Bukit Malawati and Kuala Selangor Fireflies

April 18, 2009 on 9:10 am | In Me!, Photography | No Comments

Went out for a nature shoot with Jerome at Bukit Malawati.

This is somewhere on the west of Selangor with some random historical significance that’s completely lost on me. There’s a tomb. Some cannons. A building that the local religion uses to sight the moon to determine a public holiday. A gawd-awful aquarium. And a lot of monkeys. Presumably, there’s a chopping block somewhere used during the Jap occupation too.

But we’re there only for the nature.

And naturally, nature will be commercialised in Malaysia.

There’s a tram that takes people up to the look-out point and then down to the freshwater aquarium.

Note that “Freshwater Aquarium” basically means, a couple of tanks of fish that can live in tap water and thus cheap to maintain. There’s more fish at a second rate aquarium shop in town. This is just one big disappointing government project. The aquarium is also next to the Kuala Selangor Nature Park, where a lot of buildings have been built to do research. But the money for the equipment for doing said research never came in. So no research was ever done here, and the buildings to house researchers became a tourist information centre, and random locked buildings.

But at least the park managed to collect some donation money, and a lot of saplings were planted in the mangrove.

Managed to see the following animals in the 3km walk around the park.

A monkey caught on the long end of my 100-300mm telephoto zoom. Not bad.

The light plastic build of the Pentax 100-300mm also gives very fast auto-focus. I’m almost sad that I’ve sold off this lens already.

Brightly coloured crabs.

300mm + Vivitar 2x Teleconvertor + 1.5x crop factor.

Still very inadequate for proper birding shoots. And the resolving power, fergetaboutit.

Monitor lizard.

And because we were trampling down the trail like a couple of bisons wearing lead espadrilles, (this metaphor barely makes sense, but I want to see what happens when I start seeding the blog with weird words like ESPADRILLES), birds and wildlife fled before us and we only saw what couldn’t run away from us fast enough… like mudskippers.

We also saw the backside of an otter, maybe. Or some kind of mammal…

Man-made-features-wise, there are some bird blinds near a small lake, a tower made of rickety wood, a broadwalk that’ll take you all the way to the edge of the sea, where we saw a pelican but it did not stay still long enough for us to shoot. We were n00b birders. The first sight of a beautiful bird perching anywhere near us, and we got excited; the sudden movement and exclamation immediately caused the bird to find a more private perch. There’s also an underwhelming ‘rope bridge’.

Words fail me.

Back to the tram to take us up to the bukit to see the monkeys.

More monkeys.

And the occasional philosopher.

An enterprising boy sells chopped long beans at RM1 per tiny tiny bundle. His stock is kept in a box ‘guarded’ by two tigers. The monkeys will frequently climb up tourists, and jump on their heads to get to the beans. But they won’t come near the box that’s protected by tigers. Odd.

We had dinner at a random seafood restaurant. Paid quite a bit for very poor serving sizes. Mediocre quality, albeit fresh.

Then we caught the fireflies on the way back.

My camera battery has died by this point. But you can’t shoot them from a rocking boat anyways.

The firefly boat tour seems to be developed at some expense. But managed by grumpy civil servants, looks like. They won’t break change for you. They don’t care how you queue. They make no effort to interact with the tourists, or to talk about the fireflies. They have as much charm as an illegal immigrant doing the dishes at a mamak. You’re used to this as a Malaysian, but if you put yourself in the shoes of a tourist, this is incredibly off putting.

I think TNB sponsored the site. Thus, TNB staff gets free tours or something. That evening there was a big load of random families who got priority and rode out in the first wave of sampans ahead of us who queued since before sunset.

But there were enough tiny boats and ‘paddlers’ we didn’t have to wait too long. Rm10 per person, and 4 to a boat. 10-15min row up river and then back down.

There seemed to be more fireflies than when I came to visit 7-8 yrs ago. Which is good. The fireflies are protected, and there’s a 1k fine for catching them. That didn’t stop our boatman from catching one and showing it to us.

The bugs blink in unison it was like boating down a row of christmas trees. But the pricks of light and the grey darkness made it impossible for the eyes to focus on anything. It’s nearly impossible to see what the bugs look like. Just the glow from their asses.

Flash photography is prohibited. But people are still doing it on the boat. I don’t understand why. And they don’t understand photography.