Mulu

Mulu is the main National park in Sarawak, famous for its ginormous caves, beautiful rainforests and difficult walks up to and around its mountains. Sam had been ill with 'flu for about 3-4 days and seemed to be on the mend, so like any caring boyfriend I stuck her in a tiny plane and sent her for some hot, sweaty walks in the jungle. Unfortunately the minute I had booked the accommodation and flights, she had a relapse and so had to spend the rest of the day doing Suduko flu'd up to the max, in various modes of transport and then in our room at Mulu. Luckily our room, which was in a longhouse, turned out to be a lovely air conditioned retreat from the humidity and was in fact the perfect place to stay whilst ill, even more than our place in Miri.

Casting aside all Sam's plaudits about my own bravery, I left her in the room and went for a stroll in the jungle to see some caves. I'll fast forward this bit, because the next morning, Sam was feeling miles better and I was able to take her on the same walk I had been on the day before to see the caves. The a/c, a good sleep and my tender cardiac nursing care had finally paid off and after dragging the Sudoku book from her paws, we ventured forth into the wild jungle. In Mulu however, they've brought a little bit of civilisation to the rainforest in the form of a boarded walkway, which stretches for the whole journey to the caves. So not quite so wild then. While this may seem a little bit of a cop out to some, after having now plodded through several jungly walks, it did make for a nice change.

Walking through the jungle is an exhilarating experience every time, but you can spend a lot of your time just looking at your feet making sure you don't trip up and so therefore missing most of the wildlife en route. Not having to worry about falling over so much, meant we could spend the whole time searching for bugs. There are animals around, but you've got to be really lucky to see them. Noisy human walkways and shy creatures don't mix well. We actually did see some macaques ( evil ) and also managed to spot a couple of pygmy squirrels, the worlds smallest squirrel, which I think must be pretty lucky considering they're only a bit bigger than a mouse. We more than made up for the lack of animals though, with the insane amount of weird bugs we saw. What helped as well was that there was a hand rail running the entire length of the walkway which turned out to be some kind of insect highway.















Sam has turned into some kind of entomologist and can spot the tiniest of beetles to the hugest of caterpillers a mile off in even the densest jungles, how she kept spotting emerald lizards amongst all the undergrowth, I'll never know, maybe its her Sudoko enhanced mind? We spent about an hour or so slowly wandering through the trees yelping with excitement with each new insect or lizard we found, taking photos and little films. It was one of the most enjoyable walks so far I think, it was nice and cool under the canopy and we only met about one other person the whole way.

At the end of the walkway you come to the bat viewing area which is situated at the base of a cliff face where there's an enormous cave called Deer cave. Out of this cave at dusk stream 2-3 million bats, not all at the same time, but in groups of 10,000 or so, which lessens their chances of being eaten by the lurking hawks and other birds of prey. The previous day I did spy a hawk swooping into a mass of bats. Before the bat display we had a look around the two caves that were there, the first one was called Langs cave, named after a local Penan who discovered it. A small cave full of stalactites and mites and some nice jellyfish shaped formations, we'd seen all this kind of thing before, so didn't hang around in there too long.

We then headed to Deer cave, so called, because this was where the local tribes would catch a lot of their deer. This cave was spectacular due to its size and....its smell. The smell comes from the guano produced by the 3 million odd bats that were clinging to its roof and made for one of the stinkiest encounters this young nose has ever had. An intense ammonia smell that could have raised the dead and came very close to making our eyes bleed! We managed to soldier on through the ammonia cloud which dissipated after we were out of bat range, but the stench was well worth putting up with for the grandeur of our surroundings. The cave was ginormously humungous! You could have easily fitted Westminster cathedral inside with spare room for a few other churches too. It took us about 15 minutes to walk the length of the cave which was very dark, following a path that was lit up with fairy lights and in the glow of the lights you could see grim looking spider webs and the odd beastie lying in wait.

At one point we came across a hairless bat clinging to a post, surrounded be weird earwig type insects, a scene from your darkest nightmare! Apparently, we'd hit upon a bat cleaning station and the rank golden earwigs are actually chewing on bits of rank bat skin! Upon reaching the end of the cave we greeted by the sight of the jungle which looked amazing. Some time ago, the roof had collapsed allowing a hidden area of jungle to grow, like something from Jurassic Park. I could easily imagine us bumping into a pterodactyl. The cave continued on after this Garden of Paradise, as it was called, but we couldn't reach it from this point, so we headed back and sat down at the bat viewing area to wait for their dusk exodus. By the time the bats started flying out, there seemed to be more people than bats, no idea where they'd all come from, but it was all too much of a shitfight for us, so we meandered our way back to our room, spotting giant millipedes and other cool insects on the way.

Theres much more to do at Mulu than our lame efforts, but we're using Sam's illness as our excuse and we'd already booked our return flight. There our some hard walks you can do, namely the Pinnacles and the Headhunters Trail, the latter being a long walk following the route that Warring tribes used to take and the Pinnacles being 40 meter high, sharp limestone formations at the top of a mountain. We were flown over said mountain on our way back to Miri by the pilot, who kindly flew us within touching distance. We'd seen them the easy way, but there are many challenges ahead of us I feel...