Going spleunking

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We hadn't had enough of Borneo's natural splendors yet, so we decided to go to Niah Caves National Park. We saw this park featured in one of the episodes of the BBC documentary "Planet Earth" and knew we had to visit!

Niah is one of the largest caves in the world, it has an estimated quarter million bats and half a million swiftlets (also a type of bird). It is also famous for being one of the major sources of swiflet nests, which are a very expensive delicacy in Chinese cuisine used to make the famous bird nests soup. The nests are made of swiflet spit, we haven't had a chance to try the soup as it is really very expensive and would destroy our budget!

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To harvest the nests collectors shimmy hundreds of meters up bamboo poles they've erected in the  caves. Once they reach the ceiling they scrape off the nests. It is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, if you see the poles and the heights you'd understand why, and many people die every year collecting the nests. However the high price they fetch makes it worth the risk apparently. On the day we went we didn't see anyone shimmying, although there were collectors in various areas trying to get lower lying nests.

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The park itself was quite lovely, it was an easy 4-hour hike along boardwalks through rainforest, then through the "Great Cave" and out the back of the Great Cave to the painted caves, where very faint 1000 year old cave paintings remain on the walls. Walking through the enormous unlit caves with a flashlight and listening to thousands of twittering bats and birds was quite the experience!