Amazing Caves of Gunung Mulu National Park

Gunung Mulu National Park is located in the Sarawak region of Borneo in Malaysia. The park is home to some magnificent caves, the kind that photographers and journalists from National Geographic travel across the globe to explore. It is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The park offers five-day wristbands for admission to the park. You can separately book guided tours to the main attractions within the park at the visitors center and explore most of the trails on your own. The park is superbly maintained and they are wise to only allow visitors inside the caves on guided tours as that not only provides a better visitor experience but also prevents damage from occurring to the caves by unsupervised visitors. The caves are in pristine condition as are the walkways and facilities throughout the park. Below are the areas we explored on guided tours during our 3-night stay in Mulu.

Night Walk

On the day we arrived in Mulu we went on a group guided night walk at 7:00 pm at Gunung Mulu National Park. As we were riding in the back of the open air shuttle from the Marriott Mulu where we were staying to the park, I had one of those moments of: “Is this really happening? Are we really in the back of a truck driving down a road in the moonlight to go walk around the rainforest in the middle of the Borneo at night?” It was slightly surreal. I have those moments pretty frequently on this trip. We have learned from experience that you usually do not see all that much wildlife on rainforest night walks in Borneo and this walk was the same. We spotted sleeping birds, some large insects, and some lizards. It was a nice introduction to the park and the raised boardwalk which travels throughout the forest in the park. There seem to be few mosquitoes in this forest which was a welcome surprise.

Canopy Skywalk

For the next morning we had signed up to try out the park’s unique Canopy Skywalk. It is one of the longest tree-based walkways in the world. We set out from the visitors center with our guide and five other park guests. We walked for about 45 minutes along the boardwalk through the forest until we reached a set of wood stairs that led to the canopy skywalk. The canopy skywalk consists of sections of narrow elevated suspension bridge walkways made of two boards connected side by side for the flooring and netting attached to suspension cables for the sides.

The canopy skywalk was about 30 meters above the forest floor. It felt like walking high up among the treetops. The bridge walkways did sway a bit but they felt secure so it was not scary unless you happen to be afraid of heights. I don’t remember exactly how many but I think there were around fifteen different bridge sections with platforms built around trees in between them. Rob said it reminded him of the Ewok village from Return of the Jedi. It was a fun way to explore a different perspective of the forest.

Lang and Deer Cave Tour

Our afternoon tour of Lang and Deer Caves began with an hour or so walk through the forest from the visitors center to the entrance of Lang Cave. Along the way we saw some small forest inhabitants such as snails, insects, and lizards. While it is one of the smaller caves in the park, Lang Cave was still quite large and full of stalagmites, helicites, and rimstone pools.

There were numerous large jellyfish shaped formations inside the cave. There was a well maintained lighted walkway for exploring the cave interior so it was a really pleasant walk as you did not have to worry about your shoes or clothes getting too dirty.

We then headed over to Deer Cave which was until recently the largest cave passage in the world on record. The inside of the cave is massive with a ceiling height of over 400 feet in places. When you look at the entrance from inside the rock creates a silhouette that looks like Abraham Lincoln’s profile as shown in the photo below.

This cave is also home to between 2 and 3 million bats. After we toured the inside of the cave, we settled into the seating area outside the cave entrance at around 5:00 pm where we waited for the nightly mass exodus of bats leaving the cave. The seating area even had a snack bar selling snacks and beverages. At about 5:45 pm a line of bats streamed out of the cave and up into the sky. They flew in sweeping formations as a group. After a few minutes the sporadic lines of bats leaving the cave became a continuous stream and they did not stop flowing out of the cave for almost thirty minutes.

I have no idea how many there were but it could have been several hundred thousand or perhaps even a million bats. It was a wild natural occurrence to witness. After the bats’ exodus from the cave ended, we walked all the way back to the visitors center in the dark for about an hour to catch the shuttle back to our hotel. I think we walked over ten miles on this day so we were happy and satisfied at the end of the day but also rather exhausted.

Clearwater Cave and Cave of the Winds

Our next day in the park we took another guided tour that began with boarding a longboat and taking a ride up the river to a local village market. We then headed further upstream and reached the Cave of the Winds by parking at the boat jetty on the river and walking down a walkway for a bit. This cave had a nice cool breeze inside and amazing formations.

We then boarded our longboat again and went a little further upstream to another jetty along the river. From the jetty we walked up several flights of stairs to reach the entrance of the Clearwater Cave. This cave has a crystal clear river that flows through it. There are over 200 km of cave passages in this massive cave system. We only explored a fraction of that of course. Outside the cave the river flows out and forms a lovely natural swimming hole with a large deck and changing rooms / restrooms built around it. The facilities in this park really were outstanding. They thought of everything guests might want or need. After a swimming break we ended the tour with a longboat ride back to the park entrance area in time to enjoy some lunch at the park restaurant.

The Fast Lane Cave

The Fast Lane Cave was different from the other caves we visited in Mulu because while it did have a nice interior walkway like the other caves, it had no interior lighting on while we were there. This of course meant it was completely dark except for the light of our torches once inside. We spent a good amount of time inside this cave with our guide and we traveled on foot past many formations and pools of water via the walkway. We saw some insects, bats, and birds inside the cave but thankfully no snakes which we were told also live there.

As you may already know Rob LOVES caves so Gunung Mulu National Park was truly ideal for his interests. The guided tours were a wonderful way to see and learn about the impressive caves. The local guides and facilities were so nice in the park. I thoroughly enjoyed our time there much more than I expected to. The park also offers adventurous guided multi-day trekking and camping trips as well as adventure caving where you would get much more wet and dirty than we did exploring even greater depths of the caves in the park. At Mulu we learned that although they cover less than 2% of the earth’s surface, rainforests house 50% of all life on the planet. That is pretty amazing and telling about how critical rainforests are to the health of the planet as a whole. It seems like this area of Borneo is protective of their rainforests and does a wonderful job of educating people about their importance.

We enjoyed meeting travelers of all ages from all over the world at this park. It is one of the nicest national parks we have ever visited anywhere in the world. The park has a good restaurant on-site as well as a gift shop and lodging options, which looked quite nice. We both enjoyed having a comfortable place to come back to after a full day of exploring caves and forests so were glad we stayed at the Marriott Mulu. The Marriott is just 1.5 km from the park entrance and has a free shuttle between the park and the hotel as well as some other fantastic amenities. Our hotel room bed was so big and comfortable it was like sleeping on a cloud. We are going to miss that bed and the magnificent caves of Mulu.