I'll Be There Dreckly: Going Underground

Mulu National Park, Malaysian Borneo (map)

In this blog: flying into a remote national park, an session of basic caving, then seven hours of adventure caving.

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Miri airport with Chrisophe and Rene, waiting to board
the MASair prop plane to Mulu

Scenery on the way - thick jungle and huge rivers - typical Borneo

Huge palm oil plantations as far as the eye can see criss crossed with light brown dirt access roads. Wide and wild dirty brown meandering rivers with oxbow lakes left on the side, abandoned by nature. Gently rolling hills of ancient tropical rainforest, untouched by humans. That was the amazing view through the window on the half hour flight from the city of Miri into Mulu National Park.

I prefer to travel by land or water where possible as not only are flights bad for the environment but they somehow seem to cheat you of the experience of part of the journey. In this case though with no roads to Mulu - a small village deep in isolated forest - and only an expensive day-long boat ride as the other option the over-priced flight was the only practical way into this enticing National Park, which we'd come to for two things - caving and hiking and boy did we get them.

We, means our travel gang of Rene, Max, Christophe and myself (see previous blog), and after arriving at the tinpot little airport, we walked half a mile up the road and found a ramshackle hostel which was a bit of a dive, but had the most incredible views all around of the jungle and mountains and nice owners. Max decided he was going to sleep in his 'waterproof' hammock by the river, so we helped him set it up in the precarious position he chose between two trees overhanging the waters edge, but in the end it rained so much every night he didn't stay there once, nice idea anyway.

Blackout

Mulu has a huge range of activities to offer, but is very pricey not to mention confusing in how they offer it. We went to the park office, and after some time finally came up with a plan for the next week, the first stage of which was a three hour introductory caving session in Stonehorse cave. Just an hour later we were walking up the valley on neatly made wooden boardwalks through thick tropical rainforest and looking at some of the exotic insects, before climbing steep steps to reach the cave entrance. Whilst for pleasure, this session was to prove we were capable of going caving both physically and without turning into hysterical wrecks. I'd been in a few tourist caves before, and also done black water rafting, but never proper caving so whilst I thought I'd be OK with it, I really didn't know.

It was fun. There was nothing too challenging, just some basic rope work to descend some muddy inclines, and the odd stretch across rocky gaps, clipping in our caribinas onto guide ropes at times. At one point our guide Kenneth spotted a fresh snake skin which we picked up and felt, finding a texture just like latex. Thankfully it's former owner was no-where to be seen. We also saw blind cave crabs, and a whole load of bats hanging from the roof. We got back to surface safely, and all graduated from the University of Caving, ready for the proper adventure the next day.

Adventure Caving

I'm deeply schematically these days of any organised trip that is described using the term 'adventure'. Thanks to health and safety, the only true adventure these days is that which you make yourself where there's some element of the unknown or even a little danger. But in this case for once, the word really did seem to live up to its meaning.

Our caving guide from the park loaded us into a longboat - a local style of boat which can take about eight people through very shallow waters. We went upstream for half an hour towards the caves, passing very basic rickety wooden houses built on stilts along the way, with one of the helpers having to get out every so often to wrestle the boat when we got stuck on the riverbed in low water. Reaching the cave entrance we kitted up and headed underground. The first section was quite spectacular, set out for general tourists with lighting and proper walkways, but what we were interested in was a bit further in and after going through a gate, the headtorches went on and the proper caving began.

It started fairly easily with open passages and dryish flat ground, before things started getting a bit wilder. We soon discovered that whilst the guide was there to help, we were definitely on our own when it came to picking the spots to walk on, working out what to grab, what to watch out for. At times the headroom got quite low, it was sometimes steep, slippery, muddy. The passage often narrowed and turned sharply. We went up and down, left and right, scrambling on rocks where necessary. We all slipped a few times but to no consequence but a sore bum and a smile.

The adventure caving gang - me, a Canadian, Rene, Max,
Nina from the park, Tof, one of the guides

Rope descent

Heading into a medium sized 'squeeze'

We reached the first of two 'squeezes'. I'd always imagined a squeeze in my mind to be like the neck of a bottle and horizontal, but what we had to deal with was so weird and distorted it was almost too much for the mind to comprehend - a near vertical opening roughly eighteen inches wide, which we had to descend by holding onto knots on a rope whilst blindly searching for footholds with our feet. It wasn't scary but it was pretty tough, and I was the first one of our group to do it, after the guide had lowered our rucksacks to the bottom. It didn't look doable, but slowly and carefully we all made it, with a big grin on our faces and lots of banter at the bottom.

We went in for another hour or so, seeing huntsman spiders, lots of bats, some swiftlets, strange stalagmites and stalgatites, sinkholes, roof openings, drips, and rocking rocks. The next squeeze was shorter than the first, but a lot tricker as it was a bit like going through a postbox backwards, and this time I did actually get stuck. Lying on my belly on this ledge, my right leg was jammed forwards without enough space to move it back. Again it wasn't scary, just awkward and even a little bit funny, and eventually I, and everyone else got through, eventually getting to the underground river - the longest in the world at around 180km. For the next mile or so we waded in and out of the water, sometimes waist deep. At one point the cave opened up into a huge chamber with an equally large pool, and a couple of us swam for a while - the only time I've ever swum wearing a helmet and torch!

After over seven hours underground on our three mile trip we finally reached Clearwater Cave on the other side of the mountain, a huge and majestic space in itself. Caving had proved to be a fantastic experience, neither claustrophobic nor scary, and way more challenging and adventurous than I'd expected.