A Cave for the Jaded: Niah Cave (June 30-July 1, 2010)

Niah National Park, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo

The bus dropped us at another highway T-intersection about an hour east of where we had boarded it. This T-intersection, however, was bustling with a market, stores, and restaurants, and the busses that stopped here made it a rest stop for passengers to grab food and use the facilities.

We loaded up on food and found someone – well, several someones – to take us to the park entrance. Most drivers where asking for MYR 30 to take us to the town of Batu Niah, some 14 kilometers north, and then extra to take us the further three kilometers into the park. We negotiated MYR 20 with one driver for the full 17 kilometers to park headquarters. About 20 minutes later, we arrived at Niah National Park headquarters.

Niah National Park is a little-visited park, but well worth the stop for any number of reasons (let’s save the best reason for last): First, it’s uncrowded, so accommodation is easy and inexpensive. We booked a hostel room, which was a misnomer because in fact we received an entire huge room the size of two New York studio apartments with four beds and a bathroom to ourselves for MYR 42. Yes, that’s a huge private room for about $12, and it was clean and comfortable. What made it a hostel, I guess, is that several of these huge rooms opened onto a common area with a kitchen and generous lounge. We only saw two other people sharing the common area during our brief stay.

June 30: The next day, we got a ride north to the main Bintulu-Miri highway, where we caught a bus and then another ride to Niah National Park, site of the world famous Niah Caves.

This 4-bed bedroom -- the entire room -- with private bathroom only cost the equivalent of US $14 per night.

The Traders' Cave is tiny compared to the Great Cave, and yet still pretty big. Can you find me in this photo?

The best reason to come to Niah National Park is to see the caves. The Great Cave is one of the largest caves in the world, while the Painted Cave contains prehistoric wall paintings. I was first introduced to both caves at the Sarawak Museum in Kuching. It had been my favorite exhibit in the museum, detailing the many excavations and discoveries at the caves. In 1958, scientists discovered evidence of human occupation of the cave more than 40,000 years ago, the oldest evidence for humans in all Southeast Asia.

We arrived with plenty of time to visit the caves. The 3-kilometer trail to the Great Cave took us about 45 minutes. First we passed through the Trader Cave, a huge outcropping of limestone in its own right, and then into the Great Cave. Even to this cave-jaded traveler, the Great Cave was great in every way. The opening of the cave was like a hanger for jumbo jets. Off to the left side were the clearly visible excavations of ancient burial sites. Ancient “death ships” – basically coffins shaped like boats – were discovered here. I had seen one in the Sarawak Museum in Kuching. From the ceiling high above hung bamboo poles. Locals are permitted the longtime practice of collecting the saliva nests of the swiflets for use in bird’s nest soup. A sign noted that the job is dangerous and there had been fatalities.

The Great Cave is one of the largest caves in the world. Its mouth is HUGE, measuring a quarter of a kilometer across and 60 meters high. The tiny building you see just left of the center of the photo is the size of a medium-sized house. Now look at the escavations at the far right of the photo.

Sharon on the moon-like Niah Cave floor.

It's next to impossible to make out the pre-historic wall paintings in the Painted Cave, the only such paintings in Borneo.

Sharon and I were the only ones visiting the cave mouth. As we walked about a kilometer in, we occasionally heard voices or saw an errant beam of light. Otherwise, the cave’s moonscaped interior faded to pitch black, there being no artificial lighting. There were, however, wooden planks to walk on, but they could be slippery as the ceiling dripped onto them. Bring TWO light sources if you visit the cave. If you bring only one and you drop it or the bulb goes out, you will be stuck in pitch black on slippery wooden planks surrounded by slippery drops into an abyss filled with spiders the size of tea plates and bats fluttering and chirping about; the cave is too big and slippery to feel your way out.

It took us nearly half an hour to get to the rear opening of the cave, then another 15 minutes walk through the jungle to the Painted Cave. What rock paintings we saw were behind a fence and not terribly impressive artistically, but interesting for representing the journey of souls after death (probably). We scurried back to the Great Cave to catch the exodus of bats starting between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m.

Half a million bats (and half a million swiflets) share the cave and the smell of guano was thick in places. I thought it smelled like a spicy curry dish; but it reminded Sharon of concentrated urine. When the bats started to emerge about 15 minutes after we arrived back, it was basically a trickle of bats streaming out almost single file, not the impressive black clouds of bats we had expected. Still, it was mesmerizing to watch. A bat hawk would occasionally pick off a bat in the stream and there would be a midair fight between the two.

The night at the hostel was comfortable and uneventful. In particular, I was looking forward to rain not leaking through the ceiling onto my bed, and I was grateful for dry sleep. The next day, the same driver picked us up and took us to the main highway where we caught a bus to the town of Miri, about two hours east.