When I
told an aquaintence that I was taking a trip to Borneo">
|
Welcome to the Mulu Caves |
|
|
|
It might be a good idea to
download the video
while reading the 'Travel Report' below. |
When I
told an aquaintence that I was taking a trip to Borneo">
|
Welcome to the Mulu Caves |
|
|
|
It might be a good idea to
download the video
while reading the 'Travel Report' below. |
When I
told an aquaintence that I was taking a trip to Borneo">
|
Welcome to the Mulu Caves |
|
|
|
It might be a good idea to
download the video
while reading the 'Travel Report' below. |
| When I
told an aquaintence that I was taking a trip to Borneo, she immediately assaulted me with
the "musts." You must go to Kuching. You must stay overnight in a longhouse. You
must visit the Mulu Caves in Sarawak. You must, you must... |
I am always suspicious of the
must people. Their intentions are usually good, but beneath their friendly prods is always
this obsession with getting you to do exactly what they did. My theory is that they all
want to vicariously relive their own experiences through you. They must be some kind of
cult.
So I didn't take her imperatives too seriously, especially when she mentioned Sarawak's
Mulu Caves. In fact, I thought she was joking, because she knew I was claustrophobic.
"These aren't those kind of caves,"
she assured me. When I asked her to explain, exactly, what other kinds of caves there were
besides ones that immolated you with an invisible and demonic Hurculean vice, she hit me
with the old sucker-punch: "You'll see," she said. I hate that.
But I was already going to Gunung Mulu National
Park, home of one of the world's most extraordinary cave systems, for a much different
reason. The park, which is as large as Singapore, is also an incomparable place to
experience the wonders of the Malaysian rain forest, the oldest on Earth. To get there,
you can either take a bus from the sleepy city of Miri, followed by a boat rides up the
Baram River - or take a twenty minute plane ride from Miri. The plane ride is by far the
most popular method, because on a clear day the pilot will buzz the park's most striking
above-ground feature, a serrated ridge of towering peaks called the Pinnacles. Once you
get to Mulu, there are two places to stay: either in the lodges just outside the park, or
in the Royal Mulu Resort, a comfortable, tree-house of a hotel situated in the middle of
the jungle. |
| Over 1,500 species of
plants thrive in Mulu's jungle, including the world's largest flower, the dog-eared
Rafflesia, and at least 170 kinds of orchids. Numbers like that are really just
abstractions. Gunung Mulu is really just pure green madness. On my first jungle-walk, I
felt like I was walking through a blast zone in which the bomb had been life. For every
inch of eyesight, my expert guide, a multilingual local from a nearby Berawan village,
pointed out some ingenious display of nature's creativity; whether it was in the
monumental weavings of the stranger fig vines or the tiny ribbings on the wings of a leaf
insect. On the same walk, we ran into a very animated entymologist from New Zealand who
had arrived a few days earlier to study a rare-species of spider that had remarkably acute
vision. I asked him if he was enjoying himself. "You might think I'm kidding,"
he replied, "but this place actually does resemble my personal concept of
heaven." |
What makes it all the better,
however, is that in Gunung Mulu you don't have to slog through the forest's steamy
undermush with a machete in order to fully witness its beauty. The park has over 25
kilometers of plank walkway that keep you high and dry, and it is wide enough so that you
can always spot a large insect or snake from a distance, though these creatures prefer to
avoid humans.
The walkway took over two years to construct, and though it is an idyllic way to see the
forest, its main purpose was to provide easy access to the Mulu Caves.
The Caves, by far, are the park's biggest draw. It seemed like I would never hear the end
of them. The Kiwi entymologist and I were probably the only two people who had come for
the forest, and even he couldn't stop raving about them. |
|
"They're like
nothing else, mate. You must see them." When I told my guide, Jacob, that I was a
claustrophobe, he was completely unfazed. "Maybe in other caves you have problem, not
in Mulu," he said, "I give you my word. C'mon, I'll show you."
Though I didn't really believe him, I followed him as he tramped off down the walkway
towards towards room 101 in the Ministry of Love. |
There are four caves
open to the general public in Gunung Mulu, each with its own unique attraction. Our first
stop was the smallest, called Lang's Cave, which is known for its limestone formations.
This cave was discovered by Jacob's cousin, a Berawan man named - yes - Lang. A gifted
hunter, Lang was tracking a wild boar up the side of the mountain when he came across the
cave. When he saw its size and the amazing limestone formations near its mouth, he knew he
had found something special, but told no one of his discovery.
"He got selfish," Jacob explained. "There were so many boar living near the
cave that every time he went hunting he came back successful. It made him look good with
the women, so kept it secret. " But the other men in the tribe finally prodded Lang
into revealing the secret spot. After that, word of the cave spread quickly. |
| The entrance to Lang's
Cave immediately struck me as a pair of oval jaws, stalactite teeth included. I, of
course, was lunch. Jacob had given me that bull about "his word" because he was
really not a guide at all, but the man in charge of feeding the caves. Once he coaxed me
inside, however, I saw that it was spacious (though nothing compared to what would come
later) enough to accommodate my neurosis, and well-lit by electric lights. As we made our
way down a cement pathway, I was so captivated by what I saw that my phobia took a back
seat. There were whole walls of ice-cream cones, glistening with moisture and melting down
to the floor. There were miniature rain forests, clouds, and ceilings of boiling caramel.
There were royal chambers, complete with elaborate gilded thrones and columns and imperial
poster-beds. It was Ali-Baba's cave, with all the stolen treasure turned to stone. |
| Next we visited Wind
Cave and Clearwater Cave. Wind Cave is named after the cool breeze that fans from its
entrance, and famed for its unusual calcite formations. The formations here were less
abundant than in Lang's Cave, but much larger. In a chamber called the "King's
Room" were impressive stalactites and stalagmites that looked like polished
chandeliers and candlesticks. Clearwater Cave, a stone's throw away, was much more
impressive. With 107 kilometers of passage, it is easily the longest cave in Asia, the
tenth longest in the world. It's name comes from crystalline water of the roaring river
inside, which is purified as it passes through hundreds of feet of limestone. Near the
entrance there is also a small, emerald pool - perfect for a soothing dip after walking
through jungle heat. |
| Our last cave of the
day was called Deer Cave. Claustrophobia did not exist there. Standing inside, its sheer
volume almost induces spacial disorientation. It is the largest cave passage known to man,
and its magnitude defies all description. No photograph has been able to provide a proper
idea of Deer Cave's immensity, and so writers and scientists have invented an ever-growing
lexicon of visual comparisons -- largely attached to humankind's own colossi. With a
length of over 2 kilometers, a width of up 150 meters, and a ceiling that reaches 120
meters, the Cave can reputedly contain five St. Paul's Cathedrals, over 20 Boeing 747
jumbo jets, and four Houston Astrodomes. To these I offer an altogether non-quantifiable
comparison (which I hope I may be forgiven for). Deer Cave would have made a perfect base
for the Rebel Alliance. It has a rear entrance, and Han Solo could have easily piloted the
Millenium Falcon into its mouth and still had plenty of room to land. It takes 40 minutes
to walk from one end to the other. |
| Inside the cave was a world in
itself, complete with hills and valleys, plains and forests (because of the huge entrance,
there is enough light for trees to grow a quarter-mile in). There is a sizeable creek,
which turns into a river when it rains heavily. Deer Cave even has a metropolis-sized
population, consisting of an estimated 1.8 million wrinkle-nosed bats, who stream out of
the entrance every day at 6pm sharp to spend the night feeding in the forest. (Later on,
we would stand outside the cave and watch them leave in a single stream that snaked across
the pale evening sky and took an hour to get from head to tail). The tiny bats are barely
visible while they roost in crevices far above, but they have clearly left their mark on
the terrain below. Bat guano, a fertile and pungent powder, covers the entire floor of the
cave. In one place, there is a hill of it at least 20 feet high, and its rusty color turns
the cave's interior into a landscape more reminiscent of Mars than Earth. |
|
| Ten minutes after we
entered the cave, Jacob made me turn and look back at the entrance. Water droplets were
catching light as they fell hundreds of feet from the ceiling, and it looked like it was
raining stars. He pointed to a rock formation high above the floor. Staring out into
space, was a penny-perfect profile of Abraham Lincoln. He allowed me time for a gasp and a
photo, then we moved on. |
| "It's going to
get a little dark now," he said as we climbed a stairway that led to the cave's
second chamber "but it will be worth it." He activated his flashlight and I
followed him around a rock formation, into an area of pitch blackness. Knowing that I was
surrounded by vast quantities of space eliminated any phobia-induced anxiety. Jacob shined
his light on a small centipede as it crawled across a stone face. He placed it in his palm
and turned off the light. His palm was glowing with green, radioactive streaks - a
luminous liquid that the centipede secretes as a defense mechanism. |
| The final pleasure was a view of
Deer Cave's back entrance, called Adam and Eve Forest. Beneath a huge natural doorway was
an impossibly lush stand of trees. Dwarfed by the huge entrance, the trees, some of which
were nearly 100 feet in height, looked like decorations on a train set. Falling straight
down from the ceiling was a mystical waterfall, dubbed Adam & Eve's shower. |
|
"I thought you had
claustrophobia," Jacob jibed as we stood on a limestone mesa high above the cave's
floor. All I could say was that I did, but not in Mulu. In Mulu, they have caves for
claustrophobes,
and if you go you "MUST" see them. |
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