait black hair of the Malays. The Orang Asli are considered as the aborigines of Malaysia and I think they look a bit like the peoples of New Guinea. They will stay in one place until resources become limiting, or if one of them dies, and then they will move on and set up a new living area.
This group live off the land as well as making money from tourism. The children do not go to school, but learn survival skills from a young age. The first survival skill we were shown was making fire. The villager demonstrating this made it seem so simple, so there was much competition between the guys in our group to see who could make fire. Success rate 25%.
You take a piece of wood from the Meranti tembaga tree, put a hole through the middle and make a groove underneath. Then you take a piece of rattan (vine) and pull this up and down in the groove while keeping the wood still with your feet. The friction generated causes embers to form in the centre of the piece of wood, and these are carefully transferred to some kindle and brought to life. Magic!
The second life skill was using a blow pipe and preparing the darts. Black-tipped darts were the poisonous ones, used when hunting birds and small animals. The poison comes from a nearby Ipoh tree; that’s the same tree which gives the town Ipoh its name.
Look carefully in the photo below and you should be able to see the dart leaving the blow pipe and passing the hut post. Hitting the yellow target hanging in the netting was much harder than it looked.
The living conditions here were very basic, yet there was always a neatness in the weaving of the mats and roof coverings, and they had a wonderful view to counter the roughness of their immediate surroundings. Their buildings protected them from the sun, yet provided for air flow through the latticed end walls.
As I mentioned before, there was not too much wildlife around, but today I spotted these:
We returned to the river and stopped later for another swimming option before returning to the boat jetty area. There we enjoyed some cold drinks and refreshments on one of the many floating restaurants before heading back to the resort for a BBQ dinner and games.
Click here to return to Exploring Taman Negara.
Click here to return to Travels in Malaysia 2019.
Click here to return to Helen Gray’s homepage.