30th of Jan - 2nd Feb

Okay so it took a while to travel to this place. We had to catch an express boat and when we arrived at the dock the taxi had to let us out down the road as the whole area was flooded - we then had to wade our way across to the track a bit further along. This was an interesting experience as it was absolutely chucking it down and we had our packs on. The water came up to my thigh!!! It was a shame I couldn't get a picture but it was raining to hard to get the camera out. We had breakie near the dock - noodles again (thankfully there did not appear to be any fish in this one), I didn't have a drink as I heard the toilet on the express boat was an absolute no no. I should say here that I had taking an overdose of immodium as I feared ever needing the toilet again!!

We were on the first boat for 3.5 hours then stopped for lunch (rice - I think there may have been see food in there to, great!). Then jumped onto another express boat for 5 hours. These boats were like nothing I have seen before; take a look at the pic's, they were a bit like floating airoplanes with no wings!! After this express boat we were on to the long boat another hour on this sitting on a just a plank of wood, this however had no roof and it was still bucketing it down so we got absolutely drenched. We finally got to the national park head quarters around 7pm after a 7am start!

Thankfully the headquarters were a lot nice than I was expecting and they actually did nice food!

We headed out the following morning and took a short long boat ride to a little market by the side of the river that they had obviously set up to make the most of us foreigners. Then on to Wind Cave, named due to the breeze in the narrow parts of the cave. The caves in this area are absolutely huge and have some amazing colour and shapes - staligtites and stalagmites, columns and even rivers running through them - as we found when we went to the next cave, Clearwater Cave (the longest cave passage in Southeast Asia 108km). It is said if you bathe your face in the water you will have enternal youth - obviously that is not required for me so I abstained from the cold dirty looking water!! Outside was a clearwater pool to bath in, may have been nice if Phil hadn't of stripped off and got in first, kinda out me off the idea!!

We then went further up the rive in the boat and got dropped off the commence our 8km walk into camp 5 where we would spend the night before attempting to climb the infamous Pinnacles. We did the 8km in just over 2 hours we were walking mega fast in the hope that the leeches didn't latch on, it also meant that we could leave Phil behind and get there an hour before him so we could swim in the river and be all showered and clean before he arrived!!

Camp 5 was a lot better than I expected with showers and proper nice toilets!! We had our own cook who did an okay job, it would just be better if they didn't put bloody put fish sauce on everything! I was really nervous about the big climb as it was said to be as hard as Mt Kinabulu with rope climbs and rope ladders, taking between 8 and 10 hours all in all - it was meant to be proper tough on the knees but was also meant to be an amazing view that not many people were lucky enough to see. Sadly in the morning we found we weren't allowed to climb due to the heavy rain making conditions too dangerous. I was really gutted but the other side of me was slightly relieved (due to the poorly tummy I must admit my energy levels were also rather low). Instead we just went for a short walk near the camp and saw some great Pitture plants and some wildlife. The rest of the day was spent being bored and reading (thankfully I managed to swap the book I finished during this long wait - little did the guy realise how violent and twisted the book I gave him was!!).

The following day we did a 9km walk back to the boat and headed back to see more caves. We went to see Lang Cave and Deer Cave which were a 3km walk away from Headquarters (more walking, it was bloody hot too!!). Along the way we did a canopy walk which was good, it was pretty bouncy and at one point when Phil started walking on the same bit as me I thought I was going to be catapulted out!!

The caves were brilliant, Deer Cave is the largest cave passage in the world, 2km long and never less than 90m high and wide, the main chamber is 174m wide and 122m high. It is home to millions of bats (that is not an exaggerating) so I got to see all of them. We waited to around 5pm (they came out early as they stayed in the night before due to rain) and saw them all fly out - it takes about an hour in total as there is so many of them (estimate 5 million). Lots of different breeds to (20 I think he said).

We went back for another night in HQ then headed to the plane station early in the morning for our flight to Kuching.