Day 47: Into the Wild

Today we were finally taking leave of Kuching, and heading north into the interior of Borneo to Mulu National Park, home to some of the largest caves and underground rivers in the world. I'd never heard of it before this trip, when I was doing some research a couple of weeks ago. One of my vague quests is to visit as many UNESCO World Heritage Sites as possible - there's over a thousand of them and more are added every year so it's going to be challenging, but something to think about long-term I guess.

Anyway we had a midday flight out of Kuching, so we slept in a little before visiting a nearby Indian place for breakfast of roti canai. Again the food was comically cheap, we paid I think about 10 RMY or $3.33 AUD for 4 roti pancakes (decent size), a coffee and a tea. Checked out of the hotel without seeing Keith or Maria, but I've got Keith's business card so I'll find him on Facebook at a later date.

Arrived at Kuching Airport in plenty of time and breezed through check in etc; a very easy task when you don't take ridiculous amounts of luggage! This was our first flight in quite a while that wasn't with AirAsia, instead we were flying with MASWings which is the rural subsidiary of Malaysian Airlines. The plane was a relatively small turboprop plane with about 70 seats and was entirely full of European tourists. We were surrounded by a large group of Dutch people yammering away. The plane left on time and I could mercifully insert my noise-cancelling earphones and not listen to discussion of tulips or whatever they were talking about.

Arrived in Mulu several hundred kilometres inland at probably the smallest airport we've ever seen. The terminal was basically a shack, and you could pretty much walk from the plane straight out on the road in about 3 minutes. The national park is right next door, though due to the midday heat we opted for a local's clapped-out Land Cruiser for 10 RMY. Still good value for a 2 minute drive.

Entrance to the national park is via a long narrow rope bridge over a swifty-flowing jungle river, which gave us a real feeling of going into the wild. But the park facilities were pretty modern, including a cafe, visitor's centre and offices etc. It was only gazetted as a national park in 2008, so this part was fairly new. Our accommodation in the park was a bit older, traditional-style wooden longhouses on stilts. Unfortunately the only place they could fit us was in the dormitory, so I was about to get my first taste of dorm accommodation since band tours 20 years ago.

Thankfully there were only a couple of other occupants in the 20-person dorm. It was a large-ish building with a couple of sub-rooms (though no internal doors), so we picked a small 3-bed room towards the back and moved in. Quick bite to eat in the cafe before our first cave tour - first up we were doing the Deer Cave and Lang Cave double.

As it was a guided tour we were in a group of about 20 people, again mostly Europeans (Germans, Dutch and French). The first part of the walk was along a boardwalk through the rainforest/jungle over towards the towering limestone cliffs. Quite a nice 30 minute walk, though there wasn't much wildlife to see beyond a couple of lizards and a gigantic huntsman spider (even to an Australian it looked large!).

Deer Cave is named because the locals used to hunt deer here. The streams that trickle out of the cave are very high in salt because they're about 50% bat poo, and of course the deer liked to lick the salt left behind on the rocks. We climbed a set of stairs up into the cave and our breath was absolutely taken away - the initial chamber was absolutely gigantic. At least a hundred metres high, probably a hundred metres wide and several hundred metres long. The ceiling was just enormous splotches of black colouring which we learned quickly were bats!

We followed the cave passage further and further back and although it got narrower and started twisting and turning, it was still unfathomably large. Eventually we reached the other end of the passage where a huge rockfall hundreds of years ago had created an entirely new valley called the Garden of Eden. It's unreachable from this side sadly, and is a full day hike to reach going around the other way. Still reeling from the scale, we left Deer Cave and did the short walk around to Lang Cave.

Lang Cave is much much smaller than Deer Cave, but still very impressive. Different geology in this cave, lots more stalagtites and stalagmites, bringing back memories of a very young trip to Abercrombie Caves. This cave also had huge formations of "jellyfish" which were large bulbous rippled rock formations that actually looked an awful lot like jellyfish!

We left this cave (after encountering a small but very angry looking snake) at 5pm, just in time for the Bat Exodus. If you're wondering what that it, it's exactly what it says on the can. The black blotches on the ceiling of Deer Cave turned out to be approximately 4 MILLION bats; close to 40 different species in just this cave system, including 25 or so that are unique to the area. Mostly insect-eating and herbivore bats, so much smaller than the flying foxes and fruit bats we get in Australia.

What makes the exodus so interesting though is that as they leave the cave, the bat swarms fly in a huge constantly shifting corkscrew, hoping to avoid being picked off by the bat hawk birds that hang around near the cave entrance. The exodus went on for probably 45-50 minutes, just swarm after swarm of bats. Crazy.

Walked back along the boardwalk to the visitor centre pretty much in the dark, though again not much wildlife on show. The spider was still there, some mating millipedes, a barking frog, and a scorpion in a fallen log was about all we found. Quick beer at the cheap bar outside the park, back across the swing bridge to the cafe for a tired dinner, then off to the dormitory and bed. No mobile reception, no wifi means it was time to read another book, so I cracked open Around the World in 80 Days. I'm starting to identify a lot with Passepartout!Read more