Mulu National Park

Entrance to Clearwater cave

Wind cave

Cave formations

Entrance to Deer cave - exit for the bats

Inside out

The park land

Life in the rain forest

River life

Back into Malaysian Borneo and I enter Sarawak via a booming oil town of Miri, a jumble of a town which seems way bigger and busier than KK and is probably the most difficult place I have ever tried to navigate around on foot - there are so many different interlinking streets and nowhere to cross the roads. Good enough for an aimless wonder, which I am getting rather good at, before flying into the interior of Borneo and into the rain forest and to Mulu National Park. Although Mulu is in the rain forest it is more about the caves here than the rain forest itself - if you have ever seen the caves episode of Planet Earth then you will know where I am. The limestone mountains and cliffs in the area allow for numerous and expansive cave systems, some only discovered very recently and most still being explored. There are four 'show caves' that you can visit - Deer, Lang, Wind and Clearwater and they are all huge, with deer cave having the largest chamber and being home to millions of bats, along with their guano and the thousands of insects that feed on it. Clearwater cave is the longest and has a river flowing through it - it is 129km long but visitors are only allowed 400m in - oh how the dark winding cave beckons you onwards. All the caves have good formations in them and are visited either by walks through the rain forest or via a boat trip along the river. The caves themselves are spectacular but the highlight for me was watching, at dusk, the millions of bats leaving the cave. The bats do not always leave the cave as quite sensibly if the weather is foul they will stay in for the night. I went along two nights in a row and the first night, after there being some heavy rain, well it is the rain forest, near to dusk only a few thousand bats left the cave - I'm only estimating obviously. It was still an awesome sight and if I hadn't got back the next night I would have thought that I had seen all the bats leaving. The second night the bats started to emerge in small batches - hundreds or maybe thousands at a time, flying together in a long line swirling around, sticking together to avoid the waiting birds of prey and then one batch started to leave the cave and it was just endless, it must have continued for at least 5 or more minutes - bats after bats after bats - amazing. To top it all, even with all the rain, no sign of leeches :-)