Gunung Mulu National Park

Nearly as tall as the plane

The flight to Mulu was in fact on a normal (for Maswings) ATR plane, not a twin otter, but pleasant nonetheless. I found myself in first class, which basically meant that there were newspapers available. Since the flight was 25 minutes I really had no need to worry! The Canadian girls, Jess and Andrea, were in the seats across the aisle. We were picked up and taken to the accommodation which was in longhouse-style rooms. Similar to Bako, they looked nice but on further inspection the beds were hard and towels non-absorbent, and to my horror (after the "Bako incident") the power was only on from 6pm to midnight. Since having a fan all night was a condition of my booking I was pretty annoyed, as were the other girls. We were dumped at the place and left to our own devices for 4 hours. There was NOTHING to do, no power to at least have a nap under the fan in the hot weather, and since we weren't in the park itself there wasn't even anywhere to walk. There wasn't even a deck of cards. Luckily I had taken a book from the Miri hostel and there was a cat with her two kittens.

Elephant Stack

By the time our guide turned up we were pretty unimpressed, but he turned out to be the saviour of the trip. He was an absolutely sensational guide and did everything he possibly could to make our stay excellent. (He even made a phone call to sales and got us power until 6am). Burong took us first to Lang Cave, which was impressive but apparently the smallest we would see. There were all sorts of strange formations, and he could explain all of them. My favourite was a stack that looked like elephants, and the "halactites" that defied gravity by forming crazy shapes. All four "show caves" have boardwalks through them and are very easy to see.

Halactite

The next cave was just nearby, called Deer Cave. It was ENORMOUS! The name came from back when hunters knew they could always find deer in the cave. This sounded a bit mad to me but once I saw it I understood, it is quite bright in a lot of places and there is a stream that runs quite salty because of all the guano. Further into the cave it got darker, and smellier. In fact it was so smelly that it was almost burning my nostrils. Shining my torch onto the floor I could see it was crawling with something.

Deer Cave Entrance

"Cockroaches," said Burong, and watched with glee as us three girls screwed up our noses. Apparently the golden roaches break down the poo. We walked a little further, but Burong said there was some movement at the front of the cave. We wanted to see the bat exodus so rather than risk missing it, we turned back to go to the observation point. Burong was very disappointed I think, and really wanted to show us the back of the cave, but we didn't want to miss the "show". Turns out we needn't have worried - though we sat from 5pm - 6:30pm, the bats didn't come out before dark. They don't come out when it's raining and sometimes they just don't come out, "because". We were disappointed but not too much since we knew we could come back tomorrow and since it's not guaranteed that they'll come out.

"Implexus", according to Burong

One benefit of our late exit was the free 3.5km night walk. As it's a boardwalk it was an easy walk, but I had my torch out and kept spotting stuff so it took us about an hour to get back. I saw mating red millipedes, crazy insects, and a "25k" - a barking gecko that apparently is worth $25,000 on the market because it can be used to cure some disease. As it is a national park however, this little barking gecko was safe.

We got back to Benarat Lodge and had some dinner - lunch had been fairly plain but dinner was enormous, there was no way we could have eaten all the food they gave us. It tasted good too, all local food.