Jungle trip to see the Rafflesia
I didn’t think I was going for rainforest trekking, so all the clothes I packed are shirts or dresses for daily office wear. I was told to wear long pants and long sleeves shirt to Cameron Highland because the cold temperature on the highland. That’s the only long sleeves shirt and long pant I had with me. So, me, dressing like I am going to a meeting, was heading to the jungle.
We did a short briefing at the beginning of the trekking by the bamboo bridge.
1. Don’t touch anything. Even some of the mushrooms are poisonous. If you touch the mushrooms or other plants, and later when you get sweaty you touch your face and your eyes, you may get blind.
2. If you see a snake, just stop and let it pass.
3. There are a lot of insects, do use bug spray but don’t use a lot, because there’s a certain type of bee will be attracted by the smell.
We first across a so-called bridge. At first, we were laughing at the bridge in the rain
For someone like me who is a clean freak, I was trying to step on the rocks or dryer places so that my shoes won't be too dirty. But I soon gave up this idea: the road is so slippery and even just keep balance on the trail is difficult enough.
The tour guide started to talk about the tips about how to survive in a jungle, as we stepped deeper into the forest.
We also walked by a bulk boar “home”. The tour guide pointed at and told us it was a female wild boar and say it is fine, it won't attack us, but if it is a male bulk, we will be in danger because male wild boar will attack humans and bite you. People lives in the jungle sometimes hunt the wild boars, so they get really aggressive and hurt people. When we trekking in the forest, we can clearly hear the sound of bulk boar. I was really worried what if we ran into a male bulk boar.
But, he said, there's a way to save yourself if you see a wild bulk: just climb the tree. They have long teeth in front so they won't able to climb a tree. So all you need to do is just climb a tree.
He said like it is a super easy thing. The problem is how can I climb a tree??
He picked some blue hairy berries and told me this is eatable and we can eat if we don’t have food in the jungle. We all tasted a couple of berries. It is a little bit sour and tasted like blueberries.
We also ran into a giant wild ginger flower. The tour guide said we can cut the ginger flower in half and drink the water inside if we don’t have water.
Don’t eat random berries and mushrooms in the jungle. If you can still see them in the jungle then it likely to be poisonous because otherwise, the monkeys will eat them. So if you are looking for something to eat, you can follow the monkeys.
Finally, we saw one live Rafflesia. When we stepped into the forest. Our tour guide told us it is not a flower, it is a large mushroom
Are they dangerous? We asked. They are in danger not dangerous, we are dangerous to them. The tour guide said six to eight years ago to be a lot of Rafflesia in the forest, you can trek half an hour to see them, but now we need to walk 2 hours to see them. They are really fragile. When they blooming, they have the special stinky smell like dead animal flesh that attracts flies and other insects.
My tour guide has a unique sense of humor, he explained the flower with such a serious look on his face then he said. The flies are having a party there, singing and dancing. And then when they fly to other places, the seed stick with them and get carried to another place. One week later, there will be a baby seed rafflesia. However, it takes almost 9 months for the baby seed to grow into a giant rafflesia. They only survive for 6–8 days without rain, but if raindrops on the flower it will be dead and black the next day. When we leave, we covered the rafflesia with some banana leaves to protect it from the rain.
Our guide asked us to smell the rafflesia one-by-one, it is not stinky at all if you stay 1 meter away from it, but when you keep close to the flower you will smell the stinky dead-fish smell
After witnessing the rafflesia, we need to head back. The tour guide pointed to the dark sky and told us it's going to rain soon, and it will become really muddy and dangerous in the forest. So he said we must do a shortcut by going through a more challenging route.
Here we go, on the way back we saw another route with a crossed bamboo with a danger sign ribbon tied on the bamboo. The tour said usually tourists are not allowed to go through here but we don’t have a choice today.
We all looked at each other and okay…. It looked exactly like a beginner of a horror movie where a couple of fearless tourists ignored the sign and walked into a dangerous zone ending up getting killed by the monster or cannibal…
My shoes were ruined already by the time we saw the rafflesia, can this be any worse?
It can be. At least the first half of the trip, I could take some photos with my hands but on the way back I was grabbing every I can in the forest. The trekking route was way steeper and really slippery.
There is an almost 90 degrees downhill and all of us pull a bamboo by the hill to going down. At that point, I didn’t really care about the cleanness of my long sleeves shirt anymore. I covered my hands with the sleeves to avoid getting cut by the small thorns on the stem.
There was a girl in our trip got cut by the leaves and her finger was bleeding, Our tour guide picked some leaves from the forest: it has tiny hair on the surface. He added some water, squeezed and rubbed the leaves. Soon the juice from the leaves came out and by rubbing with the tiny hair it generated much foam. He applied the foam together with the leaves on the wound and wrapped her finger with another piece of leaf. He picked another stem to tie them up. This is how you disinfect and bandage your wound in the jungle.
It actually worked! After we left the rainforest and were in the truck back to the city, she removed her herb bandage and surprisingly the wound was healing perfectly.
My friends laugh at me saying how dare I go to trekking in this outfit?
After we left the forest, we all look so dirty with mud on the pants, on the shoes. Only our tour guide, he wore a pair of rain boots that after cleaning them in the river, they look freshly clean.
I feel so lucky to see this precious rafflesia and get to know about the people who lived in the jungle. My tourist guide said when he was a kid, he sometimes skipped classes and when he skipped classes, he used to come to the jungle. The jungle is their playground.
It is unfortunate that a large area of rainforest was cut down in the Cameron Highland to build farms. But for people living in the highlands, they need to eat and plant all the vegetables and fruits. A lot of people come to Cameron Highlands also for the strawberry farm, tea farm.
In the end, if I will do the rainforest trekking again, I will definitely choose a proper outfit.