Mulu..

Our flight from Miri to Mulu was #5 of the 9. ‘Mulu’ is the access to the Gunung Mulu National Park, a region of mountains and rainforest located very close to the border with Brunei. ‘Gunung’ = mountain.  We were staying in ‘long house’ accommodation within the National Park HQ, so we were right in among the rainforest.

 

The Park HQ has a simple cafe which does a limited range of Malay meals. The food there is good – Rendang, Laksa, Satays and so on. There is a big resort hotel complex a couple of kms from there where most people stay, but we have not seen that.   

Apparently Mulu gets over 150 cm of rain per month and it rains on about 280 days per year.  Rain set in about 3 pm on our first day with impressive force.  It rained for about 6 hours with varying intensity.

Before the rain we saw a great number of spectacular butterflies and many large skinks just around the accommodation area and a lot of bird noise, not that we could see any birds. 

We sat outside on the balcony for a while to watch the bats which are flying all around, but there was a bit of mosquito activity, so we had to retreat inside.  The frogs here seem to yap like excitable little dogs – not a sound we'd normally associate with frogs.
   

We should have booked more days here.  Our second day was fairly full on.  We saw the four caves that are the done thing to see if you do not have time for more serious tramping and caving in this area. We have seen some of these caves on BBC nature programmes (Attenborough’s ‘Planet Earth’) and feel fortunate to have visited a couple of these sites for real.   More on caves, rivers and bats later..