Now’s as Good a Time as Any

Jungles of Borneo…Finally

August 31st, 2007 by Greg

In Miri I had again found a guest house with a proprietor, this time a woman named Joanne, was extremely friendly and helpful in finding tours and things to do. I think people on the backpacker circuit in Borneo have realized that most things are in fact too expensive for your average backpacker to actually do without some solid pre-planning (which no backpacker worth their salt will do), and so have made a real effort to find trips that are similar to the lofty plans of 4 day jungle treks that people such as myself may come to the country with. I told Joanne how much time I had in Miri before I had to leave, as a few days prior I had made plans with Kirsten to meet in Manila on September 1, and she laid out what kinds of activities (day trips really) there were available to me.

For my first full day I got a ride out to Lumbir Hills National Park to hike to several waterfalls. What I was prepared for was some mild to slightly difficult hiking through the hills, nothing worse than I had done previously on the trip in Laos or Nepal, and that’s more or less how the terrain was. The first third or so is to the most accessible falls, surrounded by picnic tables and it even has bathroom facilities. Nearby are some stone steps up the hill into what is the more rustic part of the trail. I spent a good 4 hours walking along this, again stopping at a couple more remote falls, in secluded little glades, trickling into a pool below.

On the way out I was walking along otherwise dry ground when it suddenly felt like I had stepped in a pool of water and the back half of my left foot was soaked. I stopped and looked down at my sandal (kind of Teva-style) to see it covered in blood. I took it off and found the part I wasn’t prepared for: leeches. Taking off my other sandal I counted about a dozen of them between my two feet, they’d been hiding in the little crevasses of the sandal. Now you aren’t supposed to pick them off because their little tooth can get lodged in the skin and become infected, but when you see a bunch of little slimy things sucking the blood out of your feet, the natural instinct is “get these things off of me!”, and I managed to flick them all off. Of course now all the wounds were bleeding nonstop, as they use an anti-coagulant to keep the meal going, but I didn’t have anything with me to stop the bleeding and I was pretty near to the park headquarters, so I just put my sandals back on and kept going, one bloody step after another. I was able to stop the bleeding with a bunch of napkins at a small restaurant near the front office, and when I got back to the hostel I asked nicely if the following day’s activity could please have less leeches.

I was in luck, as that night two separate Dutch couples arrived and both wanted to do the Niah Caves tour the next day. I’d wanted to see the caves as well, but as at least three people are needed to go, as only one person I could have been out of luck. Much of the area surrounding Miri is dotted with massive limestone formations, similar to Vang Vieng or Yangshuo. There are a few caves open to visitors, though the Niah group is the closest and most accessible, particularly as a day trip. The next morning, a van arrived and picked us up.

A plank-walk has been constructed through the jungle right up to and through the caves, making the whole journey an admittedly easy one. Currently, however, a portion of the path is under renovation, as the rickety old wooden foundation is being replaced with sturdy concrete. In it’s current stage, they don’t recommend you walk on part of it, as while the concrete is fully in place, the slats you actually walk aren’t. The concrete runners were wide enough though, and we started to go this route, as it’s much shorter, but we didn’t get far when one of the Dutch guys suddenly stopped. He told us he has really bad vertigo, and although we were only about ten feet up, now that he could see the ground, he could barely walk and was really dizzy. To accommodate him, we turned around and started off through the “muddy path”, the detour that was in place during the construction.

An hour and a half of trudging through ankle-deep mud and getting cut up on low-hanging branches (thankfully, no leeches this time), and we finally reached the first cave. We stopped and had lunch and admired a few faded cave paintings that had been done thousands of years earlier by some of the first inhabitants of the area. After lunch we set back off, thankfully back on a plank-walk the rest of the way, and got to the large cave. The path went right through this cave and out the other side, and fortunately we had brought flashlights with us, as within about 20 feet of entering the cave, we were engulfed in darkness. We had a great time exploring the cave (albeit from the safety of a wooden path with a railing on one side), with the occasional bat or swiftlet flying overhead. Eventually we came to an open area with light coming in through some holes in the ceiling, and a number of bamboo poles hanging down. This is the area where the swiftlet nests are harvested so the Chinese can have their bird’s nest soup. Local men climb up hundreds of feet to the cave ceiling on narrow bamboo ladders, gathering the nests that are worth several hundred dollars an ounce. They obviously find the money worth it, as fatalities and injuries are quite common.

We followed the path out the other side of the cave and suddenly realized that we had come to the other end of the construction area. After walking through the mud, none of us really wanted to turn around and do it again, so slowly we crept along the construction area, with two people helping the vertigo stricken Dutch guy. Even at our painstakingly slow pace, we covered the entire construction in a matter of twenty minutes and were back to where we had split off onto the “muddy path”. We made some jokes about it to the Dutch guy, about how was it really worth it to walk all that way to avoid a few minutes of agony, and while he kind of laughed with us, I could tell he still wished we had taken the other path back.

That night was the celebration day of Malaysian National Independence (like 4th of July in the U.S.), and Miri was selected to be the location of the big party for all of Sarawak. A group of us, including everyone from the caves, decided to head out to the celebration at a nearby arena. A ten minute walk and we were there, and five minutes later we were all pretty underwhelmed and ready to leave. There was a concert going on that was about the same quality as a large scale karaoke, and a few thousand spectators standing around looking bored. As quickly as we’d arrived, we went back to the hostel.

I decided to not do anything in particular for my last day in Borneo. I’ve found in traveling taking a few days of activities followed by a day of rest before a few more active days keeps a good balance. I did go out for a bit that evening with a large group from the hostel, to a large night market that happens only on Fridays, to have some dinner. We had hoped to go out for drinks as well, but were again thwarted by the fact that almost all restaurants are Muslim, and serve no alcohol. We went back to the hostel and had a few drinks at the bar below, but I called it a night early, as the next morning I had a flight too KK and then the Philippines.

Photos
Miri & Around, Malaysia