Episode 40

Episode 40

Miri is a large modern city and the centre for the Sarawak oil industry with many oil wells just offshore and a refinery onshore. The original oil well, now closed off and made into a tourist attraction stands on top of the highest point overlooking the town and a couple of the offshore oil platforms can be seen.

This original oilwell “the Grand Old Lady” as its known was bored in 1910 and abandoned in 1972 after yielding an average of 7 barrels a day for all of those intervening years. It was bored using an ancient Chinese method that somewhat resembled a giant corkscrew with a couple of Chinese ‘coolies’ providing the turning power. We walked up here in the late afternoon to watch the sunset, it’s the thing to do here, but it was cloudy in the west and barely a hint of colour tinged the horizon. Another night we saw a glorious bright orange sunset from the window of our hostel.

Large shopping malls abound and very larger housing estates encircle the older part of the town. The most interesting area is that around the Chinese Temple where there are a couple of markets and plenty of small Chinese shops. There seemed to be one hell of a lot of shoe shops here and also in the big shopping malls, perhaps the women here are like Emelda Marcos and each have a 1000 or more pairs of shoes.

Another thing we have noticed not only here but in Sabah too, is the vast number of small restaurants and cafes. An enormous number of people must eat out each day to keep these places in business, it’s certainly not the tourists here as there isn’t many of them. On the whole they are quite clean and the food tasty when it’s not too ‘chilly’ hot so that you can actually taste it. Most people throughout Sabah and Sarawak speak enough English to be able to tell you what the dish consists of and whether or not it’s very hot and spicy.

One day we did some walking in the Lambir Hill NP an hours bus ride from the city. A pleasant enough place for some walks and from the top of a high hill I got a great view of the surrounding countryside but there wasn’t anything special to see.

The principle reason to come to Miri is for access to Gunung Mulu National Park a short 20min flight away. Later we found out that a direct flight now connects Mulu with Kota Kinabalu three times a week, this would have been very useful to us if we’d known about it beforehand.

The flight was interesting as we flew over large areas of oil palm plantations that reach almost to the National Park boundary and great brown rivers lazily meander their way across the flat land towards the coast. There is a rather smart modern terminal and a few service buildings, a couple of houses and a couple of upmarket accommodation places at or near the airport. A very dilapidated old mini van waited to convey those of us who were going directly to the National Park a couple of k’s away.

This National Park, a world heritage site, is where the biggest caves in the world can be found. The limestone hills hereabouts are almost hollow and riddled with caves, many of them interlinked. These caves are home to millions of bats and swiftlets and we were rather hoping that we would be more fortunate here than we had been at Niah and see the bats emerging at sunset.

All the tracks near the headquarters are boardwalks and that was just as well because there had been a lot of rain over recent days and any tracks that weren’t boradwalks were hopelessly boggy and leeches too, were a problem.

Visiting the caves meant that we had to take guided walks so we booked one to visit Deer Cave and Lang’s Cave one day and to Clearwater Cave and Wind Cave another day.

First we went to Deer Cave and Lang’s Cave; this was a very easy 3k walk through the rainforest on a boardwalk, we kept a lookout for any wildlife as there is meant to be some around but apart from the bugs and insects we could only hear birds and frogs. The track through the cave was good and not as slippery as those in other caves we’d visited. There are many stalagmites and stalactites of all sizes but because of the birds and bats they are not very dirty, and certainly the smell is none to attractive. Nor is the floor, a close study of which reveals it to be thick no only with guano but also alive with cockroaches and other beetles that live on the guano; it was a heaving mass:

Like most of these caves their dimensions are staggering and in places the roof was 150m above us, with a stream many metres below. Our guide pointed out dark patches on the sides and roof and told us that each one was a group of hundred or thousands of bats. This one cave, Lang’s cave is home to more than 2million of them. Just how that figure has been arrived at I cannot say, God knows how anyone could possibly count them. There is possibly just as many swiftlets too, but they have not had their nests harvested so there has not been the resulting damage to the calcite formations as there has been at Niah.

Situated just a few metres from these two caves is a purpose built viewing area where people sit and await the evening exodus of the bats. At this time of year that can be from about 5.15pm till 6.40pm by which time it is almost dark. A CCTV camera is set up in the cave beside one of the sleeping areas and two monitors in the viewing area give a good close-up view of one or two bats ‘at home’. I saw one feeding her baby. There are also a number of posters that give a lot of information about the bats and make for some interesting reading whilst awaiting their evening departure. On the first evening we waited and waited and eventually they began to emerge when most of us were about to call it a night and head off, the sun had set and the light was fast going. David could see them soon after they emerged from the mouth of the cave as they rose up past the white limestone cliffs of the hills, but I couldn’t see them until they became silhouetted against the light of the evening sky. They formed long squiggles across the sky as they went off to their hunting grounds. Not one huge group but many small groups of probably a few thousand individuals, emerging minutes apart.

There are many species of bats that live here and they range is size upward from very tiny ones that measure about 25-30mm (when hanging in their sleeping position) and weigh only a few grams. Mostly these little creatures live on insects and some fruit. I think I read that there are altogether around 30 million bats in the Mulu area, and that they collectively consume thousands of tons of mosquitoes and other pesky insects each night.

I can’t imagine how bad those insects would be without the bats to keep them in check. There were a few mozzies about but not clouds of them so the bats must really have to work hard to fill their tummies. Later when we were sitting eating our dinner at the canteen we watched one little bat swoop around the electric lights catching the bugs it attracted, this one had a wingspan of 75-100mm.

As we walked back along that 3k long boardwalk in the pitch dark we could hear the ‘barking’ frog, it has a very distinctive “whooopt whooopt” call, but try and we might we couldn’t see one. We stopped and shone the torch around and tried to hone in one the sound but failed miserably.

Each evenings we spent in the park we came along and waited for the bats, one evening they didn’t come out at all and we wandered back quite disappointed, and on another evening they come out early in dribs and drabs and formed ‘donuts’ against the evening sky, and continued whirling in circles and they moved off over the rainforest.

A much longer walk that took us up and down a great many steps, through another cave, eventually arriving at even more caves where we joined another tour: These caves are all interlinked and are part of a system that is 128’s long and has some massive caverns, making the limestone hills almost hollow. In these caves too there are many stalagmites and stalactites that are much cleaner because there are very few swiftlets and bats living in this system. Why that should be I cannot say: One of these caves, Clearwater cave, has a very swift stream running through it that is still cutting a deeper passage. There are underground waterfalls and rapids.

A few hours boat ride upstream from these caves, then an 8k walk leads to the area where there are many limestone pinnacles up to 1750m high, and I would have liked to have joined a party to climb these pinnacles but was put off somewhat after hearing that a lot of vertical free climbing up ladders is involved. Also after many months travelling and not getting much exercise neither of us was fit enough for such a strenuous hike. The heat too was also affecting us adversely, David especially. At some point in the future I would dearly love to go back to Borneo and climb these pinnacles and Mt Kinabalu.

We flew from Mulu back to Miri, and from there back to Kota Kinabalu where we collected our stored luggage and then flew back to Banda in Brunei to connect with our flight back to Brisbane. Arriving in Brisbane fairly late at night our friend Helen collected us from the airport and took us back to her home at Burpengary. After visiting other friends the next day we made our way home on a holiday Monday. Fortunately the heavier traffic was going south whilst we headed north arriving back in Burnet Heads in the afternoon, it was sunny and warm and the beach looked very inviting. So after nine and a half months we are home again.

Signing off till next time – Lyn

© Lynette Regan 16^th May 2008