One of my favorite weekends in Malaysia was spent camping in the national forest! Here was the plan:
-hike to turtle beach (about 1 hour)
-set up tents and camp for the night
-hike from turtle beach to monkey beach (about 1.5 hrs)
-spend the afternoon at the beach
-take a boat back to the entrance of the national park
Here is what actually happened:
We packed up our stuff for the weekend in our backpacks, which probably weighed about 20 pounds. Not too bad but a bit heavy for heavy hiking. The path at first seemed quite simple but it slowly turned into many many stairs and climbing over tree limbs. The hike to turtle beach was 1.5 hours but the pay off was amazing. We got to the beach at sunset! Then we cooked pasta and slept in our tents. In the morning we set off to monkey beach. We thought the hike would last about 1.5 hours and part of the way we got to cross over a canopy bridge. Little did we realized it turned into a 3 hour hike through deep forest. It was awesome (as I love camping and have done some backpacking). But some of the team was out of their comfort zone. They were troopers and didn’t complain. I love my teams positive attitudes! We started comparing ourselves to Gilligan’s Island on our “three hour tour” or the forest. Then we got to lay on the beach for a few hours. It was beautiful and I got to swim in the Indian Ocean. Then we called a boat to pick us up. It was only about a 5 min ride around the coast to get back to the park entrance. Here’s a little video of our experience. Enjoy!
