Kuching is the capital city of Sarawak which is part of East Malaysia and is located on the wider island of Borneo. Anyone who has been to Peninsular Malaysia will find that Sarawak has a very different feel, and Kuching in particular, thanks to its strategic location on the snake-like Sarawak River, is one of the prettiest spots in the region.
Malaysia: Gunung Mulu National Park – Revisited
🦇 A Million Bats Over Mulu: Chasing the Exodus in Sarawak’s Rainforest
We were up at what might generously be described as a civilised hour — though not quite civilised enough for our liking — to catch the morning flight to Mulu.
A Grab car had been summoned with the by-now familiar ease that makes you wonder what travel was actually like before smartphones, and within what felt like barely enough time to finish a coffee, we were at the terminal and boarding one of those pleasingly small propeller aircraft that BorneoAir operates on this particular route — a Twin Otter or something similarly compact, the kind of aircraft that a full-sized jet would feel frankly embarrassed to be compared with. The flight to Mulu takes around thirty-five minutes, which is precisely long enough to appreciate the view over the forested interior of Sarawak and to wonder, not for the first time, quite how much of this extraordinary country remains magnificently and deliberately wild.
Gunung Mulu National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and has been since the year 2000, when it was inscribed for its exceptional natural values — which is, if you think about it, quite a list of things to be exceptional at. The park sits in the north-east of Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of Borneo, covering around 544 square kilometres of primary rainforest, limestone karst mountains, and cave systems that still, after decades of scientific survey, have not been fully mapped. It is home to some of the largest cave passages ever recorded on earth, carved over millions of years through the ancient Melinau limestone by rivers that have long since found other things to do. The biodiversity here is staggering even by Bornean standards, which is saying something given that Borneo itself is routinely described as one of the most biologically rich places on the planet. The park contains well over three thousand species of plants, a hundred and ten species of mammals, a hundred and seventy species of birds, and more types of bat than you would sensibly expect to encounter across an entire lifetime of nature watching. There are seventeen species of bat in Mulu. Seventeen. One wonders at what point the bats had a meeting and decided this was the place.
Mulu’s airport is, diplomatically speaking, compact. Built to serve the park and the handful of small communities in the area, arriving there feels less like landing at an international gateway and more like pulling up to a particularly well-organised garden shed. It is functional, cheerful, and refreshingly unbothered by the kind of retail experience that modern airports seem to feel obligated to inflict on travellers. A shared van whisked us the short distance to the park headquarters, where we checked in, sorted out our room, and immediately booked ourselves onto the following day’s tours before anyone could change their mind or sell our spots out from under us. The park accommodation is no-frills but perfectly adequate — clean, functional, and surrounded on all sides by primary rainforest, which rather puts the average hotel room in perspective. The forest starts roughly where the path ends.
After dropping off bags and getting a decent lunch at the small park restaurant — which had, to its credit, several genuinely good options and did not charge the sort of prices that captive audiences sometimes invite — we set off in the mid-afternoon for the three-kilometre walk along the raised boardwalk trail towards Deer Cave. The air was hot, humid in the way that tropical air is always described as humid, which is to say that it wrapped itself around you like a warm, damp towel and didn’t apologise for it. It smelled richly of wet earth and vegetation, which is, of course, exactly what tropical rainforest is supposed to smell like, so there was no point complaining. The trail winds through lowland dipterocarp forest, the kind of dense, layered canopy that shuts out most of the sky and makes you feel properly small in the best possible way. Dipterocarps are the dominant trees across much of South-East Asia’s lowland forests — enormous, straight-trunked trees that can grow to sixty metres or more, with buttressed roots flaring out at the base like the fins of some improbable rocket. The ones along this trail have been standing for centuries.
Our real purpose that afternoon, however, was to reach the bat exodus viewing area well before the bats themselves had any ideas about leaving. This was, it should be explained, something of a personal mission — and not merely for the usual reasons. Two years previously, in what we try to remember as a formative travel experience rather than a rather wet failure, we had made this exact same walk, settled ourselves in to watch what is consistently described as one of the great natural spectacles of South-East Asia, and then sat through an increasingly violent tropical storm while the bats — showing considerably better judgement than us — simply declined to come out. We waited. We got wet. The bats stayed inside. We eventually walked back to the park in the rain, slightly philosophical about the whole thing but mostly just damp.
This time we arrived early. Deliberately, pointedly early. We claimed excellent positions on the open-sided viewing platform and watched as other visitors gradually filtered in over the following two hours. Even at peak time there were fewer than a hundred people gathered — a remarkably intimate audience for something operating on this scale.
Deer Cave itself is extraordinary by almost any measure you care to apply. It is one of the largest cave passages in the world: its entrance rises to roughly ninety metres and stretches approximately a hundred and seventy metres wide, making it — as is noted with some regularity in the park’s literature — large enough to fly a Boeing 747 through. It was discovered by the broader scientific community during the Royal Geographical Society’s 1977-1978 Mulu expedition, one of the largest tropical forest expeditions ever mounted by British scientists, though local Berawan and Penan people knew of the caves long before anyone arrived with maps and measuring equipment. Inside the cave, roosting in the upper reaches during daylight hours, live an estimated three million wrinkle-lipped free-tailed bats — Tadarida plicata, to give them their proper name. They are not particularly large bats, each weighing only a few grams, but three million of them in one place is a different matter entirely. They emerge each evening in a coordinated mass departure that has, over the years, acquired a reputation out of all proportion to the fact that it is, at its core, bats leaving a cave. It deserves the reputation.
As dusk approached and the light over the forest turned that shade of burnished orange-gold that seems to exist only in the tropics, the exodus began. It started quietly enough — a thin, dark ribbon of bats threading upward from somewhere deep within the vast cave mouth, spiralling into the cooling evening air. Then more. Then considerably more. Within minutes, the sky above the cave entrance was filled with what can only be described as a living, shifting column of bats — tens of thousands at a time, corkscrewing upward in long, fluid streams before dispersing outward across the darkening forest canopy. The wrinkle-lipped bat is a prodigious insect hunter, capable of travelling forty kilometres or more from its roost in a single night, and the colony as a whole is reckoned to consume somewhere in the region of thirty tonnes of insects every evening. Thirty tonnes. If you have been troubled by mosquitoes in Mulu, it is worth reflecting that the situation could, without these bats, be considerably worse.
It was not, it should be said, entirely one-sided. Bat hawks — Macheiramphus alcinus — patrolled the column with practised efficiency. The bat hawk is a specialist raptor found across South and South-East Asia and across parts of Africa, built with unusual anatomical modifications almost entirely geared toward hunting in low light. It has enormously enlarged eyes, a wide gape, and the kind of acceleration that reminds you that evolution is not, in the end, sentimental. It hunts almost exclusively at dusk and dawn, and watching several of them work the edges of the spiralling bat columns — picking off individuals with calm, surgical precision — was its own kind of spectacle alongside the bats themselves.
As the numbers thinned and the forest closed into proper darkness, we made our way back along the boardwalk trail by torchlight and headlamp. The rainforest at night is not a quiet place. It is, in fact, remarkably loud — a continuous, layered wall of sound from insects, frogs, and various creatures that decline to be identified in the dark, punctuated occasionally by something larger moving in the undergrowth. Spooky is perhaps the right word for it, though it is the sort of spooky that is also quietly thrilling. We did not run, exactly, but the pace was brisk.
We made it back to the park headquarters just as the first fat drops of rain began to fall from the sky, which felt like a satisfying narrative improvement on our previous visit. The café was open. Cold beer was available. A plate of food arrived shortly afterwards. Sometimes things work out more or less as they should.
🕯️ Caves, Bats, and a Very Big Day Two
We had, with what in hindsight was either admirable ambition or a mild lapse in judgement, signed ourselves up for not one but two guided cave tours on Day Two. Having visited Mulu before and done exactly these same tours on that previous trip, we were operating on the cheerful assumption that seeing extraordinary things twice is not only reasonable but actually preferable. This turned out to be entirely correct.
After a hearty breakfast at the park café — the nasi lemak was particularly good — we made our way to the meeting point with commendable punctuality. The group numbered about a dozen, which is a reassuringly modest number for a guided tour, and our guide arrived promptly, introduced himself with quiet efficiency, and led us the short distance down to the Melinau River, where three narrow motorised longboats were waiting.
The Melinau is deceptively shallow. It had been even shallower on our previous visit, to the point where the boatmen had occasionally needed to get out and push, which is not what you want to be doing in a river in Borneo. But the drivers — and they really do deserve to be called drivers rather than merely boatmen — are experts of the first order, navigating submerged rocks, fallen logs, and various other obstacles with the relaxed confidence of people who have done this particular journey roughly ten thousand times. After about fifteen minutes on the water, we pulled in to a wooden jetty on the far bank.
Our first stop was Batu Bungan, the small Penan settlement that all tourist boats make a point of visiting. It sits at a bend in the river and consists of a collection of wooden houses, a longhouse, and a row of small market tables where crafts are laid out for sale. The Penan are among Borneo’s oldest indigenous peoples, and their story is one that repays some attention before you arrive. Until as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, the Penan of the interior were still living entirely nomadic lives deep in the rainforest, moving in small family groups through the forest according to the seasons, hunting wild boar and deer with long blowpipes, gathering wild fruit, and harvesting the starch of the wild sago palm, which formed the core of their diet. Their society was famously non-hierarchical: there were no chiefs as such, no concept of private land ownership, and a deep and codified moral obligation to share whatever food was available. The Penan word sihun — referring to the failure to share food, particularly with the hungry — was considered the gravest transgression a person could commit. It was not quite a legal system, but it functioned as one.
From the 1960s onwards, the Sarawak state government began encouraging — and in some cases applying rather more pressure than the word encouraging suggests — the Penan to abandon nomadic life and settle permanently in villages. Batu Bungan was established as part of this resettlement process, and the village now has a school, a clinic, electricity for part of the day, and access to a cash economy. What it also has, inevitably, is a slower erosion of the forest knowledge, the language of place, and the extraordinary practical skills that sustained the nomadic Penan for centuries. The Sarawak government’s relationship with its Penan population has not always been comfortable reading, particularly during the years of heavy commercial logging in the 1980s and 1990s, when Penan activists, most famously a man named Along Sega, led blockades against logging roads in what became an internationally noticed protest. That is a longer story than belongs here, but it is worth knowing before you arrive and cheerfully buy a carved wooden spoon.
We are not, as a general rule, souvenir buyers. We have enough things in the house already, and there is only so much shelf space. But life out here is genuinely hard, and the women of Batu Bungan spend extraordinary amounts of time producing the handicrafts displayed on those wooden tables. The rattan weaving alone — tightly plaited baskets, mats, and bags in geometric patterns — can take weeks of work per item, the materials gathered from the surrounding forest, stripped, soaked, and woven with the kind of patience that most of us gave up somewhere around our third or fourth decade. A single rattan bag can represent the better part of a month’s labour. So we had a proper look round and bought a couple of small wooden cooking spoons. It felt, if nothing else, like the least we could do without getting carried away.
Wind Cave came next. To reach the entrance, you climb a set of steep concrete stairs set into the face of the limestone cliff above the river — not enormous in height but sufficient to inform you, mildly but firmly, that perhaps you are not quite as fit as you might be. Wind Cave takes its name from the cool breezes that channel continuously through its passages, drawn through by the numerous natural shafts eroded upward through the rock above, creating a permanent through-draught that makes the cave noticeably cooler than the forest outside. The cave itself forms the southernmost entrance to the vast Clearwater Cave system — a network of passages that stretches for over 222 kilometres and remains one of the longest cave systems in the world by volume.
Inside Wind Cave, the highlight is the King’s Chamber, and it is difficult to oversell it. It is a cathedral-sized space packed with an extraordinary density of speleothems — the geological term for cave formations, which is considerably less satisfying to say aloud than stalactites and stalagmites but does cover everything. There are curtain formations, flowstone deposits, columns where stalactites and stalagmites have grown toward each other across millennia and finally met in the middle, and the peculiar branching formations known as helictites, which grow in defiance of gravity — sideways, curling, sometimes spiralling outward as if the usual rules simply do not apply here. Some of the columns are over eight metres tall and in places no wider than a tin of baked beans, which tells you something about the pace at which limestone caves build themselves. Stalactites and stalagmites grow at rates of between 0.1 and 10 millimetres per year, depending on local conditions. Some of what you are looking at in that chamber is tens of thousands of years old, which is the sort of number that is too large to hold in your head and so you just look at it instead. The cave walls throughout are scalloped smooth by the ancient rivers that carved them, and the installed lighting — slightly theatrical but entirely functional — means you can actually see what you are there to see, which is, after all, the point.
Back down the stairs to the river, back into the narrow boats, and a short journey downstream to Clearwater Cave. Here, more stairs awaited — well over two hundred of them, according to the signs, climbed in full equatorial heat and humidity, which you will not be surprised to learn is its own kind of character-building experience. You arrive at the top breathing in a way that invites reflection. Then you step into the cave entrance and discover almost immediately that every step was entirely worth it.
Clearwater Cave is, by some measures, the longest cave system in South-East Asia, and is counted among the longest in the world. The 222 kilometres of surveyed passages place it in genuinely rarefied company globally, and significant sections remain unsurveyed. The cave takes its name from the underground river that flows through it — and you can hear the thing roaring below your feet well before you see it. The river is gin-clear, fast, and cold, running over smooth limestone in a way that is quite beautiful if you are not expected to swim in it, which mercifully we were not. Among the cave’s more unusual features is an abundance of phytokarst — strange, spiky structures formed where microorganisms including bacteria and algae have slowly dissolved the limestone surface in patterns governed by light and biological activity. They look unlike almost anything else you will see underground. Some of the stalactite formations at the cave entrance hang like enormous stone fangs, lit from below in the dim installed light, and the general atmosphere inside is one of ancient, slightly otherworldly grandeur, which is not a bad thing for a cave to have.
A pool fed directly by the underground river sits at the base of the entrance steps, and several of the younger members of our group went in for a swim at the end of the tour. We watched. We are at the age where watching is an entirely underrated activity and the water looked very cold.
The boats returned us to the park headquarters in good time for a civilised lunch, after which we rested briefly — entirely without guilt — before gathering ourselves for the second tour of the day.
🌿 The Boardwalk, the Snake, and Two More Caves
The afternoon tour began with the familiar three-kilometre walk along the raised plank boardwalk through the rainforest, the same route we had taken the previous evening for the bat exodus. The boardwalk itself is a considerable piece of infrastructure — built on wooden piles above the forest floor, it runs through the lowland rainforest in a way that allows you to observe the environment without trampling it, which given the foot traffic this park receives is probably wise for all concerned.
Our guide paused several times along the trail to point out the sort of things that the uninstructed eye tends to miss — a fig tree being slowly strangled by a root climber, a pitcher plant hanging from the undergrowth catching insects by the unglamorous method of drowning them in digestive fluid, a rhinoceros hornbill making a racket somewhere in the upper canopy. Then, with the calm matter-of-factness of someone who had seen this before, he drew our attention to a snake that had arranged itself along the boardwalk handrail as though it had been there for years and saw no reason to move for a queue of tourists. It was, it transpired, a vine snake — Ahaetulla prasina, the Asian vine snake — brilliant emerald green and astonishingly slender, perhaps a metre long, with a pointed head and a way of holding itself completely still that suggested it was either watching us very carefully or entirely ignoring us. It was quite beautiful, in the way that things with fangs sometimes are. We kept our distance, admired it thoroughly, and moved on.
Lang’s Cave came first. It is the smallest of the four show caves at Mulu, and this is sometimes used to lower expectations, which is a mistake because it is, in its own more intimate way, quite remarkable. The cave was named after Lang Belarek, a Berawan man from the Tutoh River communities who was one of the local guides on the 1977–1978 Royal Geographical Society expedition that first systematically surveyed Mulu’s cave systems. Despite its modest scale, Lang’s Cave is exceptionally richly decorated — the stalactites here are among the most delicate in the park, some of them resembling coral formations or the hanging tentacles of a jellyfish, backlit by carefully positioned spotlights that give the whole space something of the quality of a very expensive chandelier. One does not want to bump into anything, and one’s instinct is to lower one’s voice slightly, though there is no obvious reason why. The cave is not particularly old in geological terms — perhaps around a hundred thousand years — but the formations inside are among the most photogenic in Mulu, and it has a quality of concentrated wonder that its larger neighbours sometimes sacrifice to sheer scale.
Then, Deer Cave. Even on a second visit, stepping inside requires a moment. The entrance is, depending on which measurement you consult, somewhere between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty metres in diameter — it is consistently cited as the largest cave entrance in the world, though cave measurements are notoriously contested, largely because caves are not rectangular. The cave stretches for well over two kilometres into the mountain, and the floor throughout is carpeted with a deep accumulation of guano from the millions of bats that roost above. Twelve species of bat have been recorded in Deer Cave, but the headline residents remain the wrinkle-lipped bats — three million of them, give or take, packed into the upper reaches of the cave in a warm, shifting mass that represents one of the largest bat colonies on earth. The cave is damp, dimly lit by a combination of natural light from the distant entrance and the occasional installed spotlight, and it smells — not unpleasantly — of the forest processes that are quietly consuming the enormous quantities of guano on the floor. It is wonderfully odd. The scale of the place takes several minutes to settle in your mind, and even then you are not entirely sure you have correctly understood it.
By late afternoon the official tour was done and we made our way to the bat exodus viewing platform to repeat the experience of the previous evening. There was mild debate between us about whether going twice was strictly necessary. We had both independently decided that it was.
We sat. We waited. Roughly forty-five minutes passed during which the sky did that tropical thing where the light changes from gold to amber to something that has no real English name. Then, out of the dark throat of the cave entrance, the ribbon began.
The wrinkle-lipped bats emerged in the same spiralling columns as the night before — those extraordinary corkscrewing streams of tens of thousands of individuals that shift and ripple and thin and thicken like something between a murmuration and a river, rising from the cave and dispersing into the evening sky. Bat hawks dropped in on schedule. The streams went on and on. It lasted perhaps forty minutes in total, and if anything it was more impressive the second time, which we had not expected and are somewhat at a loss to fully explain. Perhaps it is simply that the first time you watch in disbelief, and the second time you actually see it.
We walked back along the three kilometres of boardwalk in the darkening forest, found a table at the park café, ordered cold beer, and ate dinner. That, on balance, was that. Two very full days in a park that rewards every hour you give it.
💭 Reflections
Coming back to Mulu for a second time is an unusual thing to do. Most people, faced with the scale of South-East Asia and the number of places left unseen, would probably move on and find something new. We went back because of the bats, or more precisely because of the rain on our first visit, and the quiet but persistent sense that we hadn’t quite finished with the place.
What struck us, sitting on that viewing platform on the second evening and watching three million bats pour out of a cave entrance large enough to park an aircraft in, was not just the spectacle itself but the sheer improbability of its continued existence. Gunung Mulu National Park has been formally protected since 1974, which sounds reassuring until you consider that the forests surrounding it have not had the same protection, and that Sarawak’s logging history through the 1980s and 1990s removed enormous areas of the kind of lowland forest that makes the cave ecology work. The bats that hunt above the canopy each night need forest to hunt in. The insects they eat need forest to live in. The whole extraordinary apparatus of the exodus depends on a living landscape extending outward from that cave mouth in every direction.
The Penan story sits alongside all of this uncomfortably. The people who lived in and around these forests for centuries are now settled in villages, negotiating a cash economy and a government school system, while tourists like us arrive on propeller aircraft to gawp at caves they have known all their lives. There is no particularly satisfying conclusion to draw from this. It simply is what it is, and going in with eyes open seems marginally better than not going at all.
We left Mulu feeling the way good travel occasionally makes you feel — slightly adjusted, in ways that are hard to specify precisely. Less certain that what we do with our time is quite as important as we tend to assume. More aware that the world contains things operating on a scale and timescale that make most human concerns feel appropriately modest. Three million bats will do that to you.
Planning Your Visit to Gunung Mulu National Park
🌏 Bandar Seri Begawan — An Overview
Bandar Seri Begawan — known locally as BSB or simply Bandar — is the capital city of Brunei Darussalam, a small, oil-rich sultanate on the north-western coast of Borneo. The city sits within the Brunei-Muara District, the smallest yet most populous of Brunei’s four districts, and serves as the country’s main administrative, cultural and commercial centre. The wider country is bordered by the Malaysian state of Sarawak on all land sides, with a coastline along the South China Sea to the north.
BSB is a modern city of wide streets and palace buildings, but it carries a rich layered history that stretches back to its origins as a Malay fishing village on the Brunei River. Today it blends quiet Islamic tradition with gleaming architecture, tropical greenery and the extraordinary sight of Kampong Ayer — a vast network of wooden stilt villages on the water. Despite being a capital city, BSB feels unhurried and peaceful, making it an unusually calm destination for visitors to South-East Asia.
The population of Brunei as a whole is around 280,000, of whom the Malay community forms the majority, with Chinese, Indian and other communities also present. The official language is Malay, but English is widely understood and used in business and commerce. The climate is equatorial — hot and humid year-round, with average temperatures hovering around 28°C and no dramatic seasonal changes.
Brunei is a Malay Islamic Monarchy, and visitors are expected to dress modestly, particularly around mosques and religious sites. Covering shoulders and knees is advisable at all times. Brunei is also a dry country — the public sale of alcohol is prohibited — so visitors should plan accordingly.
✈️ Getting There
By Air
Brunei International Airport (IATA: BWN) is the country’s only commercial airport and the main point of entry for international visitors. Royal Brunei Airlines operates direct and connecting services from a number of international hubs. The airport is located close to the city centre, and a taxi from the terminal to the city takes around 20 minutes and costs approximately B$25. Some hotels offer complimentary or subsidised airport transfers, so it is worth checking in advance. A cheaper alternative is the purple public bus service, which departs from a covered bus stop at the far end of the car park (turn right on exiting Arrivals) and runs into the city centre for around B$2.
By Land
All main roads in Brunei lead to Bandar Seri Begawan. The principal road connects the capital to the coastal route towards the Sarawak border via Tutong, Seria and Kuala Belait. Visitors entering from Miri in Malaysian Sarawak can take the Miri Belait Transportation Company bus service, which requires a change of bus at the Sungei Tujoh border crossing. The full journey from Miri to BSB takes around five hours and involves multiple bus changes, so an early start is essential. From the Seria direction, buses arrive at the main bus terminal on Jalan Cator in the city centre, with fares of around B$6 from Seria.
Travelling to the remote Temburong District by road requires crossing through two sets of immigration checkpoints via Sarawak, which adds considerable time. The more practical route is by speedboat (see below).
By Boat
The main ferry terminal in Brunei is the Serasa Ferry Terminal at Muara, around 25 km from BSB. Ferries depart several times daily to the island of Labuan (45 minutes to 1.5 hours), from where connections are available to Kota Kinabalu in Sabah. Buses to Muara depart from the Jalan Cator bus terminal, with a direct shuttle to the ferry terminal costing B$2. Speedboats to Bangar in the Temburong District depart from a jetty near the foodstalls on Jalan Residency, just east of the city centre.
Visa and Entry
Many nationalities enjoy visa-free entry to Brunei for stays of between 14 and 90 days. It is advisable to verify current entry requirements before travelling, as these can vary by nationality and are subject to change.
🚌 Getting Around
On Foot
The downtown area of BSB is compact and very walkable. A Heritage Trail links several of the main attractions — including the Omar Ali Saifuddien Mosque, Tamu Kianggeh market and the Royal Regalia Museum — with walking maps posted at key intersections around the city centre. Exploring the central area on foot is the most rewarding way to take in the atmosphere.
By Bus
The city’s public bus service operates a network of purple minibus-style vans, each seating around 20 passengers. Services run at roughly 20-minute intervals from early morning until around 6 pm, with all routes beginning and ending at the Jalan Cator bus terminal. Fares are a flat B$1 regardless of distance. Buses stop on request along the route — simply indicate to the conductor when you wish to alight, or flag one down from the roadside. Key routes include the Circle Line (service 01) and the Business Centres Line (service 20). Route information is displayed on boards in the front window of each vehicle.
By Taxi
Taxis are not easily hailed on the street in BSB outside of the airport. The most reliable approach is to arrange one through your hotel or by calling a taxi company directly. Ride-hailing services such as Grab also operate in the city and offer a convenient alternative. Private hire (DART) cars are permitted to collect passengers from the airport, departing from the P2 car park, a short covered walk from the Arrivals terminal.
By Water Taxi
One of the most enjoyable ways to explore the city is by water taxi on the Brunei River. These small boats can be hailed from almost any dock, but the most popular boarding points are behind the Yayasan Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah mall and along the canal market. They are the practical way to reach Kampong Ayer and offer a memorable perspective of the city from the water. Fares and tour prices are negotiable — a one-hour tour of the water village should cost no more than around B$30.
By Tour Van
Tour vans can be arranged at the bus terminal ticket counters and offer a flexible way to visit multiple sites around the city and beyond. Always agree on a price before boarding.
The Best Time to Visit Gunung Mulu National Park
🌤️ Dry Season: March to October (Peak Season)
The period from March to October represents Mulu’s drier months and is broadly considered the best window for visiting. Rainfall does not disappear entirely — Mulu receives in excess of 5,000mm per year — but precipitation is notably less intense and more predictable during this time, and sunshine hours are greater.
Trekking conditions are at their most favourable during these months. The trail to the Pinnacles, a gruelling 9-kilometre climb through limestone forest, is far more manageable when the paths are drier and river levels are lower. The Headhunters’ Trail, which follows an old Kayan warrior route and combines jungle trekking with longboat travel, is also more accessible. Cave tours run reliably, and the famous bat exodus from Deer Cave — where millions of wrinkle-lipped bats spiral into the evening sky — is a nightly spectacle that visitors can watch from the amphitheatre. April to August tends to be the most popular period, attracting the highest number of visitors and corresponding demand for accommodation and guides. Booking well in advance is strongly advisable.
What to pack: Lightweight, quick-dry clothing, long-sleeved shirts for jungle trekking, sturdy waterproof hiking boots with ankle support, a packable rain jacket, high-factor insect repellent (DEET-based), sun cream, a wide-brimmed hat, a head torch with spare batteries, a dry bag or waterproof pack liner, rehydration sachets, and a refillable water bottle.
🌧️ Wet Season: November to February (Shoulder/Off-Peak Season)
From November through to February, Mulu enters its wetter period, with November and December typically bringing the heaviest and most sustained rainfall. River levels rise substantially, and the park’s limestone terrain becomes slippery and unpredictable underfoot. The Pinnacles trek is frequently closed during this period due to hazardous conditions, and some routes may be temporarily inaccessible.
That said, visiting during the wet season has genuine appeal for the right type of traveller. The rainforest is at its most lush and atmospheric, waterfalls are fuller, and the park sees far fewer visitors. This can mean a more intimate experience of the caves and jungle, lower accommodation rates, and a stronger sense of genuine wilderness. The cave tours — including Deer Cave, Lang’s Cave, Wind Cave, and Clearwater Cave — remain largely operational year-round, as weather does not affect the underground environment. January and February offer a slight improvement over November and December in terms of rainfall, making them the better months within this period.
What to pack: Waterproof hiking boots or trail shoes with excellent grip, gaiters, a heavy-duty waterproof rain jacket and trousers, a dry bag for all electronics and documents, a robust waterproof rucksack cover, quick-dry clothing in layers, extra changes of socks and underwear, antifungal foot powder, insect repellent, a headtorch, and a portable power bank to keep devices charged in high humidity.
🦋 Wildlife & Nature Calendar
Mulu’s equatorial position means wildlife is active year-round, but certain phenomena align with the seasons. The nightly bat exodus from Deer Cave occurs throughout the year, weather permitting, and remains one of the most astonishing natural spectacles in Southeast Asia. Birdwatching is generally better in the drier months when forest trails are more accessible. Pitcher plants, orchids, and other specialist flora are visible on the Pinnacles trek and surrounding trails primarily from the dry season onwards. Proboscis monkeys, hornbills, and a remarkable array of invertebrates can be encountered at almost any time of year.
🏕️ What to Pack — General Essentials
Regardless of season, Mulu’s environment demands specific preparation. The park is remote, and the nearest major town — Miri — is a short flight away via MASwings. There are limited facilities for purchasing supplies once inside the park.
Clothing and footwear should prioritise function over fashion: breathable, moisture-wicking fabrics, long trousers and sleeves for jungle trekking (to protect against leeches, insects, and sharp limestone), and sandals or flip-flops for the resort area. A pair of thin gloves or grip gloves is advisable for the Pinnacles climb, where you pull yourself up fixed ropes through razor-edged limestone. Cave tours require no specialist equipment, but closed-toe shoes are mandatory and helmets are provided.
Health and safety essentials include a comprehensive first aid kit, antihistamine cream, oral rehydration salts, blister plasters, and any personal prescription medication in adequate supply. Travel insurance that covers remote medical evacuation is strongly recommended. Cash — Malaysian ringgit — should be brought from Miri, as card payment facilities are limited in the park. Electronics should be protected at all times from humidity and rain. A robust waterproof case for your phone, a camera with weather sealing if possible, and a portable power bank are all valuable additions.
📅 Overall Best Time to Visit
The optimum window for visiting Gunung Mulu National Park is April to August, sitting squarely within the drier season. This period offers the most reliable weather for trekking, the greatest access to the park’s full range of experiences — including the Pinnacles and Headhunters’ Trail — and the best conditions for photography and wildlife watching. June and July represent perhaps the sweet spot within this window: rainfall is reduced, temperatures are marginally more comfortable, and while visitor numbers are higher, the park’s remoteness means it never feels overwhelmed in the way that more accessible destinations can. Those seeking to avoid the peak crowds whilst retaining reasonable weather should consider March or September, which sit at either end of the dry season and offer a good balance between conditions and quieter trails. Whatever the time of year, Mulu rewards those who arrive prepared, patient, and genuinely curious about the natural world.
📊 Seasonal Summary at a Glance
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