Taman Negara is a rainforest reckoned at more than 130 million years old, grown unbroken since the Cretaceous. Dinosaurs moved beneath a canopy like this one, and it outlived the Ice Ages that reshaped forests everywhere else. Nothing here has ever been cleared, so the canopy sits in layers, and giant tualang trees — the tallest in Southeast Asia — push straight out of the tangle toward the light. It is Peninsular Malaysia's largest wilderness, cut by rivers and unmapped trails and crowned by Gunung Tahan, the peninsula's highest peak at 2,187 metres. The name means simply national park in Malay. Asian elephants, Malayan tapirs, white-handed gibbons and the seladang, a massive wild ox, still live in it. So do Malayan tigers, though the odds of seeing one are effectively zero.
For most of its history the only way in was by river, and the run up the Tembeling is still the approach people remember. A road now reaches Kuala Tahan, the village facing the park across the water, and most visitors arrive that way instead. Beyond the river the forest runs on without a break, cut by streams and by trails that simply peter out. Gua Telinga, a limestone cave a couple of kilometres from park headquarters, is crawled through on hands and knees past bats and racer snakes. Upstream on the Tahan the water breaks into the cascades of Lata Berkoh, an hour by boat or a long walk. Birders have counted more than 350 species here, hornbills among them. Come in the drier months, roughly February to September; from November to January the monsoon swells the rivers and can shut much of the park down.