“Welcome to the Jungle, it gets worse here everyday.” – Guns N’ Roses
“I found that Taman Nagara was…”
“Anticlimactic?”
“Exactly. Too many leeches, not enough wifi. I’m more of a mountain person than a jungle person.” – Woman from San Francisco
The Jungle
The Jungle is a place that tugs on the mystical strings in our minds. Where mountains inspire majesty, the jungle will always be the place of mystery. Metaphorically, it is used to suggest things hidden or concealed or sometimes…lost. The Jungle is ageless to us humans, old enough to be effectively eternal. It is the place where we were born as a species, and also the place where we perhaps most fear death. It is a place of giant predators and small poisonous things. Biting, disease-ridden insects. Venomous snakes, blood-sucking leeches, and carnivorous plants.
Simultaneously, the Jungle is a place of life. First, there is the obvious: the life surrounding you as you enter the Jungle. The place seems, in fact, unbelievably alive. As you step within you are immersed in the calls and chirps of a thousand varieties of bird, insect, and wild creature. Unlike the forests that I grew up near, one will occasionally hear creatures moving in the brush, or heavy things crashing through branches above, unseen. The Jungle also holds more species of plants than any other environment on Earth, many of which have medicinal properties.
Yet, all of this can be missed when one actually proceeds into the Jungle. Such was clearly the case with the woman I quoted above, who I met on a ferry to Panang. She was the sharply critical type, quick to judgments, that so appeals to me. There’s something interesting to me about someone with the courage to simply say: nope, I don’t like that. For types like that, it’s easier to like mountains than it is to like jungles. Unlike when one approaches a mountain, and the sight of it smashes into your mind like a linebacker, striking you with awe, an appreciation of the Jungle is more elusive. When one visits Taman Nagara in central Malaysia, it is easy to think: “what’s the big deal?”
Of course, most travelers go to places for three reasons. They want to see something beautiful, they want to relax, or they want to make the other people in their lives jealous. Taman Nagara offers, really, none of that (though there is always the option to lie about it).
First, it’s not beautiful. Or, it is, but it’s also disgusting. The plants grow as close to each other as possible, fighting for precious nutrients, while the carcasses of old trees litter the ground, covered in fungus. Bugs swarm everywhere, including several varieties of ants that were the largest I’ve ever seen. Some were, I’m not kidding, each as big as a quarter. Everything is wet, and when you do see some opening in the trees to offer a scenic view, dense transpiration prevents you from seeing further than a few dozen feet. Then there are the leeches. Leeches are actually fairly harmless, but to someone unfamiliar with them they appear to be terrifying alien creatures that move faster than it seems they should be able to. Whenever you stand still they strike, coming out of the cover of leaves to climb your shoes, hunting for skin to suckle on. This disenchants many people who stop to gaze at some tree or another, and look down to find three critters gobbling on their flesh.
Second, it is not a place to relax. It is, frankly, one of the most uncomfortable places on Earth. Suffocating humidity and heat are only broken up by torrential downpours that leave one soaked to the bone. When the rain subsides, the bugs comes out in full force, attacking with reckless glee, shrugging off insect repellant and enjoying a feast of foreign flesh. The walkways are encroached on all sides by plant life, and in several places tree branches jut out just at knee level, and are somehow missed by your eyes until your knees smash into them. I hit my knees no less than three times in an afternoon, each time promising myself that I’d keep a sharper eye out. Each time, obviously, forgetting. The thing that you must remember about the Jungle is that when you visit, you are not simply viewing this place. You are now a part of this place. You have entered the ecosystem, the food chain, and even though you are just passing through, the Jungle has no idea, and wouldn’t care if it did. You are food now.
Third, it is not a good place to brag about, because pictures do a horrible job capturing it. I took several pictures which all look identical. It looks as if I took a bunch of different leaves and branches and glued them together into a collage. The plants are so dense that it actually appears two-dimensional in places, like a wall of leaves. And yet if you peeled that wall back, you’d find an identical one behind it. This is what the Jungle is: an impenetrable morass. Unless you find a temple hidden in its depths, you’re unlikely to score points with the friends back home.
So then, I’ll ask the question I always ask: why go here? Why travel to one of the most uncomfortable places on Earth, just to see a bunch of wet plants, get eaten by insects and leeches, possibly contract some tropical disease, only to get half the amount of likes you’d normally receive on Facebook?
It’s not about leaving your comfort zone, though I wouldn’t put it past some people. Instead, being in the Jungle is about approaching two important aspects of human life. First, our origin. As the wild monkeys swinging overhead attest, our humble species came into being in a place very similar to this. A place choked with life. A place of danger, discomfort, and disease. For tens of thousands of years, for longer than civilization has existed, our ancestors roamed areas like this naked, searching for food, wary of predators. There is no way I have found in which one can feel as real a sense of what it must have been like back then as where I was. When you hear a rustle in the bushes, your body instinctively freezes, your senses sharpen, and you prepare to fight, run, or die. It only lasts a moment before your conscious brain assures you that it’s nothing, that you’re in the 21st century, and nothing’s going to hurt you. But in that moment you become a creature again, and touch our primal roots.
The second reason has to do with the metaphor I mentioned before. The Jungle is a living metaphor: it is mystery incarnate. Its many plants conceal a thousand types of animal, insect, and bird. The plants themselves contain compounds that may kill you or save your life, that may dull pain or cause fearsome itching, that may give a potent flavor to food or be useful in constructing buildings. In our cultural storybook we find familiar stories of hidden temples, lost cities of gold, and ancient people untouched by modern life on the outside, all hidden in the Jungle. Its depths contain more than ancient civilizations though, and include the history of millions of years. Taman Nagara is 130 million years old. Since before anything resembling Homo Sapiens walked the Earth, this Jungle has served as a great arena of life, a never-ending competition to determine those fit to continue. It’s history is both hopelessly boring – an endless parade of plants barely distinguishable from each other – and marvelously fascinating – more species have gone extinct here than currently exist on the planet, and when this forest was born, only 9 of the species that currently exist on Earth were alive.
In other words, it is a place that requires a slightly different mindset than one typically has while traveling. This place is not about having a good time or blowing off some steam. It is about encountering one of the world’s great engines of creation. It is about seeing a place and appreciating the difficulty with which our ancestors stubbornly pursued their goals. Only a handful of people in the modern world understand truly what this means, and I’m not one of them. For thousands of years, people had no writing, no grocery stores, no electricity, much less wifi, convenience stores, and bottled water. None of the ways in which we solve the basic needs of our life had been invented. But even as the Jungle seemed to be trying to destroy them, even as it brutally pitted them against each other and every other of the thousands of species that crawled and grew and flew through it, it also gave them their food, their medicine, and eventually, the means to escape from this womb of our planet, to proceed into the infancy of our history.