Bunung Mulu in Malaysian Borneo was largely unheard of in 2012. Nine years after, it remains to be so! Back then, there were only two ways to get there: either take the small service plane from Miri to Mulu or do the treacherous three-day trek along the Headhunter’s Trail. Now, there is also the option to take the longer, more complicated river route. I obviously took the easiest option.
From Mulu’s airport, it took some 20 minutes on foot to get to the park’s entrance. There was no public land transportation available then. What opens to you past the gate, however, is beyond words—the experience was and still is the best communing with nature I have had. The World Heritage-listed Gunung Mulu National Park is one of the most magical, most unspoiled places in Asia. Considering how difficult the access is, the superlative natural beauty that Mulu offers is without equal. One review on the site even aptly described it as “almost Jurassic Park,” and I could not agree more.
While there is a luxurious accommodation nearby, I opted to stay in one Rumah Panjang, a Sarawak longhouse, just outside the park’s gate. I hoped that I might find company among other travelers staying there, but I ended up occupying the whole house alone for the three nights I spent there. Even the elderly caretakers had to leave me by 8 p.m. only to return the following day at 6 a.m. It was frightening as they turned off the lights when they left, and you could only pray that no wild animal crawls into the room. The experience was fun, nonetheless.
A morning tour took us to the Clearwater and Wind caves. There were five of us on the tour boarded on a longboat. The river cruise along the Melinau river gorge took us to the foot of Gunung Api. Halfway through, we stopped at a settlement of the Penan, nomadic indigenous people who are given exclusive hunting rights within the park. There was a small market, too, where one could help the community by purchasing their crafts.
on the way to the Deer Cave. A rare sighting of an orange-tip lantern fly (Pyrops intricata) spotted on the trek up to Wind Cave.
Gunung Api’s Wind cave got its name from the strong winds channeled into the cave through its numerous shafts that could go as deep as 60 meters from the surface. Its grand King’s Chamber is gifted with some of the best cave formations there are to find. The Clearwater cave, on the other hand, spanning over 60 kms in length, boasts of having the largest cave network ever surveyed. One of the world’s biggest cave chambers, the Sarawak Chamber, is on the Clearwater system. The cave’s opening also offers a unique habitat for a rare one-leaf plant and is often frequented by enchanting Rajah Brooke’s birdwing butterflies.
The Deer and Lang Caves, on the other hand, are in the park’s southern limestone karst hills. To reach these caves, the three of us in the tour trekked a few kilometers, passing by an ancient Penan burial site. If the Deer cave is colossal, Lang cave is small. It is so tiny that one can even touch the ceiling. Despite its size, Lang cave is the most extravagantly ornate in terms of rock formations, as well as the most illustrative of ongoing geological processes such us dripstones, living stromatolites, and natural limestone discolorations.
The nearby Deer cave has the reputation of having one of the largest cave openings at 170 m x 125 m. While not as opulent as the others, the interior houses an exceptional micro-ecosystem that is deprived of sunlight and steady air movement. The cave is home to 3.5 million wrinkle-lipped bats, a few creepers, some blind shrimps and fishes, and more than a meter-deep guano. Outside the cave, one can witness the impressive “Flight of the Dragon”—a seemingly endless queue of bats leaving the cave at dusk to feed.
Everything that one wants to do inside the park has to be coordinated and booked in advance. While a few self-guided walks within the park are permitted, the visits to the caves can only be done by joining a guided tour. In one day, I leisurely trekked to the Paku falls, encountering interesting birds, lizards, and impressive mushrooms on the way. No one is allowed to go on their own beyond the falls as that would be the start of the challenging ascent towards the Pinnacles, another highlight of Mulu which I missed. I vividly recall that in all my walks, I always ended up being soaked in the rain—it is not called a “rainforest” for nothing after all.
Gunung Mulu is one the six great karst landscapes in this corner of the world. The others being: Ha Long Bay, Trang An Cultural Landscape, and Phong Na-Ke Bhang National Park in Vietnam, the karst landscapes of southern China, and our Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park in Palawan. Borneo is home to the second-largest rainforest in the world, only after the Amazon.
Image courtesy of Bernard Joseph Esposo Guerrero
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