Remember that one scene in Planet Earth when they filmed a billion cockroaches feasting on a mountain of bat shit in a cave deep in the jungle?
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| Each individual speck = a swarm of cockroaches. You can see the very creepy crawly video here |
Back in '09, I was obsessively watching this and other Planet Earth episodes back in my dorm room in college. Now, if during that time, somebody would have told me that one day I would have the chance to go to this very cave, I would have given a resounding,
FUCK NO
Who the hell would? Roaches + bat shit is best seen through the television screen.
The ending to this story is no surprise, but I actually
did get to go there, and it was fucking AWESOME. I did not come into actual contact with any bugs or poop, and realized that the nature documentary only focused on the gross parts, not how awe-inspiring, huge, and amazing the cave is itself.
Deer Cave in Mulu National Park in Malaysian Borneo was the biggest cave in the world a few years back (the title now belongs to a newly discovered cave in Vietnam!). Even if I were to tell you that 7 Boeing airplanes can fit tail to tail inside the largest passage in this big ass cave,
big is still not a good word to describe it. Maybe if we combined gigantic, enormous, titanic, immense, colossal into...say, ginortanimmolossal, then maybe,
maybe, we could start to describe seeing Deer Cave irl.
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| The entrance |
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| ...almost in... |
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| If you look very closely, you can see the bridge post which are about as tall as people...and this was only at the entrance! |
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| The Garden of Eden near the back |
I took about ten million pictures inside this cave, but poor lighting makes for bad cameras. There are no words that can really describe being inside something so much bigger, older, and more massive in every way than you are, hearing the deafening buzzing of 5 million bats, walking along trails mile-deep in ancient poo. In the same way a scholar might be inspired to write poetry amongst cherry blossoms in Japan, a homeless man might be inspired to play the banjo in Deer Cave.
After we explored the cave for about an hour, we came outside during sun down for the famous bat exodus. From 5-7pm every night, millions of bats exit the cave in ribbon-like swirls to feast on tons of insects. The spectacle is quite titillating for the senses.
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| Everyone waiting patiently for le bats. Shortly after this picture was taken, I felt a drizzle from the sky. All my hopes of seeing the bats were completely destroyed because we heard that they don't come out when it's raining. FML max times ten T_T |
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| "OMG RIGHT THERE RIGHT THERE!!!" Everyone hooted and hollered when we finally saw them. This is definitely NOT as impressive as it would be if it were a normal day, but we'll take what we can get! |
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| I give this a 6/10 |
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| Then we saw a double rainbow!! (can barely see second one in this pic) And the rain stopped too!! |
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| More bats came, but now it's too dark for good pics. |
Deer Cave was the holy grail of Mulu Park, but there were many other beautiful nature experiences to be had.
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| Our homestay by the river in Mulu |
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| Had to climb like 400 steps to get to Moonmilk Cave |
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| Definitely worth it! This cave had creamy milky white formations |
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| EWWWW THEY'RE COPULATING!!! |
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| Trees in the rainforest are kinda BEG |
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| Hiked 4km to get to this waterfall...immediately took a VERY refreshing swim |
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| Supposedly the longest canopy walk in the world. I also supposedly went on the longest canopy walk in the Amazon...I know not to trust Asian superlatives anymore. |
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| Our trusty guide |
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| Stalactites and stalagmites in Lang Cave |
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| Look at all those tiny insignificant humans |
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| Beautiful walk home after a VERY long day (we walked close to 15 miles in one day!) |
Borneo is one of the most biodiverse places on earth, but all in all I regret to say I was a little disappointed. I expected to see much more wildlife. In the Amazon rainforest, I saw pink dolphins, poison dart frogs, tarantulas, all kinds of camouflaged insects, many many colorful birds, glow-in-the-dark scorpions, the list goes on (granted we had to go through hell and high water to get there)... I was expecting that since every BBC nature documentary I watched highlighted Borneo (probably more than South America), we'd see at least
something. But then again, this was only one park. Other than that, I'm so glad I finally got to go. It's as beautiful and peaceful as nature can get.
