Malaysia

Malaysia is split into two halves separated by the South China Sea: the peninsula, with the Titiwangsa range and lowland rainforests among the oldest in the world, and the states of Sabah and Sarawak, in northern Borneo. Taman Negara, on the peninsula, protects a rainforest that has gone more than one hundred and thirty million years without glaciations or major climatic change. In Borneo, Mount Kinabalu rises above four thousand metres and concentrates an astonishing number of plants found nowhere else, and the Danum valley and the Kinabatangan river hold orangutans, pygmy elephants and proboscis monkeys. The Mulu caves, with the largest known underground chamber by volume, complete a country of natural superlatives.