Little legs

Today I went to Niah National Park which has huge caves. Yesterday I called a couple of tour companies to see if they had any trips going as I preferred not to be wandering around in caves on my own. One of them called me back late afternoon to say he’d just had a booking so I could join a German couple on the trip today.

The caves are a 3km walk through the forest. The guide is from an indigenous community who lost their village when the Government decided to build a dam and flood the area a number of years ago. Like Liza, he was very knowledgeable about the plants and trees in the forest. We heard gibbons calling in the distance but didn’t see them. We did see lots of millipedes like this one.

The caves are huge. They are home to half a million bats and unknown numbers of Swiftlets. Local people climb up to very unstable looking wooden platforms to harvest the birds’ nests for making birds nest soup. Since it’s in the national park, the collection is regulated with no nests taken for part of the year so the birds can raise young and local communities providing security to ensure that only licensed people can collect the nests. There were lots of birds flying around and you could see some nests although most of them are in the deepest parts of the cave. You could see the bats hanging from the roof of the caves too. The cave floor was rock but felt slightly spongy – layers and layers of bat and bird sh*t! In places the wooden walkway though the caves was very slippy and it was definitely not a surface you wanted to fall over on. The handrail was also covered in droppings so not something you wanted to touch! The caves were where some of the earliest archaeological evidence of humans was found. Unfortunately the guide wasn’t as informative about this and said we didn’t have time to go to the museum which was annoying.


I really struggled to take any half decent photos in the caves so check out the few on wikipedia or try google images.