3 Flights, 2 Planes, 1 Bag

 Our local guide, Bonny.

 The boardwalk hiking trail.

 The entrance to Lang's Cave. Who do you see?

 Stalactites.

 A snake crawling the wall of the cave looking for birds or bats.

 The entrance to the Deer Cave.

 Part of the streamer of bats.

The amphitheatre for watching.

A sleeping kingfisher.

Stickbugs on the night hike.

Flat headed planarian or a hammerhead worm.  

Wednesday, June 13^th.

I woke up at 3:00, before the alarm, finished organizing my stuff and myself before meeting the rest in the lobby at 4:30.

We had three flights to catch to get to Mulu NP. We flew from Kota Kinabula to Lauban, then Lauban to Miri and finally from Miri to Mulu. The flights were 30, 40 and 25 minutes. Apparently, there is no direct flight. On the second flight I sat beside and talked to a nose, ear and throat doctor from Malaysia who was going to Lauban for the day to the clinic he runs in the small town. We talked about all manner of stuff and given the meeting of Trump and Kim yesterday, we talked about that. He marvelled at how Trump is the butt of so many jokes and so much disrespect and said that that would not be tolerated in his country or indeed in Kim’s! I’ve often thought about that. Is it an abuse of free speech? Or does he get what he deserves?

After our three flights we were picked up at Mulu airport and driven the two kilometres to the entrance of the national park. Donny assigned us our rooms and we went to settle in. This time I am bunking with Ed from Calgary. Then we met up again at 12:30 for lunch at the café on site. After lunch I went in the souvenir shop and I bought a beautiful multi-coloured leather wristband as my souvenir of Borneo. We went for our cave(s) hike at 2:30. We had a male local guide named Bonny join us. It was a three kilometre walk on a raised wooden boardwalk through the rainforest. The weather was hot and incredibly humid. Just walking made us sweat profusely. The walk through the forest was beautiful, lush and green accompanied by all the various calls and noises of the animals we could not see. At the end we arrived at a wooden amphitheatre. From there we walked another half kilometre to Lang’s Cave. This is not a huge cave, only about 400 metres into the mountain but it has some excellent stalactites and stalagmites. Inside the cave about ten feet off the ground and crawling along the ceiling we saw a snake. It was still for a bit and people wandered off, and then as I watched with Donny it began to move along. As it stretched out, it had to be about four feet long. I had heard about snakes that frequent caves looking for bats and birds that hide there. It was amazing to watch it as it moved. I have seen videos of snakes on the cave walls at the exit trying to grab bats on the way out.

Then we went to Deer Cave which is about 100 metres away. This is a massive cave with the largest opening and inside chamber of any cave in the world, and it is home to about three million bats. We went in on a boardwalk and saw a few colonies of them above our heads. We had been warned that it would be smelly, but I was surprised that it was not nearly as smelly as I had anticipated. There were mountains of guano (bat droppings) on the ground but the smell was not bad. I had hoped to see the myriad of bugs and critters that live on and in the guano, but no such luck.

After that we walked back to the amphitheatre where we sat for a half hour before the bats began to exit the cave for the night’s feeding. I was very surprised that they began to emerge in small groups of a couple of hundred about 5:00, about an hour before sunset. Then more and more came out and flew away in a long streamer that went on for over twenty minutes. Most people wandered back to the cabins before it was over, and when I went back I found myself walking alone where I could really enjoy the sights and sounds of the rainforest. I always feel it is a privilege to be in such a place.

When I got back I sat with the rest and had dinner, after which Tom and Fransesca (two young Londoners) and I went on an hour-long night walk with Bonny our local guide. We saw a couple of types of stick insects, frogs, large snails, spiders, geckos and two different birds sleeping in the trees. The most interesting thing was the flat headed planarian otherwise known as the hammerhead worm. It is actually a member of the slug family and is carnivorous and eats snails, slugs and its own kind. Then off to bed.