We have had an amazing week at Gunung Mulu national park in northern Sarawak, it is one of the most unusual places we have visited so far on our travels...
After leaving Semporna we returned to Kk for a night before catching a flight to Mulu as this is the only way to reach the remote park which includes the worlds largest caves, the worlds largest single cave bat population, lots of jungle, rivers and amazing limestone landscapes.
On our first day we mainly relaxed at the park having checked into a fancy bungalow due to no availability of other accommodation so we thought we should make the most of it! We went to see the Lang Cave followed by the Deer cave (largest passage in the world) which was really huge. At about 6pm every night the 4million or so bats that live in this cave leave to look for their dinner of insects which is a very impressive sight, and we were thankful for their presence as there were noticeably less Mosquitos here.
Our second day involved a trip along the river to a village of indigenous Penan people and then on to the Clearwater and Winds cave. It was interesting to learn about the different formations and to see the various shapes and curves, it really reminded us both of the sculptural aspects of Antonio Gaudi's work on some of his housing in Barcelona. We continued down the river and were dropped off by the boatmen with 3 other people 9km from our next stop- camp 5. The camp was fairly basic dorms with open walls, cold showers and a kitchen where we could cook our own food set in the Melinau gorge. We had come here in order to attempt to climb the Pinnacles, a set of limestone needles half way up Gunung Api. We had been told that the climb was much harder than Mt Kinabalu and had heard tales of people crying on the ascent due to physical pain so we were a bit apprehensive when we set off at 7am. As it turned out, Kinabalu had been good practice as we found the steep ascent ok and really enjoyed the final 400m of rock climbing with ropes and ladders. We were lucky that it didn't rain and we had a fantastic view of the Pinnacles over lunch. Things were a bit slower on the way down due to the ground being quite slippy and having to climb a lot of the way but we made it with plenty of time for a swim and cool off in the river before making our dinner of noodles. We were really pleased to have made it and really enjoyed scrambling around on the mountain, definitely a highlight of the trip!
We returned to the park HQ the following day in time for some adventure caving in the Racer Cave. Whereas the other caves have paths and lighting, adventure caving involves going into a cave with only a helmet and headtorch with a guide and getting very muddy sliding through narrow passages and climbing up and down boulders and rocks. Once we were about 2km into the cave we all turned off our headtorches to experience the darkness and listen to the sounds of the cave which was eerie and quite scary! We couldn't believe just how much wildlife lived in the depths and saw plenty of cave crickets, crabs, bats, swiftlets, huge spiders but unfortunately no racer snakes as the cave is famous for. We enjoyed the adventure caving much more than we expected and tried to book another cave before we left, unfortunately there were no guides available so it wasn't to be! Maybe this was for the best as we would have moved up to advanced caving which may have been too difficult. So instead we walked to the Moonmilk cave, where we had to spend a good hour sheltering from a very heavy tropical rainstorm.
Apart from the caving the HQ also had plenty of interesting walks through the jungle including a canopy walk, botanical walk, waterfall walk and a night walk where we saw all sorts of huge insects, mainly stick insects, spiders and some glow in the dark mushrooms!
We had thought that spending a week somewhere would give us a break from lugging our rucksacks around but due to room availability and going to the Pinnacles we still managed to stay in 4 different types of accommodation during our stay! It was nice to be somewhere remote for a week with no Internet or contact with the world, but we are looking forward to seeing some civilisation in Kuching to end our Borneo trip.