A trip to Sarawak wouldn't be complete without a trip to some of the caves. I met a young English student called Roscoe who is planning to study botany at Sheffield, and we both agreed that dusk was the time to be at the entrance to the Great Cave in Niah. At that time all the other tourists had left and we could watch the "shift change" as the swiftlets came home at the end of their day, and the bats started to leave for the night shift. There wasn't a huge swarm as I had expected, but it was quite a spectacle, and I could feel the wind from the bats' wings as they rushed out over my head.

It isn't called the Great Cave for nothing either. We had already spent a good hour trekking along the boardwalks deep into the cave, which was like entering a pre-historic world. The noises and the sights in the very limited light never seemed to tie up, creating a very disorienting feeling. Up on the high ceiling of the cave was some very precarious looking wooden scaffolding, and very crude ladders dropping a long way to the ground. It is from there that the harvesters gather the nests of the black nest swiftlets for that very famous Chinese delicacy.

I would really like to have got to the even bigger caves at Gunung Mulu from where a BBC photographer showed us a huge mound of guano. But it would have taken a flight on a twin Otter aircraft to get there and more expense for park fees. Our caves were similar, not too far from the main highway, and I can probably live with missing out on that big pile of bat poo.

Posted from Kuching, April 18th 2011.