Tropical Winter, Tue, 22 Aug 2017 | written by Simon
Simon at a Cave, Jungle, River, UNESCO site in Asia, Malaysia

Good night again, despite the fact that many more people checked in to the dorm yesterday! Thank you, gecko night watch!
I got up reasonably early to pack before leaving for the three day trek to the Pinnacles. I left some stuff in the park office, but my backpack is now heavier than it ever in this holiday – I have in it three litres of water and food for three days.
At 9:15 we got on the boats and set off first to a village market where we could buy all sorts of local handicrafts. Except I didn’t even get to look at them, because they also had a few good information boards there which I started reading and before I was finished it was time to go. Shame! But I did learn a few interesting things. So in the Malaysian part of Borneo the Malay people are actually only 21% of the pulsation – there are forty different ethnic groups here, all with distinct cultures and languages. Most of them were nomadic hunter-gatherers until as recently as 1950’s. The largest group are the Iban, making up 30% of the population. The people in Mulu are Penan, there is only about 10,000 of them and they are some of those who only abandoned nomadic life quite recently, after Christian missionaries got here in the 50’s and kindly told them to stop being so backward. But a few hundred Penan people still do lead a hunter-gatherer life in the jungle.
Because of this history, the Penan people pride themselves for being very communitarian – they never had any tribal hierarchy, didn’t acknowledge private property. Amazingly, the Penan language doesn’t have a word for ‘thief’ or ‘thank you’, but does have six different words for ‘we’, which says something about their social structure. It also has words for all the plants in the forest, but no word for ‘forest’ – the word they’d use just means ‘world’. I wonder how this communism works now, once the white people showed up and taught them out of all their primitive mistakes.

The boats took us a bit further up the river to the Wind Cave. It has four entrances and one of them is just above the river while another is a collapsed ceiling quite high up. The difference in air temperature and pressure causes a draft that can be felt in many places in the cave. It has some pretty sweet formations and our guide, Donnie, was explaining them all really well. He also kept picking on me all the time when asking the crowd what is this and what is that, because he was my guide yesterday as well and knew I heard some of those things already. Plus I was asking him millions of questions both days, so it’s only fair. It was really nice chatting to him, too. Turns out he came here as a tourist a few years ago and loved it so much that he became a guide. You can tell that he really likes his job. He also has a really badass tattoo after his own design, with a good story behind it.

The Clearwater Cave was next, named so in an Australian fashion. A couple hundred steps lead up to it, and I did them twice, because I didn’t get the instruction to wait and had to come back down. The cave was big and neat, but not nearly as awesome as the Deer Cave. But this is only the bit we saw, because this cave is ridiculously long – over 200km of it has been mapped! The clear river going through it is pretty cool, but we didn’t get to swim in it. You can do an advanced trek from the Winds to Clearwater, involving 6km of climbing and 2km of swimming, but I don’t think I’d be ready for that just yet.
Here, the Pinnacles group split off from all of the others who are doing just the caves – suddenly from the 20 or so people we were left with four: Clare from Ireland, Eugenia from Spain, Judith from France, and me.
Back down in the river, I took a quick refreshing dip, we had lunch, and we jumped on the boat to go further up the river. We were told that in some dry seasons people have to push the boat to go through some rapids – as the river was getting smaller and smaller there were a few times where I thought we’ll have to do this too, but our boat masters were awesome and led us through the most impossible parts.
Our landing was just a small opening in the forest wall, the beginning of a 9km trek on a narrow path, leading for Camp 5 where we stay before the proper climb tomorrow. On the way we crossed two amazing rope bridges, with just a couple planks to step on, bouncing with every step. We’ve also seen a lot of small lizards and some amazing butterflies. Some good chats with the co-travellers were had as well.

We reached the camp soon after 3pm, not terribly tired, but very very sweaty. Carrying all that stuff in this temperature will do it! It’s not a big deal, you get used to swimming in your own sweat on the first day here, but it was nice to jump in the river and swim in water for a change. Especially since there are a lot of wasps and hornets here, and they really like the salt that’s in your sweat, so you want to wash if off​ you and your clothes as soon as possible. They also make using the toilet a bit awkward, since urine also has some salt in it. Somehow I’m not terribly comfortable hovering my genitals over buzzing hornets… This is particularly difficult, as apparently today is when my body decided it doesn’t really need to keep all that water it was storing in the last days, and I need to pee every half an hour.

The camp itself is pretty neat – I thought it will be tents, but it’s proper buildings, with a toilet and even a kitchen! I wish I knew, I would bring something I could cook here, rather then carrying all those cans that aren’t even tasty. Should have read the notes better. We spent the rest of the evening just chatting, being briefed on tomorrow’s trek by Ishmael and Richie, our guides, and having dinner. Chilling in the darkness now, getting ready for an early night, because tomorrow starts before 6am.