Caves, jungle and bats

  Gunung Mulu National Park, Malaysia
Sunday, May 27, 2007

I had heard about Mulu from Raimund, the German who climbed the mountain with me - he was trying to recruit more people to go there and split the cost of some of the longer guided treks. I figured that now was my only chance to get there, since I have limited time, and you can only fly there or take the boat from Miri, or pay a huge amount of money and fly direct from KK. Checking the FAX website it looked like the flights to Mulu were fully booked, but when I showed up at the airport I found that getting there was no problem, provided I stayed for slightly longer than I wanted in order to get the first available return flight. I bought tickets there and then and flew out a couple of hours later.

Mulu is an outcrop of limestone mountains that have been eroded in particularly cool ways by the acidic runoff from the rainforest. For starters there is one of the largest cave systems in the world, containing the Sarawak Chamber, the biggest enclosed space on earth, and Deer Cave, with a passage you could fly a plane through. Also there were the pinnacles - sharp pointed knife-blades of rock sticking vertically out of the forest. I had originally planned on seeing both, but annoyingly the other people who were going to split the cost of the guide with me decided they wanted to go somethere else to do birdwatching, and the guide would cost me RM400 by myself, so I didn't bother.

The caves were really spectacular though - Clearwater Cave and Cave of the Winds had some nice underground rivers and cave formations to look at, while Deer Cave was just unfeasably huge - I went back a second time to walk through towering piles of bat guano to the 'Garden of Eden', where the end of the cave had collapsed and the jungle had intruded partway into the cave, where there was a shimmering pool of water with vines and waterfalls tumbling from the arch of the entrance.

The guides were also pretty good - some of them were from the local Penan communities, and on the walk to the caves they would point out some of the thousands of medicinal plants they knew and gave their uses. One of them, called Michael, kept on trying to convince me to come visit his longhouse, where (for a fee) you can live totally within the Penan community, under the same roof, eating the same food and walking the jungle learning as much as you want about fishing, hunting, plants and culture as you want. It sounds pretty good, but I don't really have time on this trip. I'll try to get out to one of the longhouses near to Kuching, though, for their legendary hospitality and rice wine.

One of the most amazing things you can see at Mulu happens every sunset, when the estimated 3m bats stream out of Deer cave to hunt. There are so many you can hear their wingbeats from some distance away. Four nights at Mulu was far too long given that I couldn't really do the extended trek I had wanted to - once you have seen the caves there is not really very much else to do that isn't more than a day's walk or boat ride away. Living in Mulu is not cheap either - the food is 3 or 4 times more expensive than at Miri, so I limited myself to 2 meals a day and tried to buy as much stuff as possible from the Penan village down the river instead of the overpriced Mulu Cafe. In the end I was glad to get back on the Fokker 50 to Miri.