COMMENT | Just outside Kuala Lumpur, in Kepong, there lies a forest park quite unlike any other within easy reach of city folk dying for access to some semblance of Malaysia's oldest forests in the world, dating back some 130 million years - older than the Amazon.

Unfortunately, the majority of that park, administered by one of the world’s renowned tropical forest research bodies, the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia (Frim), has not been readily accessible to the public since the bad old days of Covid-19 in 2020.

Out of the 545ha of the park area, only about 80ha of pretty but domesticated parkland with a lake and ponds is really open to the public, unlike previously, when all of it was, in return for a small payment of an entry fee.

The remaining...