Miri, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo (July 1-3, 2010)
I’d never heard of Miri before, except as the name of an episode of Star Trek (1960s). There’s apparently no connection between the episode and the large town at the eastern end of Sarawak close to the Sultanate of Brunei. For travelers, it’s basically a small transit city for visits to nearby wilderness areas, including Gunung Mulu National Park (or just Mulu). We stayed in Miri two days catching up on internet, doing laundry and buying things we would need for our trip to Mulu. I didn’t see much of the town or try to.
The nightlife in the vicinity of our excellent guesthouse (Minda Guesthouse) was made evident by the cheers and hollers that would erupt from the neighborhood each time Brazil or The Netherlands scored a goal in the World Cup. Occasionally I would wander out to the bar across the street where Kilkenny and Guinness beer were on tap and burgers (chicken burgers for me) went for less than a buck a piece at the nearby burger stall.
We finally procured flights to Mulu National Park, the only way into the park, practically speaking. When we arrived at the airport, I was surprised to see such a clean, modern, comfortable airport in a place I had never heard of before. There were even nice shops, including a Famous Amos cookie (and candy) shop. I asked Sharon about Famous Amos, because I had seen it in a Malaysian mall once. It’s interesting how certain chains do well in certain counties. Like I’d never come across a Kenny Rogers BBQ Chicken restaurant in the U.S., but they pop up with some regularity in Southeast Asia. Sharon explained that there’s a mall in Kuala Lumpur with a Famous Amos on every floor. Consider that most malls in KL seem to be about six stories high. We ascended to the departure lounge on the second floor of tiny Miri airport and sure enough there was another Famous Amos shop.
Gunung Mulu National Park, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo (July 3-7, 2010)
Gunung Mulu National Park (or just Mulu) is Sarawak’s premier national park and a huge source of foreign tourist money. Nearly everyone on our Bombardier ATR-72 prop plane was of Australian or European origin. The flight from Miri was great: exactly 19 minutes, barely enough time for me to stir in my seat and find my page in my book. Nearly everything in the park requires a tour guide, which separates you from still more of your lose change. Need to use the restroom? Gotta hire a guide. I jest of course, but it sure felt that way at times.
Reservations for hikes and park activities often fill up the day before, which can leave you stuck unless you can find a private guide. Accommodation in the park, too, is nearly impossible to reserve. We called before arriving but couldn’t reserve a bed (however, when we arrived, the national park hostel which was “full” one night I stayed there had more than a dozen beds that went unused – one suspects their policy of taking reservations without a deposit leads to a certain amount of “overbooking”).
No matter. We spent our first night at a very rustic and shabby nameless hostel just a couple of hundred meters from the park entrance. The leaning, collapsing, ramshackle wooden structure had seen better days (or perhaps not), and in my black and white photos of the place, it looked more like a crime scene than accommodation, but the beds functioned and I managed to sleep. And it cost next to nothing. Note to self: Bring a portable smoke detector on my next trip.
And after all that griping let me just say that Mulu still manages charm the visitor. Really! I had the time of my life in this park.
The first thing we did upon entering the park was hike to Deer Cave (about 45 minutes). Never mind that Deer Cave is part of the world’s largest cave corridor according to the travel gods, because we didn’t sign up for a freakin’ guide anyway, so we didn’t get to see the inside of the cave. Doesn’t matter; it gives me a reason to return. But the other reason I could care less about the inside of the cave is that the real action is outside. What is amazing about Deer Cave is standing or sitting or lying on your back outside the cave at about 4:30 p.m. when the cave’s two million bat inhabitants stream out.
Sharon and I arrived literally as the show was about to begin. One minute the sky was clear; the next minute, a black swarm could be seen snaking across the sky and disappearing behind the trees. Then another swarm of them would emerge and cross the sky, then another and another. I don’t have the words to describe what watching this spectacle was like, but if I did, they would go something like this: grrrraa, shrwow! A friend once described lying on his back in the very center of Australia on a clear night watching a thousand meteorites an hour shoot overhead (that’s one every 3-4 seconds), sometimes exploding into green and yellow fireballs or splitting into pieces. Watching these bats is probably the animal-world equivalent of that meteor shower and alone worth the trip to Mulu.
Some people left the show early. Big mistake. Never leave a Jackie Chan movie without watching the credits (and bloopers) at the end, never pack up in the middle of a Fourth of July or Disneyland or really any fireworks display without seeing the finale, and never, ever, ever leave the bat-streaming-from-Deer-Cave show without seeing the final, really long massive ribbon of bats that emerges at the end and continues a good ten minutes. It’s a sight I’ll never forget.
Ironically, the next day was the Fourth of July. That morning, we did the canopy hike (again, by guide). At times we were 20 meters (65 feet) above the rainforest walking on wooden planks held in place by nets and rope and wood. It doesn’t feel particularly stable, but this just adds to the adventure and allure of the walk. At nearly half a kilometer in length, the canopy walk is supposedly the longest in the world. Again, a winner!
Next we did the adventure caving in the intermediate Racer Cave. We donned our helmets and headlamps and entered the pitch black cave, where we climbed and descended our way through and back. The hard part was applying upper body strength to climb up and down ropes, sometimes into what seemed to be a dark abyss. If you are claustrophobic, arachnophobic (or my own word, megalarachnophobic), or you can’t do a pull-up, well these are all reasons for the “intermediate” designation. And yet everyone on the tour loved it and made all the ascents and descents. Nobody died. A family with children even managed it as did some older folks. Adding to the edginess were the huge spiders and the occasional whine and flutter of a bat batting by you. I went into the cave full of trepidation and left it thinking “that was so much fun.” Another winner, and now you can see now how Mulu slowly grew on me and made me a fan.
By chance earlier in the day we had run into Harley and April whom we met during our visit to the Bundong Longhouse and whose names I could not forget: “Harley (like the motorcycle) and April (like the month).” So later that evening we joined them at the Royal Mulu Resort for dinner and drinks, where the drink menu included cocktails such as the Mulu Headhunter.
The Royal Mulu Resort is where the hoity-toity stay, like royalty, bankers and lawyers, and Harley and April. Well, OK, Harley and April are as down to earth as two people can be, and I must say their room looked quite attractive compared to the crime scene fire trap awaiting us. But the food at the Royal Mulu Resort was good but not exceptional (considering what they charged), and the live entertainment left Sharon embarrassed for her home state (she’s originally from Sarawak). She reckoned some tribe sent their worst performers to the show as some sort of joke on the tourists who spend loads to see it.
The next day, Sharon and I set off for Camp 5. The journey takes all day, because first you take a boat to visit several caves, then you hike 8.2 kilometers with your pack to the camp. Most people go to Camp 5 to hike the Pinnacles the following morning, which was our plan. The caves we visited were fine, especially the one with the underground river, and I mean this thing was flowing hard, white water right down the center of the cave. The other cave, Wind Cave, had stairs and lights – attractive, but too developed.
After the caves, we returned to the boat which then dropped us at the trailhead for the 8.2-kilometer hike to Camp 5. The sky looked like it was about to rain, so I literally booked down the trail. Sharon was walking slowly with another girl we had met, Wendy, so I didn’t think anything of leaving these two capable women to walk on their own at a slower pace. In the last couple of kilometers, it began to rain hard and the trail became a long, muddy lake of sorts. I arrived at Camp 5, checked in and was assigned a bed in a long room full of beds – really just camping mattresses (you have to carry in your own sheets, etc). Then I sat and watched the rain fall and waited for Sharon and Wendy, and waited, and waited.
As my concern grew for Sharon and Wendy, the rain came down harder and the sky grew darker as dusk set in. Had it gotten too dark to hike, I’d have gone looking for them with my headlamp, but at length they emerged from the woods completely bedraggled, and Wendy looked quite ill. It turned out she had taken ill on the trail and Sharon had carried her pack for her.
And so Wendy related to us (and some young physicians also staying at Camp 5) her tale of woe, and how she came to be ill on the trail to Camp 5. Wendy had recently been SCUBA certified and went diving. The night before her dives, she had a few beers. That's a no-no. The day of her diving she did four dives, but she did the deeper dives last instead of first. Again, that's a no-no, as it causes nitrogen to build up in, rather than dissipate from, the body. She exceeded her no decompression limits on those dives too, staying too deep for too long. BIG no-no. And then she hopped on a plane to Mulu after only 18 hours at sea level. Plane pressurized to 8,000 feet, residual nitrogen in her blood. Uh-oh!
Wendy had been a very naughty diver. Wendy broke just about every rule in the book. So the next morning as Sharon struggled with the Pinnacles – a rough climb that occasionally claims lives and would have easily claimed several buckets of my sweat had I climbed it – I escorted Wendy back 8.2 kilometers along the trail, back by boat, and back to park headquarters so she could catch the first flight to a city and get to a hospital. Wendy had decompression sickness, sometimes known as the “bends” – a painful and potentially deadly illness caused by nitrogen bubbles forming in the blood. After some time in a decompression chamber, Wendy recovered. She has since become a foremost expert (example) of what not to do when you go SCUBA diving.
The next day, Sharon emerged from the woods barely able to walk, while I had seen Wendy to her plane and then enjoyed quite a relaxed and civilized final 24 hours in the national park. That afternoon, Sharon and I made the five-minute trip to the airport and boarded the Bombardier ATR-72 for our flight not back to Miri, but to Kota Kinabalu in the eastern state of Sabah.
Mulu had grown on me, really grown on me. I frankly wouldn’t mind getting a group of friends together and going back there someday. It’s that good! But I had missed climbing the Pinnacles, perhaps for the better (I don’t do well in humid heat). I had one more chance to do a great climb in Borneo, and it was staring back at me through the window of the airplane. . . Mount Kinabalu.
ADDITIONAL PHOTOS BELOW:
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