Taman Negara

Today was a long one. Nothing special though. In fact, probably the ONLY blah day we've had so far. The guy at our guest house knocked on our door at the late hour of 7:15AM this morning to make sure we were awake to catch the boat at 8! Of course, we weren't so we were thankful for the wake up call. We stumbled out of bed, lazily got our stuff together, and headed out the door. We walked down the beach to the pier and waited for the boat. At 8 am sharp, the boat left the dock to start making its rounds around the island. It started off with only three people on the boat, including Blake and me, but after a few stops, the boat was loaded down with people and luggage. Although it was early, the boat ride was probably the most exciting part of the day, which is saying something. Once we got off the boat, we purchased tickets to Taman Negara and had some breakfast while we waited for the bus. We had fried rice pattaya and a chocolate, banana pancake. Yummy! After shopping around for a bit for a few "touristy memorabilia", we got on the bus (which was a van... and we were the only two passengers). It took us FOREVER to get to our final destination. We first stopped after about 2 hours and had lunch at a semi- fancy restaurant and then hit the road again. We tried to read in the van but the roads and drivers in this country are awful so we soon gave that up! 10 hours after we left the island, we pulled in to the bus stop here in a town outside of Taman Negara. It's a National Park (literally translated) so there's no staying in it, but its a RM1, 5 second ferry ride across the river into it. We found a place to stay shortly after being dropped off. Its is not far from the little town, that includes floating restaurants and that's about it. After settling in, we walked to the tourist office to get some ideas for tomorrow but ended up just deciding we would do our own treks and canopy walk. Then we found a place to eat and had an apple shake, fried rice paprik, and fried beef with rice. There's nothing at all to do at night here, besides jungle treks that we've heard are a waste of money, so were now just perusing the internet and then going back to our place to read. We'll update you soon :)