A few years ago, I watched a Planet Earth episode about caves -- watching people base jump into the mouth of a vertical cave tunnel, and scuba dive through underwater caverns -- and I thought "holy shit, that's badass." Cave exploration has since stuck in my mind as the epitome of nature adventuring.
When I told Stephen I got the fellowship to travel around the world he said, "YOU HAVE TO GO TO THE BORNEO CAVES!" So naturally, I had to look into what those were, and I'm pretty sure the Mulu caves are what he was referring to (as they are part of a national park on the island of Borneo, although I'm sure there are lots of other caves in Borneo that are not directly accessible from the Mulu Park Headquarters, but a person only has so much time to see caves).
Anyhow, I booked a four-night stay in Mulu National Park so that I could be there for three full days, and do a different cave tour each day, since there are three main "show cave" tours. However, during my one-night stay in Miri (the city that is only a 30-minute flight away from the national park and the place everyone has to go through before getting to Mulu), a couple hostel-mates who had just returned from Mulu gave me some great advice:
The Clearwater Cave and Wind Cave aren't that great compared to the others, so you can skip those
The Garden of Eden trek includes the Deer Cave and Lang Cave, so don't book those things separately
The convenience store at the park headquarters sells rubber shoes with cleats that are great for the hikes if you don’t want to get your own boots wet and dirty – especially since some of them require you to wade through rivers with water as high as your chest
There are several walks you can do without a guide, and at no cost
You can see the bats come out of Deer Cave any night – don’t need to schedule a special tour for that
So, based on this info, I rearranged my itinerary to the following:
Day One: Garden of Eden trek with Deer Cave and Lang Cave (5-6 hours)
Day Two: Canopy Walk (2 hours) in the morning, and Fastlane/Langang Cave (3 hours) in the afternoon
Day Three: Self-guided Paku Valley & Waterfall Loop (3-4 hours)
It is worth noting that there are some activities offered by the park office that I did NOT do: a hike to the limestone "pinnacles," and "adventure caving." The pinnacles hike takes two full days with overnight camping in the jungle, and although I'm sure the view of the pinnacles is amazing, it didn't seem amazing enough to justify all that effort, which would undoubtedly involve hiking and climbing in down pouring rain. I'm just not prepared in terms of clothes or shoes or daypacks for that kind of outdoor trekking, PLUS it was expensive, AND it would leave only one day to see everything else. As for the adventure caving -- which involves getting a hard hat and a special caving outfit and going off the main paths in the caves to get deeper into caverns (which can involve squeezing through tight spaces and wading through deep cave rivers) -- I figured I'd had enough of a taste for that when I did the Garden of Eden hike (and adventure caving was also expensive).
I would really love to do a separate trip for more outdoor-adventure-specific traveling, so I can pack accordingly and be prepared for multi-day hikes and such, which require additional supplies and a totally different backpack than the one I've got for this trip. Fortunately, I've still managed to see plenty of beautiful natural sites without needing special hiking gear :)
Gunung Mulu National Park: An UNESCO World Heritage Site
There's a "Discovery Center" at the park, which is basically a little museum of infographics and fun facts about the park. I thought some of you might be interested in what makes this park so special, so I've included a bit of the Discovery Center information below.
To be placed on the prestigious World Heritage List, a defined area, like a National Park, must be studied and then assessed by a panel of international experts to decide if it meets at least one of these four criteria:
It is an outstanding example of the major stages of the Earths' history, including the record of life, significant on-going geological processes in the development of landforms, or significant geomorphic or physiographic features.
It is an outstanding example representing significant on-going ecological and biological evolutionary processes.
It is an outstanding example representing significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity, including those areas containing threatened species of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science and conservatism.
It contains superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance.
Mulu National Park meets all of these criteria.
Environmental Sustainability aiding Economic Sustainability: The Park is located in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, whose timber industry has developed and become a very important part of the State’s economy. The Government has been very mindful of the need to develop this as an economically, environmentally and socially sustainable industry, so in parallel with the sustainable use of some of its forested areas, Sarawak has also established a world class system of Totally Protected Areas. These includes the National Parks, Nature Reserves and Wildlife Sanctuaries which will cover more than 1 million hectares or 12% of the forested area of the State. While selective logging is permitted in the Protected Forest Reserves, they are also managed to provide long term protection of their biodiversity. This means that they cannot be cleared for agriculture or plantation forests and will always provide an important buffer zone between the park and developed land.
What Makes Mulu Super Special: Some places might have a large number of different plant species but not many animal species, or they might have a large number of plant species but most of them are grasses. They might have a very high number of bird species but very few mammals or reptiles. They are still recognized as having high biodiversity but the ‘hotspots’ are those places which score high values in the number of species in many different groups of organisms. For example, researchers here have identified more than 1500 species of flowering plants, 1700 mosses and liverworts, 450 of ferns and 4000 of fungi in Mulu. This diverse vegetation supports 80 species of mammals, 50 of fish, 270 birds, 50 reptiles, 75 amphibians and estimated 20,000 species of insects. Not the total number of species to be found, just those already identified!
"My caves are the best, they're the biggest, everyone says so": Many superlatives have been used to describe the caves of Mulu: “The biggest chamber,” “the largest passage,” “the largest cave by volume of air,” “the longest underground river.” All true, but not necessarily important in terms of why it is significant to preserve them. What is important is the variety of extra habitats the 350km of cave passages and chambers found so far provide for a wide variety of bats, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and some truly remarkable insects – many of which are found only in Mulu. Deer Cave, for example, is home to at least 12 species of bats, the highest number of bat species occupying a single cave ever recorded.
Why limestone is nature's preferred cave-sculpting material: The biggest and best known of all caves are those that form in soluble rock, particularly limestone. Limestone is porous – it has air spaces between the grains so it can absorb water. It is also permeable, meaning that the pores are connected in such a way that it can transmit or allow water to flow through it. When water gets inside the limestone and starts moving, it dissolves the rock from the inside out and if the limestone is pure enough, the process creates one of the most remarkable and varied features of this amazing soluble rock – caves!
When the water cascading off the higher sandstone mountain meets the limestone, it doesn't flow over, it flows through, dissolving the limestone mountains from the inside out to create some of the most cavernous limestone to be found anywhere on Earth! (infographic below)
Oh no! Why is the river all brown and dirty? Because dirt is natural! Practically all large rivers have a muddy brown appearance – this isn’t from sewage or pollution, but from the heavy sediment load washed into them from the mountains and run-off from surrounding forest areas. The sediment load is greater where deforestation has left the soil unprotected, but sedimentation is a natural condition in these rivers because natural landslides are common on the steep hills and mountains. On the lower flat-lands the rivers have a natural tendency to meander, cutting new channels and washing the soil away as sediment and turning the rivers a milk-coffee color.
View of Mulu from the arrival plane
I hope you all feel more knowledgable and have a deeper sense of appreciation for this and other wonderful natural parks. They are so, so important, and one of the things I am most proud of about the United States is our national parks program. During one of the cave tours, the guide said to me, "You've got Mammoth Cave in the United States," and I was like, "...yep, uh-huh..." without really having a clue what or where that was, and that's a shame. We think we've got to go to other countries to "see the world," but we have SO MUCH WORLD in our sea-to-shining-sea cross-continental nation that we so rarely try to explore (which include cultural as well as geographical novelties). When I get back home, visits to Yosemite, Yellowstone, and (now) Mammoth Cave National Parks are going on my "places to visit" list.
Deer Cave, The Garden of Eden, & Lang Cave
The hostel at the (very remote and jungle-y) park headquarters
When I arrived to meet my group, I wore rubber shoes that I’d bought from the store (which were at least one full size too large but they didn’t have any smaller than “39”), and all I had brought with me was my phone (sealed in its waterproof cover thing). And then I quickly learned that I needed to bring a lunch, because the hike was going to last until at least 3pm, which meant I needed to bring a backpack. Everyone else had legit outdoorsy daypacks, and I didn’t want to get my leather-and-cloth backpack from Peru all dirty on a hike, but I also didn’t have any other options. So I ran back for it, grabbed some money, and hit the convenience store to see what might be okay for lunch. The most “lunch-y” thing was some canned curry chicken, so I got two of those, and a bag of almonds and cashews, and a small package of off-brand Oreos. Only later, did I learn that the café will make a real lunch for you and put it in tupperware for day hikes. OH WELL.
There are fun-fact informational signs along the main paths throughout the park, and I found this one about hunting with tree-poison-tipped darts (and the anti-malarial, anti-hangover, aphrodisiac plant) particularly interesting. Our guide said the local market (which you can visit as part of one of the tours) sells the exact kind of blowpipes used by the Penan to fire the hunting darts (poison darts not included).
The Garden of Eden walk is so named because it is theorized that, back in the day (by which I mean millions of years ago, not the 1940s), Deer Cave was even longer than it is now, but it collapsed, forming a sinkhole into which this Garden of Eden eventually grew. No one knows for sure if that's what happened, but if it is, that makes the Garden of Eden the largest sinkhole in the world by volume.
The hike involves going through Deer Cave in a U-shaped path -- half of which must be done just climbing over rocks and wading through the cave river after the tour boardwalk ends -- and then hiking through jungle to the Garden's waterfall. To get back, you just have to turn around and go back the way you came in, because there's no other way out of the valley-sinkhole; it is surrounded by a steep slope of sandstone and shale formation on the south-eastern side, and on all other sides by 150-300 meters tall limestone walls.
Anyway, the Garden of Eden tour starts easily enough – we walked for about 45 minutes on wooden boardwalks from the park office to the Deer Cave entrance – our guide pointed out a stick bug and a green viper snake (very venomous!) along the way -- and then we walked another 20 or so minutes on a path into the cave. Then the path ended, and things got interesting. We climbed all over huge rocks, many of which had ropes around to hold onto for balance. There were a few instances where we also had to wade through shallow water. In a few places, water rained down through the ceiling of the cave like a showerhead, and huge groups of bats were visible only as dark black areas along the top of the cave.
When we finally got to the other end of the cave, we were given two options for how to exit: 1) climb over some slippery rocks, or 2) go through the water, which meant holding our bags over our heads since the water would be chest-deep. I opted for the water route. I figured I would dry quickly, but I didn't know what I’d do if I slipped and fell off one of those rocks and injured myself. The guide has a strong radio in case of medical emergency, but I didn't want to test their emergency response system, and going through the water felt more adventurous anyhow. Here's a photo of two people in my group (real hard to take a selfie in these conditions) so you can see how deep the water was:
Once out of the cave, we did some more hiking, some more water-wading, and passed through an area full of leeches (a couple got on me but I was able to notice them (with the help of others) before they could start sucking blood from me. One leech did manage to grab hold of another person in our group, though, and it was actually kinda cool to see it balloon up as it drank his blood. The leech releases some kind of blood thinner, so when the guide peeled it off, it seemed like the small wound had caused a lot more damage than it actually did because of how much (diluted) blood there was. It got him right in the webbing between two toes…. Yuck.
When we reached the waterfall in the Garden of Eden, we sat down for lunch and had a chance to go swimming.
A leech on my one-size-too-big rubber hiking cleats...
On the way back, our guide asked if we wanted to go an altenate route through the Deer Cave.
“What’s the alternate route?”
“Through the guano.” (Guano is bat droppings.)
“Is there any particular cool perk to going through the guano other than it being different than the way we did before?”
“No.”
“Okay sure, let’s do it.”
I was the one who asked if there was any special perk to going through the guano, because no one seemed to care about the obvious downside. I suppose they didn’t think it would be covering literally EVERYTHING (the ropes, the rocks, anything we'd have to touch for balance), and that we would be getting it all over our hands as we climbed our way over the rocks and back to the main path. So gross. I asked our guide if he convinced lots of people to take the guano route, and he said "yep." People will do such weird things for the sake of novelty.
But actually... guano is significantly less disgusting than other mammals’ feces. We weren’t even sure if that’s what was covering everything at first, because it doesn’t have the normal consistency of poop; it’s more like a heavy black dusting over everything. And a pile of it isn’t squishy like mud, it’s just kinda cushy-soft to step on, almost like running track asphalt. And as for as the smell – it’s really not that bad when you consider that it is EVERYWHERE. (I'll stop talking about how not-awful bat poop is now. Don't want it to start sounding like I LIKE the stuff.)
A cool thing about Deer Cave is that there’s an opening that has a rock formation in the shape of Abraham Lincoln’s profile. The guide made a joke that maybe after another ten thousand years the profile will be shaped like Donald Trump’s face. *...Sigh...* There's just no getting away from that man, not even from halfway around the world.
(Sorry the photo is blurry -- I had to zoom in a lot and the light coming from outside made it hard for the camera to focus on the profile)
After Deer Cave, we went to Lang Cave, the prettiest and most geologically interesting of all the show caves, due to its many stalagmite and stalactite formations (the icicle-looking things that come down from the cave ceiling and also build from the cave floor up). These form when water drips through the ceiling of the cave and the minerals carried in the water actually start binding and create a growth of rock coming down from the ceiling, and the same thing happens with the water that drops to the ground – the minerals slowly pile on each other, bind, and build up with each drip. Eventually the two shapes grow to the point that they meet in the middle and form a column. How cool is that???
The Planet Earth episode about caves talks about the stalagmite-meets-stalactite process starting at 21:35. Then, at 28:00 it goes into cave scuba diving, which looks incredible (one needs to have an advanced "tech diver" certification to do this, as it is incredibly dangerous, of course).
There are birds, called swiftlets, that also live in the caves. In Lang Cave, we saw some of their nests, and the tour guide told us that those nests are used to make Chinese bird nest soup. It is very expensive, but evidently, very good for one's health. I didn't get a straight answer when I asked how tasty it is...
Canopy Walk
The tropical rainforest weather often forces tours to be cancelled due to rising water levels or danger from slippery rocks after a heavy downpour. Thankfully, the only time this got in the way for me was having the canopy tour delayed by 90 minutes; it's a quick and safe one, so it didn’t need to be cancelled altogether. Also, it was delightful – basically just a leisurely stroll through a series of treetop bridges. Sometimes people see wildlife in the tops of the trees, like monkeys, hornbills (e.g. “Tucan Sam” birds), or snakes. We didn’t see any of those, but I didn’t mind because for me, that wasn’t really the point anyhow. I think I just like hanging out in places I normally shouldn’t or couldn’t be, like 20 meters deep under water or 20 meters high in the treetops.
Fast Lane / Langang Cave
After the canopy walk, it started pouring down rain starting at 11:30am until just about 2:00, which is when the Fastlane Cave tour was going to begin. Everyone met up at the park office wearing rain jackets or ponchos (myself included, as I had purchased a poncho at the shop the day I arrived), and I noticed most people also had footwear that would be good for walking through deep puddles. I asked whether I would need special shoes for this tour and was told “nah,” so I thought wearing my normal boots was fine. I’m sure you can sense that where this is going… (it was not fine).
We took a 5 minute riverboat (yay riverboats!) as a shortcut to get to the cave entrance, which would have otherwise been a 2.5 kilometer walk. From there, we walked along a forest path for 10 minutes, and about five minutes in, we came across a three-meters’ stretch that was a few inches deep, with no way to walk around it dryly. All eyes zeroed in on me and my boots, since I was the only one who hadn’t brought appropriate shoes. Rather than get my boots all wet, I opted to just go barefoot, which was fine.
Sorry that story of overcoming the improper footwear obstacle was so anticlimactic… these caves have been cool, but I haven't had to overcome much adversity here.
Anyhow, the walk through Fastlane Cave was pretty awesome. It wasn’t well-lit, so we all had to use our “torchlights” (which is what the rest of the world calls flashlights) to see the inside of the cave and all the interesting rock formations around us. The poor lighting also means the photos aren’t great, but here’s a few to give you an idea of what the inside of the cave was like.
Ugh, the photos really don't do these caves any justice. Just... trust me, they were awesome.
Paku Valley Loop & Waterfall
The Paku Valley Loop is an 8km trail you can do without a guide that takes you to the Paku Waterfall. I decided to wear my normal leather boots for this, because the rubber cleat ones are super slippery on the boardwalk, and they give me blisters because they aren't the right size. However, I wish I'd just gone with the blisters. Along this trail, there are several places where the water has pooled from the most recent downpour of tropical rainforest rain, and you have to either just walk through it and get your shoes wet, or take your shoes off and wade through barefoot. OR -- if you're super creative -- you'll figure out a third, really graceful and not-stupid-looking-at-all way of getting across without getting your boots wet OR taking them off, like so:
So glad no one else was around to witness that.
Sometimes the water was so high, however, that this method wasn't workable, so I just ran through the puddles as quick as possible. Between that and the super muddy parts of the trail that were unavoidable, my boots -- my beautiful Keva boots that have treated me so well for 6 full months and comprise exactly half of my travel shoe collection -- really took a beating. I hope they recover enough to get me through the next two months without falling apart. I need to treat them to a shoe shine ASAP, cuz that's the boot equivalent of a spa treatment, and they earned it.
The Paku waterfalls were beautiful, though. What is it about water and gravity that is so magical?
Along the way, I also saw a teeny tiny squirrel, a striped cricket, several gecko-looking lizards, and a centipede, and I wondered a lot about what I would do if a venomous green viper snake bit me while I was alone. (Scream for help and hobble back as fast as possible with whichever leg was not paralyzed first -- that's what I decided I'd do.)
That night, I went back to Deer Cave to watch the Bat Exodus. The guides say the bats can leave the cave anywhere between 4:00-6:00pm, so that leaves quite a long time to be waiting around. If it's raining, sometimes they won't come out at all, unless it's been raining for several days and they're too hungry to be picky about the weather anymore. I waited from 5:15 to 6:00pm, and no bats. Fortunately, I'd seen a bat cave exodus back in Cambodia, so I didn't feel like I was missing out on too much when I decided to give up and head back. Oh well.
Next blog: Exploring the presence and influence of Islam in Malaysia and the rest of SE Asia...