The Great Bat Exodus

We flew from Hanoi to Miri, via KL on Saturday 26th July.  Miri felt like unfinished business as I had to leave there in such a rush in early February to get to dad's bedside.  As our budget airline dropped down to the coast over the oil rigs and offshore service vessels and towards Miri Airport I felt both sad and excited to be back.  My stay didn't last long before I returned to the airport on the Monday to take the short thirty minute flight up to Mulu National Park.  Sue was back at work so I thought I'd use the weekdays constructively by visiting Sarawak's only World Heritage Site and doing a three-day trip along the "headhunter's trail".

The trip had been arranged for me by Sue's colleague Kerry, who is a friend since our days in the small Sarawak town of Saratok in 2011-13.  The trip is run by Larry a local guide and entrepreneur with his finger in many pies.  Like so many things in Sarawak the tour had a fairly haphazard feel to it.  I was met at the airport by a four-wheel drive which whisked me to a homestay near the National Park gates where I was allocated a bed in an almost empty dormitory.  Later in the afternoon Larry himself arrived to brief me.  He's a big man with a ready smile, a handshake and a trilby hat perched on his round head and thick neck.  Later he led me, a Dutch family of five with whom I would be travelling the headhunter's trail and a young Englishman called Thomas to the Deer and Lang caves a couple of kilometres inside the National Park.

The caves are reminiscent of the Batu Niah complex south of Miri - like the surface of Mars with the powerful smell of ammonia from thousands of years of accumulated batshit.  Going deeper into the caves there are streams and spectacular stalactites and stalagmites.  As evening approached Larry left us outside the caves with a few hundred other tourists to await the nightly exodus of the bats to scour the air for insects while a pair of eagles also circled hungrily.

Often these big set piece events are an anti-climax and I understand that when the weather is poor the bats can just stay in the great cave and refuse to come out.  But that evening they didn't disappoint their expectant audience waiting with cameras ready.  It started with a few strings, each comprising several hundred bats and after about twenty minutes turned into a continuous stream snaking from the cave, punctuated from time to time by a dive-bombing eagle pulling a hapless bat from the throng.  After about forty five minutes it was too dark to see anymore and so we all returned to our hotels and homestays with images that were mainly a pale imitation of what we had seen.