MULU NATIONAL PARK (PART I/II)

This post is specially dedicated to the mysterious Bimbobum. Sorry for the delay! Maybe I can buy you 'char kueh tiaw' or you prefer a 'buffet' when I go KL around mid-July to show my apology. Haha! Then again, your mysterious identity could be leaked! Anyway, there are too many photos so I decided to cut the post into halves. The second one will come before the World Cup ends!



First of all, Mulu National Park is situated very near the Miri division which is the neighbour to Brunei. Therefore, if you are outside Miri and you intend to visit Mulu, you need to fly to the Miri airport first. Sarawak is divided into 9 divisions and is the biggest state in Malaysia. It is famous for the caves and jungles it has while neighbours Sabah is famous for the beaches, islands and mountain ranges. Therefore, you know where to go depend on you preferences.





The best time to visit Mulu is midyear because the monsoon will make the place very wet and slippery during the year end. Another reason will be the rain will prevent the bats from coming out to look for food which you won't want to miss. Talk more about this 'important' issue later. Why visit Mulu? Well, let me give you a few reasons.

Reasons to visit Mulu:
1. It has a biological diversity level of over 3,500 species of plants and large amount of fauna species.

2. It is listed as a world heritage site in November 2000.

3. You think you gone through all the caves in the world and so what is so big deal about caves? Well, let me tell you kid, this place has 300 kilometres of cave passages which consisted of hundreds over caves and to top off with the Sarawak Chamber, which at 12 million cubic metres is the world's largest single cave chamber. It is a record 700 m. (2,300 ft.) long and 70 m. (230 ft.) high, with an average width of 300 m. (985 ft.). It can accomodate 40 Boeing 747 aircrafts with still enough room to spare.

4. Still not satisfied? Well, it also has the largest cave corridor in the world, the highest cave in the world and longest cave in the world. (by the way, it is so long and hard to access that until this day, there is no exact length to it recorded yet! Why? This long cave had areas where you need to be submerged in the water and some spaces lack oxygen and you need to bring in food, drink supplies and oxygen supplies but it could not sustain you far enough to reach the end since it took days!)

5. It has so many bats in the caves estimated at 2.5-3.5 million that even Batman will consider to take this as his lair! Haha!

6. Apart from Gunung Mulu for those who loves hiking, it also has the famous pinnacle formations of Gunung Api and Benarat which you will not want to miss! Razor sharp solid thorns like rock formation pointing towards the sky right in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the thick jungle reaching the height of 40-50 metres.





What about the people who live there? The Penans. They are one of the many unique ethnic tribes of Sarawak. You can call them the Tarzan version of the east. They are nomadic people who can survive in the jungle for a year with just a blowpipe. They go get some sap from the trees and apply it onto the sharpened sticks as the weapon to hunt animals. This sap basically paralyze you for hours once you got hit. Hence, these people are the best jungle travellers. Few years back, I recalled this helicopter crash tragedy in the jungle. The government used sophisticated radar planes, dogs, armies and for days they failed to find the crash site and the people. Finally, they sought the help fo the Penans and finally, it was them who found everything! Imagine this, even the technology and dogs lost against them. They are also extremely good with their blowpipe, able to shoot long distances to survive in the jungle for a year of hunting!

To go to Mulu, which is situated deep in the jungle to the south of Miri, you can only fly there unless you love jungle trekking so much, you can trek through the extreme thick jungles and hopefully you get there! Yeah! When I gone two years back, MAS used the Twin Otter plane to fly in. I am not sure whether you guys board the plane before, it is the smallest passenger plane after Fokker 50 in MAS and you need to weigh yourself before the flight. You will have to sit at both sides of the plane to balance the weight!

From August 2006 onwards, Fly Asian Xpress (FAX) will take over all the flight operations into Mulu and you can book online at their website.



This is Miri Airport, exactly a copy of the KLIA design. Mulu has no power supply! Everything is ran by generators. There are around 5 vehicles in the whole site. This place is basically being preserved as much as possible to protect the natural reserves.



Once we reached there, we stayed at the National Park. You have only two choice of comfortable accomodation in Mulu. You either pick the cheaper National Park HQ hostels or the Royal Mulu Resort. This is the banyan tree. A super ancient one. Look at the size of this tree!



You can walk through the roots! In Mulu, as I mentioned earlier, there are hundreds of caves. Only four are show caves - meaning caves opened up to the world for the public to go with ease as the basic facilities are built inside to assist your journey into them. The rest are adventure caves which require you to book a special guide to bring you for the longer and tougher journey. These are for the reasonably fit people who wants more challenges!

The four show caves we visited are Deer, Langs, Clearwater and Wind caves. We went to the Langs and Deer caves on the first day and later the Clearwater and Wind caves on the second day.



Langs cave is named after the person who founded the cave. It has spotlights attached to the whole cave to show you its beauty as they focus on the different structures available in the cave. This cave's main feature is basically to show off its aesthetics. There are some rim stone pools on the floor too with the beautiful stalagmites and stalactites.











You can see many details of plant roots crawling all over the cave. I will say this is the most beautiful cave I ever seen so far! Well, there is a problem with photography inside the caves. The passage is very small so therefore it gives you exactly minimum time to take a photo. Flash will destroy the photo so I aimed for the aperture shots. Problem is some areas are forbidden especially the bats zone because they don't want you to disturb the natural ecological system! You are not allowed to use a tripod so it is very difficult to buy time to take a good shot. People will be waiting for you from both sides because of the tight one person width passageway and you seldom have an opening! That's why most of my shots turned out blur because of the limited time I have and most of the time testing out my ability to keep still for a good aperture shot. I am not using a digital slr here.



Next stop is the Deer cave, which is just beside the Langs cave, around 100 metres away. This cave is huge and smelly because this is where the home of millions of bats are available. You will see huge boulders and bigger spaces all over the cave.











If you look carefully at the photo above, you can see long rays of light coming down from the top of the cave to the floor. You see lines of rays of light and you can see the small figures of human scale below it. This is the tallest point of the cave if I am not mistaken.



This actually looks like the Sarawak state map if you look in from outside the other way round.









The famous Abraham Lincoln profile.





You know what is the stuff taken at the photo above? Shit! Like millions of kilograms of shit! Haha! Extremely smelly!



According to the tour guide, baby bats will fall to the ground during birth. The mother bat will come and and save some but not all. Those that were not saved will be eaten up by these scary crawling insects. You can see the bat above being taken away for food!



This one falls flat and still waiting for the mother to rescue it.



This is the bat observatory area. They purposely build this platform outside Deer cave for us to come out and grouped together to wait for the bats to fly out.



Here you see them coming out from the cave.



They spiral out like a dragon, spinning and spinning in a long line that is never detached.



This goes on for almost an hour. Why do they come out? Here is a closer zoom below. No, they are not birds!



Well, late in the evening, the bats will come out looking for food which are basically insects and fruits. The videos below show how they fly out of the caves. Millions and millions of them! If tomorrow or tonight we will have rain, they will not fly out. Therefore, you will want to avoid the monsoon season when it rains alot. It depends on your luck actually. There are some bad luck tourists who waited for days and they did not come out because of subsequent days of rain. Therefore, we were lucky because we seen them during our first try!

Videos to watch (7 days to expiry date!):
Dragon Shaped DNA-like Spiral Bats Chain 01
Dragon Shaped DNA-like Spiral Bats Chain 02
Dragon Shaped DNA-like Spiral Bats Chian 03

Part II soon before the World Cup ends! I promise (keeping fingers crossed!)!