Sarawak

15th March – Mulu Caves
By Maria

We had a couple of hours to kill until our flight to Mulu, so we had a look around Kota Kinabalu shops.

We then got on the lovely Maswings propeller flight to Mulu via Miri. When we landed in Mulu we got taken from the airport for our 5 minute tuk tuk ride to the resort, right next to the river.

We had nothing booked for this afternoon, so we had a look around the resort and got settled in before dinner. We had a lovely buffet dinner and cocktails.


16th March
By Mikey
After breakfast we spent a couple of hours back in the room relaxing and watching tv, before a quick lunch.

After lunch we met our guide Noah who took us to the sky walk (that he help build) and to Lang & Deer caves. Along the way we were shown some animals onlong the walkway including stick insects, butterflies and millipedes.

Camelion

Sky Walk

Millipede

The walk ways were very good quality and it is easy to see that the government is trying to get tourism up and running in this region.

Lang Cave is a nice cave not massive like Deer Cave but not as interesting as other caves we had visited in Western Australia. Inside the cave it was stinking hot and humid.

Deer Cave was different in that the entrance is massive, I think it also contains the largest passage in the world, another is feature is the 2 million bats living inside. The bats make a mass exodus around 6pm every night, they fly in small groups to avoid being attacked by the bat hawk.

Deer Cave

Inside the caves we saw shrimp, fish and millions of bugs. Due to the high number of bats living in the cave a large amount of guano is built up which resulted in a not pleasant smell, but provided a perfect environment for the earwigs and other bugs.

After the cave tours we waited just outside deer cave until sunset for the bat exodus, but unfortunately it started to storm and we had around 50 minutes of heavy rain, this delayed the bats coming out. The bat visitor centre was pretty good with live video of the bats inside the cave. Finally the rain stopped and the bats emerged. It wasn’t as spectacular as the Carlsbad cavern in New Mexico but it was still worth while seeing.

Bats

The walk back to our transport was in the dark and along the way we saw some more of Borneo’s wildlife, including a large green viper on the walkway.

Worm

17th March
By Maria

We packed everything up before going on our boat ride up stream, the river was very low due to dry season with a lot of limestone rocks and tree trunks sticking out of the water. We went to Wind Cave first which was great, then hopped back in the boat to go to Clearwater cave – this was my favourite of the 4 caves (no smell, no creepy crawlies and not to hot) the water runs through the cave and it has carved some lovely patterns in the limestone (got to see a snake here).

Wind Cave

Snake in Clearwater Cave

Noah our guide had brought us a chicken curry lunch and some Tuak rice wine to try which Mikey loved. (they even had some awesome toilets to use) We then headed back to change and to catch our flight to Miri.

Unfortunately their was some confusion with pick up and the company organised for us to stay the night at a wonderful hotel in Miri and to pick us up in the morning. So I was happy as I managed to get a couple of hours shopping in next to the hotel!


Gallery, Slide show