Miri and the Niah Caves

Miri

After yesterday’s travel day today took the usual format of visiting the sights of the town I am staying in. There’s not too much to Miri for a tourist. As you walk around you find that there are a fair few big houses here as a result of the money that has flowed into the town after oil was found here early in the 20th century.

It doesn’t have the colonial heart of Georgetown or Kuching, though to be fair that is partly because the allies bombed the be-jesus out of it in 1945 toward the end of WWII to hasten the departure of those dastardly Japanese; they had taken the place and the oilfields back in 1941.

After a lovely breakfast of coffee and fruit, including a big helping of the heavenly tasting and beautifully purple dragon fruit, I walked the 3kms or so to the Taoist temple in the north of the town, but with signage being really poor here I probably did double that zigging and zagging to locate it. Being English of course that meant I was wandering about the place at midday, on a day that turned out to have the most direct un-hazy sunshine of my trip. I ended up with a pink nose, a splash of colour on the forehead and a horrendously red strip across my neck, where my rucksack had pulled my shirt down. It was going to hurt.

The Taoist temple was a nice, simple single roomed building, nothing approaching the extravagant scale of Kek Lok Si, but it was splashed brightly with primary colours as ever. Miri being a transit place for tourists rather than a destination meant that I was the only visitor there. After cooling off for a while in the shade I walked east toward the base of the low hills which fringe the city and popped into the Boulevard Shopping Mall, which like all malls out here are colder than my fridge. After a quick stroll around I had myself a lovely further cooling frappacino. Not sure what it was, but it was cold and frothy ‘fruit’ flavour - it didn’t have coffee in it, I thought they were coffee drinks. Still on a learning curve.

I left the Boulevard suitably frigid and walked down the road in the direction of Canada Hill (defrosting on the way), literally the road, as pavements are an occasional ghostly apparition that quickly disappear either into deep drains, or just stop and become part of the road. Where present they tend to include obstacles such as gaping holes where sewers have collapsed or manholes have not been installed, the pavement is used for random parking, locals working or sitting, even walls jutting out across them. In short, useless as a pavement, so you have to walk on the road and keep an eye out for anyone that is driving toward you without due care. They don’t expect you on the road either (not many people walk anywhere here I guess) and when it comes to crossing them, just think Frogger if you remember back to the 1980s computer game.

Seeing an un-signposted (surprise) road leading up the hill I thought this could be the road to the museum, then again it curled off left and may have gone in exactly the opposite direction. I took the risk and it turned out to be the right road, thankfully for it was a 1 in 10 and in the afternoon heat took some effort. The museum was nice enough and very modern, but it was very much educational about oil formation and the industry and didn’t have enough, for me anyway, on the actual history of oil here in Miri and Borneo. In summary, it took longer to climb the hill to get to it than it did to walk around it. Again, only three visitors in addition to me, despite an enormous car park.

Strolling down was a very pleasant affair with bird songs all around me of warblers and such like. After a quick walk around another shopping mall at the base of the hill it was time to head into town for a well-earned pint of Guinness at the BARcelona (sic) and a chance to use the free wi-fi.

At 6.20pm the sky turned all shades of pink, which quickly turned to darkness and at the same time the swiftlets flew noisily overhead heralding the oncoming night and the imminent return of some torrential rain.

Tomorrow it is back into the country with a trip to the famous Niah Caves.

Niah Caves

I had arranged a car to the famous (honest, they are) Niah Caves with the wonderfully helpful Mrs Lee from the Dillenia the previous day. After being the first to book, another four people had put themselves up for the trip too, so two cars set forth at about 9 o’clock, with one couple from Holland in one car, which left me sharing a car with an unduly quiet young couple from NZ/Norway. I tried conversation with them but the effort yielded indifferent results, so I gave up with them. They looked tired with life.

The walk to the caves was a straight return trip along a wooden boardwalk, with no option of a circular walk. But this was to prove brilliant for me, in terms of what I would see. There wasn’t much climbing in terms of height gain, until near the caves and then again within them. That said it was hot and strenuous.

Firstly, the caves. The main cave is preceded by a long narrow cave, which may be better described as an overhang, known as Trader’s Cave. This is where the families of the workers who collected the swiftlets bird’s nests from the main cave lived and traded their valuable product. The remnants of their homes remain simply as the foundation and structural supports, which comprise of narrow ironwood timbers. These are straight, square cut and almost metallic looking and the ironwood name is certainly apt.

A few hundred metres through the jungle and it is on to the main cave, the scale of which is jaw dropping. The buildings at the front of the cave (see photo) give a sense of it, but being British I could have done with a double decker bus or a football pitch in there to get an obvious yardstick for the scale. After closing said jaw, the next thing you do is gawp at the slender poles dangling unsteadily from the roof of the cathedral like space. To think that anyone volunteers for climbing and shinning up these fragile looking ‘ladders’ to stupendous heights just to collect bird nests is enough to slacken that jaw once more. Cue much shaking of head and wonderment. At the same time it also makes you think that who could ever think that a soup made of bird spit would be a good thing, let alone a delicacy. Okay, those pesky Chinese.

The walk through the cave takes several sustained minutes of hard slog up the wooden steps and over the lip of some large rocks, which then gives way to night. At this point if you have forgotten your torch you can turn back and go home, or hold out for a group to hold on to, for it really is pitch black. I had my torch though. It is a fair way through the cave and you can hear the swiftlets and see occasional bats, where they roost away from the roof high overhead.

Exiting the cave takes you back into wooden boardwalk territory, but this one is very shaky and missing some timbers. It looks like it was constructed with untreated wood sometime before Alec Guinness was building bridges for the Japanese. In short, worrying to a lad a few stone heavier than the average Bornean (or even two of them).

After gingerly progressing over the boards it is up some more steps and on into the Painted Caves. This series of caves includes prehistoric cave painting of the type you will have seen on TV or in Nat Geo over the years, and are really clear to see despite the un-needed barbed wire up against the images (behind a fenced area). The paintings are all red brown in colour, probably made with haematite, and portray the kind of things you expect from the pre TV era – animals, hunting, men, women, and death. No football, gigs and beer then? At the far end of these caves is an in-situ skeleton of a young lady, previous skeletons found in the cave, which have all been removed, were all male. For some reason all the males were orientated in the opposite direction to the girl (head out toward forest).

After a scoot around these caves and another water break (we really are made of water) it was time to off-ski back toward the waiting motor, and while the caves were impressive and memorable the jungle was to prove at least a match. As well as catching numerous brightly coloured birds (which I can’t pretend to be able to identify) and copious varieties and numbers of butterflies I saw massive bright red millipedes taking to the boards, and beautiful dragonflies (okay, maybe damselflies – I will need to check with an ecologist in the know). Then around half way back I heard some crashing ahead of me followed by silence as the animals waited for me to pass. I had time, and I waited, and was rewarded after a lot of time and shifting about with the sight of a group of Silver Leaf Monkeys, which had made a swift get away from me by climbing further up into the canopy on the trees which perched on the side of the cliff. Their calls to each other were distinctive.

I spent some time here following their progress and listening for the occasional crashing crescendos as they traversed the Cliffside canopy, and then I walked on with a smile on my face as it was the first time I had definitely seen the Silver Leaf. Further along I came across my most startling sight of my trips in the jungle when I heard some rustling in the leaf litter and a slight splash in the stream parallel to the path. I assumed it was a larger than usual lizard that had dislodged something into the water, but as I searched the leaf litter below for sign of movement I saw what had fallen into the water. It was a 2m long python. It was swimming away from me, but that fact that it was a) a snake and b) a bloody big one, gave me goose bumps and I wish someone had been with me to witness it, for it was pretty incredible. I was gutted when I realised I had changed the lens on camera to my Angkor Wat damaged wide angle lens from the zoom I had on earlier, for I could not get a good (or in focus) picture. Ho hum, I will not forget it though.

Another a few hundred metres down the track and I couldn’t believe I found another group of Silver Leafs. It really was my lucky day. At the end of the walk I spoke to one of the Rangers, who said I had been very lucky both with respect to the monkeys and the snake. He said he had never seen a python here, and said he didn’t want to as he didn’t like snakes. A wise man, but there was me thinking that they liked all that outdoor natural stuff.

The miserable couple took an age to get back, but thankfully fell asleep quickly in the car to save me any more wasted effort. So, all in all a cracking day, as much for the jungle as the magnificent caves.