Jungle photo by Theodore Moore
I’ve written a lot of pieces about my travels, mostly published as 600-wood columns or not at all. This much longer piece was published in Asiaweek, Hong Kong, May 29, 1992. (Internally, we called these efforts ‘Good Reads.’ They were to be first-person accounts, always beginning with “I” and a verb, and written in the present tense.)
I wince at the reek of bat guano. The slant of sunlight from the mouth of the cave makes this chamber appear awesome and grand, but the stink brings me down to earth. I hear squeaks, and peer upward. On the cave ceiling 50 meters up I can make out a patch of black. It is a blob of wrinkle-lipped bats. Tens of thousands of them are hanging by their toenails, digesting bugs.
Directly under them is a carpet of brown felt that looks almost comfortable. My guide pokes beneath the crust and pulls out a white centipede. It squirms to get away, its fear causing it to glow like a firefly. Nearby the guano is fresh and almost black, and it glistens with small white spots. I look more closely and see the golden cave cockroaches. In this dim cavity just a few meters from the lush Sarawak jungle, bat guano is one of the few things for creatures to feed on.
We go deeper in the cave, where it is almost black. Here is a colony of naked bats. These nervous, scrawny mammals live in a strange partnership with the earwigs. The bats secrete a grease to protect their skin; the earwigs eat the grease, which grooms the bats. When the bats fly off, some of the orange earwigs drop to the cave floor. The fence posts on the tourist trail swarm with these frustrated bugs, trying to climb back up to their hosts. Touch the fence post and they scurry up your arm. They are harmless, the guidebook says—but I watch what I touch. Hours later, I shake one off in my room.
Deeper than we go into the cave are the nests of the cave starlings, birds whose young are born—and must learn to fly—in absolute blackness. They have their own predators. Their eggs are preyed upon by cave racer snakes and giant crickets. Far under the mountain live the cave scorpions, and in the underground rivers, cave catfish and blind white crabs. Several species are found only here.
This is one of Malaysia’s newest attractions, the Mulu caves at Gunung Mulu National Park. On the map, they are just below the southern tip of Brunei, in Sarawak. Since 1985, an industry has sprung up to show them. It is an example of “ecotourism”—holidays for people who would rather visit wilderness than an amusement park or a beach. These caves are so remote that most have been discovered only in the past fifteen years. They include the Sarawak Chamber, the world’s largest underground room, found in 1981.
Malaysia has kept its caves natural. My wife Annie notes how strict the park guides are about the rules: no touching rock formations, (or they’ll quit growing); no smoking, no food. Mulu has none of the colored lights she remembers at the caves in Guilin, China. There are no snack-bars and postcard racks, as I saw years ago at Carlsbad Caverns in the United States.
Mulu’s concrete paths go only a short way into four show caves. The dark interior is reserved for adventure caving by those willing to scrabble on rocks and wade rivers by helmet-light. Subterranean explorers, many of them British, have lived in the dark for weeks. Says one account: “Camping underground is often more comfortable than in the forest outside. It is a relief to be away from the daily rain and the nightly insects, but eventually the need for sunlight and a bath becomes overwhelming.”*
We are at Deer Cave. The cathedral-like chamber has been known to the Penan people for years as a place to hunt. The deer are gone now—too many tourists—but the bats remain. At dusk, they swarm out of the dark mouth in batches of tens of thousands, like plumes of exhaled smoke. They twist in a tight coil, then stream outward, undulating like a snake dance. Group follows group. The 600,000 bats eat about six tons of mosquitoes and other bugs before returning to their roost at sunup. Hence the mounds of guano.
Each day, the flight of the bats attracts a small group of tourists: a Danish family from the island of Fyn; a German woman on leave from an computer-research lab in Japan; Shell Oil engineers from Sibu and Bintulu in Sarawak. Asians are fewer, but I see a Chinese man escorting a “Singapore Girl” in full airline regalia.** No Japanese. “It is too far into the jungle for them,” my guide says. “We got only one last year.”
After the flight of the bats, the tourists pick their way by flashlight over a 3.3-km plankwalk through the forest to the river. The jungle is always alive with sound, and just after dusk it is a mad chorus of chirping, twittering, shouting and honking. The visitors see nothing and hear everything. They walk faster, and some make nervous jokes. Far away a flash of light and deep rumble warn of an approaching storm. The tourists worry that they will not make it to their longboats—and their bungalows—before the clouds open up. Above them the leaves rustle from the first gusts. They walk faster. They are having fun.
The rain forest is much of what makes Mulu special. In the daytime, when the plankwalk is in deep shade, people can see leaf-bugs and red centipedes; big spiders, fat horned beetles, and a wild profusion of plants. Off in the jungle, they can feel the closeness of a place with no landmarks, no slope, no sense of direction. They bushwhack through the cobwebs and mud, worrying about snakes. They emerge glistening with sweat, where a waterfall dribbles into a lazy river. The yellow-green pool shaded by the trees and cliff is theirs for as long as they wish.
Many tourists pay thousands of dollars to come to Mulu from their homelands, which have nothing like it. More will come. Across from our rickety bungalow is the site for a luxury hotel. Workers are already pouring the concrete supports, sweating in the rain. Nearby is a new airstrip. The Gunung Mulu National Park, now at the end of more than 100 km of river, will soon become a short hop away by air.
For now, getting to Mulu from the seaside town of Miri (pop. 250,000), takes a full day. We leave at 7:15 on the express boat up the wide oxbows of the Baram River. We are shut in, 60 people, four across, in an air-conditioned capsule. There is only one narrow door and an inadequate emergency exit. I try not to think about an emergency. Our seats face a small TV that blares Cantonese opera, kung-fu movies and American show wrestling. The movies are subtitled into English, Chinese and Malay.
Next to us is a young tribal family—Ibans, probably. The woman is bottle-feeding a baby. Her husband is peeling a boiled egg for his son, littering the floor. He’s wearing stone-washed denims and running shoes, and drinking a can of Sarsi.***
Nearby is an older man. He has the traditional pencil-sized hole at the top of each ear, and a carefully cut soup-bowl haircut with a tassel down his back. His tattooed arms look like they were rolled in an ink pad. His hat is made of rattan, with three feathers sticking straight up. The old woman next to him has elongated ear lobes that reach to on her shoulders, weighted down with brass pendants the size of water chestnuts. The ears were done for beauty; the tattoos, to denote status.
With us is a tall young Swede. He has a serious look, and yellow hair that sticks straight up. He is here to see the forest. It is his fourth trip to Asia, and they were all to see forests. He’s an environmentalist.
He knows he is not welcome in Malaysia, and is traveling incognito as a tourist. When I take photos of logging camps it makes him nervous.
Already he has been to Laos, where he has gone deep into the jungle and eaten soup with a lizard in it. A Swedish aid mission, he says, is advising the Laotians on how to manage their forests. He says he will send Lao officials the real story of Sweden: that his country is clear-cutting the last of its ancient trees. Swedes are replanting in single species, rows and rows of saplings that will be allowed to grow for only 40 years. “Monoculture,” he says with disdain. “That’s not a forest. You can’t plant a forest.”
Malaysia embraces sustained-yield forestry, the same principle espoused by Japan, North America and Europe. Malaysia has set aside wildlife refuges and parks. It is replanting some cut-over areas. It has reduced the cut, though less in Sarawak, a frontier province, than in peninsular Malaysia. Last year Sarawak produced 48% of the country’s sawlogs, most of them exported to Japan. The land is being worked hard.
The Swede does not like what he sees from the boat: brown water, the color of coffee with milk. “It’s from the logging.” A Malaysian will tell us later that until about ten years ago the river ran clear, and the people drank it. Now they collect rainwater. To use river water, they have to let it sit, and sometimes they get half a bucket of mud. People catch fewer fish.
The riverbanks seem as green as ever, “lungs of the earth.” But the Swede explains that classic jungle has a high canopy of tree tops, and is dark on the ground. That’s what we’ll find at Mulu. Along the river the big trees are spread apart, the big meranti and ironwood cut out. More of the green is at ground level. “Scrub jungle,” the Swede says. He has no use for plantation forestry.
We see scrub jungle all day. All along the river are stacked plies of logs, some red and fresh, some gray and cracked. Rafts of them are carefully tethered and labeled, and barges are stacked with logs too heavy to float. The log camps have proud Chinese names, like the river boats. At many of these camps our boat stops, and a young man, usually an Iban, steps out.
We are told later that a man can earn up to $1,500 a month driving log trucks, and is paid by the volume he moves. It is a dangerous job. The logs can suddenly shift, and capsize the truck. Logging, too, is dangerous. Every year, men get injured and killed when logs snap and shift. But $1,000 or $1,500 a month is big money. The clerks at the travel agency back in Miri make $310. I have no doubt that the young loggers would have little time for the Swede, if they could comprehend him. What the man with the tattoos and the ear-holes would say, I cannot guess.
The issue of logging in Sarawak reminds me of my homeland, the U.S. Pacific Northwest. There, too, logging scars the land; it silts the streams and kills fish; it replaces towering trees with saplings; it replaces a diverse forest with a planted stand, all one age and species. It also supports whole communities, providing high-paid jobs for young men.
This Swede’s sort of thinking prevails only in a country that can afford it. America can, and its logging interests are in retreat. In Sarawak logging is the No.1 money-making use of the land. There seem to be few competing uses. Perhaps I am part of something beginning to change that: “ecotourism.” It’s small compared with logging, but every bit counts.
Like the Swede, I’m paying money to see the wild. I have come to see the caves—and the bats and the earwigs. The cave ecosystem. Standing at the bottom of a dim, dripping cistern like some medieval dungeon, I can look up at a bright gap far above, its edges outlined in green creepers. Outside is a riot of trees, the sound of birds, the bright colors of insects and centipedes. At my back is a river flowing from somewhere in the mountain. Where it bubbles out into the forest I have a refreshing swim. The Clearwater River is one of the few streams I see in Sarawak that runs clean.
There is nothing like the Mulu Caves in my home state. Our “eco” activities are hiking and camping, fishing, river rafting, eagle watching and mushroom hunting. All were popularized by city people. Each lures people into the forest, and enchants them. The result is political support for rules to protect wildlife, soil and streams. All such rules stir controversy, especially at first. The loggers denounce them. The greens say they don’t go far enough, and don’t trust the loggers to follow them. The issue is always in flux.
I’m arguing with an environmentalist about the new hotel. This government hotel will help your cause, I say. It will put Mulu on the map. It will make more people—wealthier, more powerful people—aware of the value of this place, and of others like it. But he doesn’t agree. The new tourists won’t spend that day on the river, he says. They won’t see the brown water, the log camps, and the scrub jungle. They will see nothing, and learn nothing.
From our bungalow to the park we take a motorized longboat. We fight the rain-swollen current, slipping under boughs and past snags. A dugout canoe is uncomfortable, and can tip over. Sometimes the river is low and the tourists have to get out and push. People at the luxury hotel will complain about that. If they get caught in a downpour they will get sore, and blame the management. No, a longboat won’t do. People will either come in by helicopter, or the authorities will build a road. By 1995, I’ll bet, tourists will be arriving at the park in air-conditioned coaches.
Like all people who “rough it,” I feel superior to those who come after me. Where I stayed, there was a bat flying around the dining room. I liked that bat. Of course the people who saw Mulu a few years ago had no dining room, and probably thought that my ugly bungalow spoiled the charm. I think about the new hotel. It will have no bat in its dining room. But the food will be better, it will provide clean towels and the showers will run hot. The electric generator will be kept in good order, so that I won’t have to pack my luggage by candlelight, and be dive-bombed by frenzied moths. I scratch my mosquito-bitten feet. My shoes smell of bat guano.
Notes:
*Mike Meredith, Jerry Wooldridge and Ben Lyon, Giant Caves of Borneo (1992).
**Singapore Airlines’ young, slender stewardesses were dressed in tight, traditionally patterned dresses and advertised as “Singapore Girls.”
***Root beer.
An Australian environmentalist wrote an angry letter that I had totally ignored how corrupt the logging was, and that the rules of forestry were being ignored. Asiaweek Kuala Lumpur correspondent Santha Oorjitham, who had attended the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, said several people she talked to said I had struck just the right tone. It depends on your point of view. I was traveling as a tourist, not an investigative reporter.