We have just come back from two days away at the Royal Mulu Resort, just a 30 minute flight from Miri and set in the middle of the rainforest. Mulu is a world heritage site famous for its caves. There are something like 60 caves in the area but only 4 are accessible to the general public to walk through. On the first day we walked through the rainforest to get to two caves: Lang Cave and Deer Cave. The walk through the jungle was great. We saw a lot of local wildlife… frogs, lizards, lots of butterflies, pygmy squirrels and a snake. According to our guide there are also a lot of larger animals in the area including various big cats, monkeys, wild boar, wild deer, and a rarely spotted Rhino!!
The caves were magnificent. Very hard to describe… Lang Cave is smaller but has some very beautiful rock formations. Deer cave is huge and is home to millions upon millions of bats (very smelly!). At dusk we all sat in a small clearing and watched as all of the bats come out of the cave opening to hunt for the night. As they come out they spiral around before flying away in big swarms in a snake-like wave that just looks like a black shimmering cloud from down below.
The walk back from the caves at dusk was really cool because we could hear an amazing cacophony of animal noises.
The second day we took a long boat along the river to see a local village and the remaining two caves. The long boat ride was a highlight of the trip. A long boat is basically a very long, low, canoe-shape boat with a motor. The river level was quite low and the water very clear. Going along the river the long boat was constantly maneuvering around big rocks and logs in the shallow water.
The remaining two caves were the ‘Cave of the Wind’ and the ‘Clearwater cave’. These were spectacular too and worth the steep climb we had to make up hundreds of steps. The Clearwater cave system is over 140km in length, which makes the largest cave in the world in terms of volumetric space. We’ll have some photos up soon of the forest and the caves. Unfortunatenly we didn’t get any photos of the caves on the second day because our camera battery ran out! It seems that the salesman misinformed us about the battery life when we bought our camera 😛