Borneo 2015 – day 05

Friday 3rd July

This morning, we got our first sleep in on this trip. Our bungalow is nestled amongst the trees, so all night you can hear the sounds of the insects, bats and nocturnal birds. It’s really very peaceful.
After breakfast, we decided to walk to the Marriott Resort (a silly idea in the blazing sun), which ended up being about 2km. They have a really nice pool, which we made good use of while we were there. We then caught the shuttle bus back to the Park HQ.
We were booked in for an afternoon caving exploration, which was to cover Deer Cave and Lang Cave, and then observe the exodus of the bats from Deer Cave…
The frustrating part about this walk was that it is 3.8km each way, I was carrying a camera bag weighing in at around 12kg with a tripod strapped to the outside, and only when we arrived at the cave entrance did the guide turn around to me and say “You can’t take your tripod into the cave”. To say I was not impressed would be a gross understatement. Restrictions like this should be explained when you book your tour. I could have accepted this fact and left the tripod in the bungalow instead of carrying it unnecessarily for the best part of 8km!
Almost every afternoon, about 100,000 bats (the park literature says ‘one million bats’, but what I have come to realise during my time here, is that Malaysians don’t have a concept of ‘hundreds of thousands’. They go straight from thousands to millions) depart from Deer Cave on a dusk-food-gathering trip. The great thing about having all these bats here is that they keep the mosquito population very much in check. We are right in the midst of a rainforest, where it usually rains every afternoon in the dry season and twice every day in the wet season, and for all that, we’ve only seen a couple of mozzies in the two days we’ve been here.
The bat exodus was interesting to watch, as like swallows, the bats tend to fly in a swirling formation that is constantly changing like some airborne Mandelbrot set.
It made for fairly boring photos, but (hopefully) interesting video footage.
We watched the bats departing Deer Cave for about 15mins, shot some video and some photos, and then hit the trail back to HQ. By this stage, it was about half an hour after sunset and the light was fading. As we got further along the track and the light in the sky grew ever dimmer, we started to notice fireflies in amongst the foliage of the jungle. They are so awesome to watch, for those of us who don’t see them on a regular basis. We even had one or two of them fly across the path right in front of us.
Tomorrow, we are doing another 2 caves (the Cave of the Winds and Clearwater Cave) in the morning, and a 2 hour night walk, with the afternoon free to just relax.