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Published: October 6th 2007
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Niah National Park looked an interesting spot on our westward trail, so we stopped for a couple of days at the nearby Niah Cave Inn (pun possibly unintended), one of many hotels we've seen in Malaysia where durians are banned. The National Park is home to several items, including an Iban longhouse (the Iban being an indigenous tribe whose traditional accommodation is in enormously long houses on stilts, with one door per family), and a number of caves that are notable for their size, their occupants (bats and swiftlets), the behaviour of their occupants (enormous exoduses en masse at dusk), and the produce of their occupants (the swiftlets generating the highly-prized main ingredient of bird's nest soup). Less visibly, but perhaps more momentously, excavations in the park have revealed evidence of human occupation from about 40,000 years ago, one of the earliest such sites in the region.
Unfortunately some ongoing renovations made the visit a little less rewarding than might otherwise have been the case. We were diverted off the main walkway onto a loop that bypassed the longhouse and ended up at a group of drinks and tat women, who told us we could either take a muddy 1
hour path through the jungle to reach the caves, or a shorter but probably illicit route along the still-being-renovated walkway. We chose the latter, which consisted of the concrete framework for the walkway, i.e. a central concrete "beam" about a foot wide, then gaps, then 2 outlying beams each about 9 inches wide. There were no handrails and the distance to the ground below was at times unnervingly great. I wasn't enormously happy with this, so we resolved to try the jungle path instead on the way back.
The caves themselves were extremely large, with their scale being intimidating, especially the aptly-named Great Cave. Green rocks lent a surprisingly colourful tone to the entrance, and swiftlets could be seen darting around in the gloom. Progress inside required a torch and the cavernous surroundings produced hushed tones, with the emptiness above us almost feeling like a weight. But even more spectacular were the poles of the bird's nest collectors. Extending up to 50m into the darkness, these reedy supports consisted of multiple bamboo poles connected via pegs and anchored by thin pieces of rope. I really wish I could have seen someone climbing up or down one of the poles,
Beetles
Doing stuff as the whole apparatus looked flimsy in the extreme, but instead we had to make do with seeing, far above us, the weak torchlight of some brave local guy flipping bird's nests from the cave wall down to his partner. That will most definitely not be my next career change.
The other cave we visited, Painted Cave, was supposedly the site of an ancient burial coffin and some similarly aged cave paintings, but we were unable to find them. Instead, we ended up posing in a group photo for some Malaysian university's field trip.
We took the jungle route back to the main walkway, a decision to be regretted in hindsight as it consisted of ankle-deep mud in parts together with ravenous clouds of mosquitos, leaving us drenched in sweat, our shoes coated in mud, a liberal spray of flecks over the rest of us, and a selection of new bites. With several hours still to go until dusk and the emergence of the bats and swiftlets from the caves, we decided the thought of a shower and clean clothes was more appealing and squelched back to the hotel.
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