Mulu National Park

We spent 4 days in Mulu National Park, Borneo. This is a popular destination with many guided tours. The main draw is the giant cave system that you can explore with a guide for a fee. Our tour included 4 caves. They varied from small with elegant stalagmites and stalactites to giant caverns with rivers running through them and giant rock formations. The first night was also capped with a bat show where we saw millions of bats leave Deer Cave to go out and eat. Two things we found interesting: 1 when the bats leave the cave, they fly in a horizontal tornado like pattern to avoid predators, very neat to watch; 2 there are virtually no mosquitos in this part of the jungle because the bats eat over 15 tones of bugs a night. The caves were interesting, but we find they didn't really hold our attention for long. The real draw for us was a hike to an interesting rock formation call the pinnacles. Like it sounds, the pinnacles are many large, pointed rocks located near the top of Mount Mulu. To get there we had a fun boat ride and an easy 2-hour walk. Leeches were supposed to be bad here, but we only got one tiny one. We lucked out with no leech bites in all of Borneo. The hike on the following morning was 2.5km and very steep. The top section was a lot of ladder work and a bit of climbing which we enjoyed. The decent was very difficult. Extremely slippery and steep. We took our time as we were worried about injuring ourselves before Kilimanjaro. Our guide did all the cooking but was pretty standoffish once he had done his work. The biggest problem we faced was the bees at camp 5. They were drawn to sweaty clothes, and we didn't bring any soap to wash them. I'm sure the locals have a good laugh at the tourists as they run away from the bees.

Flight to Mulu, met our guide, bought lunch at the restaurant, rejoined our guide to tour Deer Cave and Lang Cave followed by bat show. The accommodations were nice in national park. We had our own lodge to ourselves.Leggi altro