Chapter Twelve: Borneo: Nature keeps on calling....Mulu national park

15 november 2016 - Mulu National Park, Maleisië

Mulu!!

This national park deserves its own chapter...and i thought i had seen a lot of things already...mind-blowing Mulu, it should be on everybody's bucket list, actually Borneo should be on everybody's list.

It took me only 25 minutes to get to Mulu national park. A little propeller plane landed on a tiny land strip in the middle of the jungle, 2 km from the headquarters of the park. I stayed in a hostel, i planned to do every day a trip and the hostel was perfect suited for it. The hostel/park was in the middle of the jungle, far away from the living world.

On the day of arrival i booked a night tour through the jungle, bug hunting. The jungle of course has magnificent animals, but difficult to spot. During the night the beats of the jungle come alive, again it's the sound. After seeing snakes, big spiders and weird looking other buggy things, it started to rain. Rain is a bit different than i am used to. The river swell with almost 1 meter that night, unbelievable, never saw so much rain fall in a short period of time.
Next day, a walk through the trees at 20 meter high. Imagine handmade bridges (of course) of wood and rope. Wiggling paths...one tree to another, in between filming a birthday welcome gift to my little nephew....really Borneo? Pffff this island, the forest, the beaches, the caves and now walking through the trees at 20 meters...this all followed by an hike to waterfalls (again some waterfalls), but than oohhh than the deer cave!

The deer cave....i put my phone away to find the words, because this time pictures can't show how f*cking awesome this cave is. It's the largest (passing) cave in the world. I could literally follow the individual drops of water from the ceiling, the height of this cave: 174 meter and a width of 120 meters. The views are breathtaking, when standing in the middle of the cave you just see some sunlight, half blocked by a wall of water drops. This creates a scenery I will never forget, stunning just stunning. See some pictures of the cave, if you zoom in, you can see mini me, just for perspective of how big this cave is.
The ceiling; it colors green, grey, brown and black. The deer cave is home to more than 4 million bats, they eat 30 ton of insects/mosquitoes every day, yes 30.000 kilos!! The view of 4 million bats flying out of the cave is bizarre, although in the twilight it darkened the sky. All this bats shit of course, the smell of ammonia is intense, workers need to clear the paths in the caves of all the guano. The wauw factor stopped, no more wauw, no more fantastic, definitely no more awesome, no more...no more... just no more. There are some moments in life where you just need to acknowledge that you saw one of the biggest creatures of life....don't try to describe this, i would make it more ugly.
"BOY": sit down, look, breath, watch, live....and that's just all I did...

After the massive deer cave, i went to the Llang cave, again mindblowing, but now for the wonderful stalactites/stalagmites. Here pictures provide a better way of explaining. Not walking on an exo planet, not Mars, not the moons of Saturnus or Neptune....just planet earth ...
My travel companion was a Belgium guy Jack, there's not a funnier way to see the caves with a Belgium guy, the way he expresses himself was hilarious.....just talk to a Belgium person when it see the pictures

The caves in Niah and Mulu are an absolute must see. 
But after 3 caves, i went on and saw even more caves. I booked a kind of survival tour to climb the Pinnacles. It is a special mountain range where beautiful spikes of limestone spear through the rainforest at 3 km above sea level. It's like Zeus attacked the rainforest with his lightning strikes. It is a 3-day tour, hiking twice a distance of 10 km through of course dense rainforest with a backpack of 10 kilos. I needed to bring my own food and water, 6 liters of waters. Oh lord the more i threw in my body, the more came out of it. The hike was lovely, the forest was wet, the rivers aggressive and the wooden/ropes bridges rickety.
I was with a group of all sorts of peole, Americans, europeans and locals, i was lucky, again a good group.

The climb to the pinnacles was much tougher than I anticipated. 2,4 km climbing, serious climbing with ropes and no a single time a flat path. After just 900 meters, 2 Vietnamese people stopped, 2 more germans didn't reach the second resting point and in the end 5 of the ten reached the top. This is the point where my underwear and socks were drowned in sweat, now i knew why i had to carry all this water. But the intense effort was absolutely worth it, what a view. But the most difficult part still had to come, the descent. Only thing i will say about this is that every muscle in both my legs hurt for 3 days. Hell my muscles, cursing every step at some point....yep surviving, dying and that constantly. With all this terror, this old body managed to reach the top and the bottom as first. I normally hate mentioning this, but as grandfather of the group it's worth mentioning.....i still smoke unfortunately and my stamina is not what it should be.....but still is also nice to hear that everyone in the group suffered as i did, and despite my evil habits....I'm still oke...I wondered what I could have done without all this shit.

A couple of days before: 
Before we reached the starting point of the 'survival tour', we where in a longboat. First we went to the clearwater cave and than the windcave, again massive interesting and beautiful. In short, in one caves there was a wide underground river and the other was famous for the strong winds and that blow through the cave system. Hopefully you can see some videos I uploaded, there is a nice one of the river. Now I'm typing this, I realize that I hardly mention extremely cool stuff, I m getting used to it, while it's not normal at all....will I ever, can I ever provide all the juicy details....sure when I'm on a remote island, but than.....so many thoughts, experiences, feelings.....we'll see.

Next stop will be Hong Kong, it will take me 4 flight to get there. From a dense jungle to a dense city....talking about contrasts.

Foto’s

1 Reactie

  1. Gabriella:
    26 december 2016
    Hoi Luuk,
    Waanzinnig deze foto's! Trouwens allemaal
    Greetz Gabriella