Betwixt activities in Kuching, Bex buried herself in guides, blogs and reviews. The result was an extra major stop before heading all the way west to Kota Kinabalu.
Mulu is tiny. Nestled south of Brunei, but still within the Sarawak region of Malaysia Borneo, its basically an airstrip (arriving by land is near impossible), a tiny village and a huge, varied and interesting national park. The, not in anyway unpleasant, but certainly unexpected oddity here turned out to be the park itself...
When you land in a twinprop with 20 other people and then walk to a home stay for your lodgings, you hardly expect the national park to be so incredibly well developed and modern. Immaculately uniformed staff, modern offices, shop and restaurant, even most of the self guided walks were 75% fully maintained wooden walkways!
The park offices can happily and readily arrange guided and non-guided activities for your entire stay (all in near fluent English of course!). For our three nights we settled watching the nightly bat exodus from Deer Cave, a self guided walk, a waterfall visit, a days guided cave exploration and hike and a tree top canopy walk. All in all the cost was quite reasonable, if we'd used the park lodging and restaurant this would have been well over budget!!!
[Not to mention the home stay had a great kitten which Bex kind of loved, so why stay anywhere else?!?]
We nipped off straight from the office to try and catch the bats (it was well into the afternoon already!). In the end we still had to wait an hour for the spectacle but it was certainly worth it! As it was dusk the pictures I took are naf, but watching ~6 million(!!!!) bats spiral, almost endlessly, from the cave and off into the jungles as night closed in won't be something I forget in a long time!! Afterwards we inadvertantly had a self guided night hike back to the park HQ. From what others told us this was the same as the organised equivalent... Except we didn't see foot long stick insects or anything of note aside from frogs and fireflies!
On the next day the self guided walk turned out to be a pretty simple affair (but it was free) but I snared my first leech [as you'll see evidence of weeks ago when this actually happened!!], we saw plenty of gigantic bugs and a dip in the waterfall toward the end was actually quite glorious and welcome!
The area is rightfully renowned for its cave systems and we had eagerly anticipated our final full day getting involved in some caving! It did not disappoint. At the entrance we witnessed tarantula webs coating swathes of ground and boulders. None of their creators were to be seen but, in the full dark of the deepening cave there were plenty of their relatives to be found! I have no idea of the species but they were as large as my outspread hand:
We climbed, crawled, scrabbled, waded and swam our way through the caves, paddled/waded our way up a remote river and, eventually, hiked to and settled for lunch at an incredible waterfall (this backpacking is a right chore!). Job done. The final morning we quickly went about the canopy walk (great fun, the world's longest tree based walkway apparently... Though not too scary) before grabbing our bags and walking to the airport; that never sounds any less odd [oddly not the last airport walk either!]
No comments:
Post a Comment