Not being satisfied with summiting Kinabalu just four months ago, the school's most active club decided to climb the hightest mountain on peninsular Malaysia: Mount Tahan in Taman Negara National Park.

Mount Tahan requires a minimum of 4 days to complete, along with 2 days of travel just to get there. Taman Negara National Park, where Mount Tahan — the highest peak in Peninsular Malaysia at 2107 meters resides, is a massive park that borders three states: Pahang, Kelantan and Terengannu. It's home to most of Malaysia's indigenous wildlife, including the elusive black panther, the striped tiger and wild boar, along with thousands of bird and insect species. The high forest canopy keeps the ground area humid, creating ideal soil conditions for a plethora of flora and fauna. Tropical fruit also abound in natural form in Taman Negara, requiring a fairly agile human to be able to wade through a thick ground brush and then scale a tree to as high as 15 meters to hand-pick the fruit, as witnessed by the Trekking Club when their guide demonstrated fruit-picking in the wild.

Planning the Mount Tahan trip was fairly simple. A single call to the park headquarters in Pahang (needs a Bahasa Melayu speaker if you want things to go a bit more efficiently) to set up the dates, arrival times, permits and guide fees (1 guide/12 people is mandatory and costs RM300 for 4 days + RM50 for each extra day), and camp reservations was all it pretty much took. The approximate cost per person is RM200 and that includes all transporatation to/from KL, park and climbing fees. We had the trekkers pay RM250 just in case, but ended up with about RM60 leftover per person, so we decided to make t-shirts and an extra 4 sets of photos for each trekker. The easiest way to get to the Pahang side connecting point for Taman Negara is to catch a train from Sentral Station to Gua Musang (RM45/person return), and from there board another train back to Merapoh. From Merapoh, talk to one of the train station operators; either he or his friend(s) will take you the 20 minute drive from there to park HQ for RM4/person. Once at park HQ, they will check and itemize your belongings to make sure you bring out what you bring in (they're very serious about this and that's good), and then arrange their own 4x4 to take you to the trailhead (RM15/person return). Coming back is exactly the reverse, except that once in Merapoh you can hire a car for RM10/person to take you from Merapoh to Gua Musang since the buses and trains between the two small towns are quite infrequent. Talk to the locals; they're generally happy to help out the tourists.