Taman Negara is a rainforest that has grown unbroken for more than 130 million years, and no road has ever been cut through it. It fills the centre of peninsular Malaysia, and the way in is the one that has always worked: low in a narrow wooden longboat on the Sungai Tembeling. The river takes close to three hours. The outboard works against the current, the banks squeeze in, and green closes over both sides until the boat ties up at Kuala Tahan, a village whose restaurants float on pontoons and ride up and down with the water. From there the forest is met one layer at a time, and the first of them is over your head. Narrow suspension bridges hang between the tallest trees some forty metres up, swaying as you cross, level with the hornbills and the flowering crowns.
Past the walkway the trail climbs Bukit Teresek through jungle loud with cicadas to a clearing that opens across the treetops towards Gunung Tahan. The bottom layer belongs to the night. On a guided walk after dark your torch finds stick insects, sleeping birds and the eye-shine of animals leaving the path; switched off, it leaves fallen wood glowing faintly where the fungus is working. A whole night in a bumbun, a hide built above a salt lick, buys you a chance at a tapir. Asian elephants are down there too, and one of the last populations of Malayan tigers — fewer than 150 left, against perhaps three thousand in the 1950s — and almost nobody ever sees one. The Batek, hunter-gatherers who have moved through this forest with the seasons for generations, still take squirrels and monkeys with blowpipes and poisoned darts and know where the honey is. After rain the trails crawl with tiger leeches. Law has protected this forest less than distance has: there are three ways into the park, one from each state it covers, and not one of them is a road.