Malaysian Borneo: Pt 1: Mulu National Park
I’m currently in the 2nd largest city in Taiwan, Kaohsuing, resting after our 4 day 180km biking extravaganza of the east coast. You can catch up on the rest of my stories here.
From what little I’ve heard about Borneo, I gathered that it was a wild island full of thousands of unique flora and fauna, largely untouched by humanity’s profiteering ways.
How silly of me.
Well, that’s not completely true.
Mulu
Okay, before I talk about Mulu, which was a story in it’s own right, I have to explain the story of how we got to Mulu. It started off innocuously enough: we had to catch a bus. An early bus, to be exact: 7:00am, heading from Brunei’s capital to the neighboring Malaysian city of Miri, where we would catch a short flight to Mulu in mid-afternoon. Unless you want to do a 12 hour+ day of AWD through the rainforest, the only way in and out of this park is by air.
After being told that we would be able to catch a Dart (Uber for Brunei) at 6:30, we wake up, furiously press the dart button, and soon find out that not a single dart driver is working in the biggest city in the country. The place feels so small-towny sometimes. Giving up after 15 minutes (this was 15 minutes before our bus leaves), Lena attempts to hitchhike while we walk to a neighboring hotel, and we explain our cause. After some frantic back-and-forthing (which including some average schmuck masquerading as employee and saying that someone was going to help us??) they assure us that the bus is not leaving on time, and that we can take a cab. So we call the cab, finally get down to the bus station at around 7:20, and explain our cause to the bus manager there.
The bus had long left. But, the manager, after hearing we had a flight to catch, told us that if we could arrange a Dart, that he would hold the bus on the highway so we could rendezvous with the bus. A dart, now working as the drivers wake up, is now called, and it turns out to be the driver that we previously had. He had a karaoke machine, full DJing capabilities, and oodles of candy for us. We hopped in the car, the manager explained what to do, I hastily tipped the bus manager, and we caught up with the bus 30 or so minutes later. Thankfully, the rest of the journey was uneventful, and we made our flight.
Gunung Mulu National Park
While we were only in Mulu for a short couple days, and only ended up seeing one of the many caves and hikes for offer, it felt incredibly long, and I had a personal reckoning with my addiction to creature comforts: namely Air Conditioning. Since there’s no road connecting Mulu to the mainland, there’s also no electricity or other infrastructure, so the entire village and park runs off of generators. We only had electricity 6 hours a day (6p-12a), and so we spent our first afternoon handling it as best we could, by spending some time in the river and otherwise complaining.
But the ridiculous part is that there is a Marriott in Mulu — complete with wifi, comforts, and 24-hour electricity (and I presume, AC). The locals hated this place, and also held the government in contempt for not hooking power up, but at any given point in the day you could find 5–8 people at the edge of the hotel using the wifi, which the hotel didn’t seem to mind.
As our morale and motivation were low from the sleepless night, we spent much of the next day in the park office (that had AC), killing time until the afternoon hike to deer cave.
Deer Cave
I’ve been fortunate enough to see plenty of caves on this trip, but Deer Cave was still impressive in it’s own right. A 4km walk on a raised walkway, it was easy to get to. The opening was massive, and completely covered in bat feces. It turns out that over three million bats live inside the cave, comprised of about 30 species, and since they all live on the ceilings, the poop just falls down, and accumulates, and accumulates.
This is where the deer get involved. The deer, who lack sodium in their diets, come to deer cave to improve their nutrition. The salt from the feces leaks into the river, which the deer lap up. The tribesmen would then come to the cave as it was quite easy to hunt the deer, and so that’s how Deer Cave got it’s name.
We then waited for about an hour and a half for the infamous “bat exodus”, where those 3 million bats all concurrently leave the cave at dusk to go feast on billions of insects. But those lame bats were being lazy and couldn’t be bothered that day >:(.
We headed back, and thankfully our hosts kept the electricity on a couple more hours into the night since it was so hot, but it was still a second sleepless night.
I’m glad I did Mulu; it really made me ponder the addictions of creature comfort, and how hard it is to go back once I’m used to it. I’ve thankfully had a hot shower, decent bed, and AC for most of the trip (a benefit to the increased tourism), but they make me less able to forgo them, and they certainly aren’t helping our situation of climate change. When push comes to shove, I know that I can live without them, just the first couple days adjusting are going to be difficult. A tragedy that humanity makes so many useful inventions that forgo a healthy future planet. Oh well.
As for my opening comments on Borneo? My next blog posts will cover that. Malaysia doesn’t care about the environment one bit.
