The Caves of Mulu National Park

Our trusty Fokker F28
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Tuesday 12 August 2008

To Mulu National Park

A real spectacle - 2 million small bats streaming and spiralling their way out of the cave entrance at sunset.

An early start was needed this morning for our two flights north. The phone rang at 04h45 for a 05h30 departure from our hotel for a fifteen minute drive to the airport.

This lovely flower is a species of Monophylla. It has only one leaf!
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We had to pack our bags in two separate lots as we were only able to take with us enough clothes for 5 days … and as we had to carry them over jungle tracks, the lighter the backpack was, the better. The rest of our things were packed in our main bags to be air freighted to Limbang where, we were promised, we would meet up with them again.

The flights to Miri (MH 2802) and then onto Mulu (MH 3630) were uneventful in an old jet and a Friendship respectively. We were in Mulu a bit after 10h00 and in the Mulu National Park 5 minutes later. Checked in, we headed to our rooms, all three of them. Two were ordinary doubles, but mine was huge with four king-sized single beds… a case of take your pick David! The attached bathroom with all the facilities one needs combined in an area large enough to hold in excess of 20 people! Again, I had this all to myself – such private luxury…. yet not in the accepted term of ‘luxury 5 star class’. No. This was luxury trekking style! There may have been four beds but there wasn’t even a nail to hang my shirt. There was a wardrobe of sorts but, when I tried the door, it was so warped and twisted that I didn’t have a hope of opening it and checking out the age of the mould inside! There wasn’t even a chair… but who needs a chair when you have a choice of four beds!

A profusion of stalactites and stalagmites in one of the caves
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Within the building there was a really good Interpretation Centre which contained poster presentations and an AV screen or two. Interesting reading while we waited for lunch. This we had to buy for ourselves. I chose steamed local vegetables… plural, right? But what I got was singular…. braised bok choi tossed in a spicy dark sauce. Quite tasty! It cost RM19.50, but that did include a 1.5 litre bottle of water, two packets of biscuits and a tube of Mentos peppermint sweets.

At 14h00 we left on a 3km walk to a couple of caves (www.forestry.sarawak.gov.my and follow the links to Lang Cave and Deer Cave). It was leisurely walk along a very well constructed and maintained boardwalk, the majority of which was made out of ironwood (Shorea sp.) while some was made of metal along with a few short sections of concrete path. Generally the wooden and metal sections were a couple of feet to a metre above the forest floor. Some of the trees we passed were numbered which no doubt related to a key of some sort somewhere but certainly that was nowhere to be seen.

A bat's eye view looking out of the cave
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The first cave was the Lang’s Cave. It contains a spectacular collection of stalactites and stalagmites but much of it appeared ‘dead’. It is tastefully lit and home to some bats, mostly wrinkled-lip bats, and also some swiftlets.

A short distance away is Deer Cave which has the largest cave passage in the world. It is just over two kilometres long and never less than 90m high and wide. The main chamber is 174m wide and 122m high –big enough to comfortably fit London’s St Paul’s Cathedral and still have room to spare. It is called Deer Cave because deer used to enter the cave to drink the water from pools near where the bats roost. This water contains dissolved salts which the deer needed as a supplement to their normal food. The local tribe knew of this attraction and hunted the deer, hence the name of the cave.

A spiral of bats leaves the cave to feed.
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Back at the viewing platforms, we waited for about an hour for the bats to leave the cave for their evening feed. We were told it would be a real spectacle, and spectacle it was! Up to 2 million small bats streamed and spiralled their way out of the entrance at sunset. For around 30 minutes, wave upon wave flew out of the entrance and headed off to feed on insects some kilometres away. It is estimated that these bats consume up to sixteen tonnes of insects each night before returning to the cave in the early morning.

It was getting towards twilight by the time we left the viewing area for the walk back along the boardwalk. It is lit about every 7m by electric light generated back at the resort, so a torch was not really necessary. The jungle began to come to life with all sorts of strange noises and a few fire flies flicking their way through the undergrowth. Most notable was a large frog whose noisy call sounded like ‘what’, ‘what’! As I write now, I can still hear one now at camp headquarters.

Camp headquarters is a fairly sophisticated place… an HQ building, where everyone has to register on arrival, and various other buildings for accommodation, eating and shopping. Dinner was set for 20h00, just an hour after arriving back from the bats. This gave me time to shower and wash a very, very sweat-sodden tee shirt. But will it dry?

Dinner was included this time and we were allowed to choose from the menu but only one of us could choose any one item - how quaint! We managed. Someone chose chicken and potato curry; another chose sweet and sour fish etc. A jug of rather horrible orange cordial came along as did a platter of fruit which carried a piece of pineapple, a piece of papaya and one baby fried banana each. Quaintness was being overdone!

Frau G and Sarah wandered off to the ‘bar’ which was in a separate building and some hundreds of metres away in search of some Tiger beers. When they brought the beer back, it was disappointing…anything but cold. In this heat especially, I like my beer cold!

That damn ‘what’ frog is still going and it will get ‘what for’ from me unless he shuts up very soon. I like frogs but there’s only so much ‘what, what’ anyone can take!

An aside! Frau G is German, as I’ve said before, and she shows some quite decidedly Teutonic traits. Firstly, she needs to have everything organised to the hilt with a number of contingency plans in place – just in case. This doesn’t really work in Malaysia, in the jungle, where anything can, and probably will, happen. Something as simple as rain can upset the best laid plans completely. Secondly, she just has to be at the front, hurrying and scurrying from place to place. Case in point! On the twilight walk back from the bat cave our group was walking at a reasonable but not fast pace – it is the tropics after all. We caught up to a Japanese group who were walking even slower than we were. Frau G just had to pass them and shortly afterwards tripped over her own feet and took a tumble into the scrub down beside of the boardwalk. Only a grazed elbow this time but there were parts of the walk that are over a metre above the ground and she could have caused herself quite an injury. But Frau G is Frau G and I’m afraid she just doesn’t press my “friendship button”. She’s not the sort I’d choose for a trek companion at all… but we can’t always choose our fellow travellers, can we? Must make the best of it!

David