Before embarking on the subject of food, I must say Mulu National Park was both a wonderful experience and a great dissappointment. There are numerous caves in the park, and five or six of them are easily accessible and open to the public. The Wind cave is a fairly long cave with beautiful formations. The Lang cave has, in my opinion, even more beautiful rock formations, but I may be biased since I saw that one first. It's located in a different place, near the Deer cave. The Clearwater cave is a huge cave, and among the longest in the world (some 75 km long, numbers vary). There is a crystal clear river running through it, thereof it's name. Going to those caves on foot, you need to go through a small cave passage through the mountain. Bring a torchlight, or your head will suffer. The Deer cave is to me the most fabulous. It's really an enormous cave passage into a small valley, only accessible through the cave - popularly known as the valley of Eden. The cave in itself is very beautiful, but what's so wonderful about it is that it's the home of more than 3 million bats, and they fly out every evening like a huge trail of smoke. I saw it twice, so all in all, I've seen 6 million bats
If nothing else, it is worth going there for the bats, and if you have some time to spare, the adventure caving. A local told me that especially the very tricky and narrow cave crawl between the Wind and the Clearwater cave is worth doing. If you have claustrophobia, you won't.
The dissappointment was that to go anywhere outside the vicinity of the park HQ, you needed to hire a guide. Now, if you go exploring caves when you're not a cave dweller
or whatever you call cave explorers, that makes sense. In some mountain regions, it would also make sense. Here, they have paths that would constitute as four lane highways in other parts of the world, and you need to be either completely blind or completely dumb to not find your way. For instance, going up Mount Mulu there's first a boardwalk for three or so kilometers, then a path that passes two cabins that never exceeds 20% inclination for another 15 kilometers. Approaching the top, the inclination goes up a bit, with some fixed ropes for assistance, from what I understood no more than 50% inclination. The path is also marked with colourings on trees and rocks. All in all 24 kilometers. For this, you have to have a guide with you, and the cost is roughly $250, plus you need to buy food and water. Water was by Malaysian standards insanely expensive - roughly 6 times that of the price at a supermarket anywhere else. The same rules applied to most other long walks in the park, that is, guide mandatory and expensive. If you needed to use a boat, which was nescessary for some treks, that would cost you your other arm and maybe parts of your remaining leg too. The Unesco world heritage status has turned the place into a luxury resort for fat, stupid tourists with the same security measures and precautions as those of an American theme park, that is, trying hard to compensate for and safeguard against human stupidity. Well, unfortunately I can currently only think of two things that are inummerable, and that's the number of moskitos on East Greenland and the extent of human stupidity.
Another thing to be aware of if you decide to go there is that there is a four star resort there called "The royal Mulu resort" or something. I would recommend against staying there, since it is built on land stolen from the local Penan tribe. The dispute is not settled, and since it's only Penan people that complain, who cares, right? Well, I care. Check the status in this regard if you still want to use the place.
Flying to and from the park was a sad sight indeed. The park with surrounding areas was covered by a beautiful green canape, but as we got closer to the coast, scars from forest machines became apparent and very little of the tall tree's remained. Regarding the plight of the Borneo rainforests and it's people,
read this for some background information. For this, I somewhat regret going here, since I don't particularly enjoy supporting a government that promotes such behaviour. At the same time, I missed these facts while reading about Malaysia before coming here, so it has really been an eye opener. When it comes to human rights issues, Malaysia is ok, although I personally find the fact that they fine Malay couples caught holding hands in public objectionable. They're not secularised either, but then neither is Spain, officially (I think).
Politics, religion and highly questionable corporate and government practices really makes my stomach churn, but since I promised food, so here's food.
I have come to the conclusion that everybody in Malaysia loves "Chicken fried rice". You can find it everywhere. Yes, everywhere, even at McDonalds. I purposely checked their menu on my way to the Internet cafe. There's also this local fast food chain that obviously have had a hard time introducing a different cuisine, since they now announce "Yes, now we have Chicken rice" on huge billboards and banners. If that isn't enough, it's available for breakfast, lunch, dinner, late supper and as a snack in the middle of the night. It's not half bad, but you're likely to get hungry again within a couple of hours since the amount of chicken is often close to microscopic. If you want an alternative, theres always Chicken noodles. I doubt I need to expand on that.
It is also very easy to see which crowd a particular restaurant aims for. If they have a huge sign that says "We dont serve pork" they are mainly targeting the Peninsular Malay people of which the majority are muslims. If on the other hand, they're proclaiming "We serve pork", my bet is you will find lots of Chinese customers in that restaurant. The food is generally safe in any restaurant here, but if you're a bit squeamish, more strange stuff is likely to be floating around in your soup at the Chinese places. A slightly fancier restaurant will probably serve Satay, which I haven't tried yet. I never seem to find those places when I'm hungry. Either that, or they also host Karaoke in which case I stay well away. In the coastal cities, there's also seafood. It really is delicious. One would think that I had learned my lesson from last time, but I'm in a coastal city again, and yes, I had fish for dinner. See part on human stupidity above. If this post comes to an abrupt end, you'll know what happened
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Thai food, on the other hand, that is really something to write home about. Or Gamebanshee will probably also work. Just walking through any street of any place in Thailand and you'll be smelling food that makes your mouth water, or your eyes, or both. Green curry, red curry, coconut milk, baby eggplant, and so on, unt so weiter, etcetera, and they can make it so hot you could compete with the space shuttle for making escape velocity in the shortest time. You all know Thai food, right? If not, get thee to a Thai restaurant! Well, it's the same in Thailand. Only better. A lot better.
Drinks, then. Speaking non-alcoholic, fruit juice in Thailand beats most, if not all drinks in all other places I know, hands down. Fruit juice in Malaysia is sometimes roughly similar, but more often watered and not as good. Regular coffee is awful, except maybe if you can stand the anglo-saxon stuff. They are, however starting to serve espresso, cafe latte and other mid-european coffees and like many other things copied in Asia it's actually quite good and sometimes even great. The tea, I only tried it once in each country, and it's hard to believe Malaysia has been under British rule. Even more amazing is that the stuff grows in Thailand, but what they do with it is... oh man, unspeakable.
Beer is bleak but drinkable in Thailand. They have Singha, which tastes slightly more than your average American beer, but just ever so slightly. In Malaysia, they have Tiger, which roughly amounts to the same thing. Guinness is served in very few places in Thailand, more often in Malaysia and in at least one place in Kuala Lumpur, on tap! Whatever local liquor you find, in Thailand Mehkong is simply horrid, and in Malaysia, among other things a rice spirit that is beyond undrinkable. I guess I pickier than most, since I don't drink stuff just to get dizzy.
Tomorrow Im going to Kinabalu park, also an Unesco world heritage site, and Im fearing the worst. I am going to climb the mountain, and I'm not going up with any torches just to see the sunrise. If at all possible, I'm setting out at 6 am, aiming to reach the peak at around 11 am at the latest, since it gets a nice cloud cap at around noon, and then head down. Shouldn't take more than 10-12 hours. It really feels good to be back in shape, if just enough so to walk up a hill. Oh, yeah, the path is used for a race every year, the current record is 2 hours 40 minutes up and down. Need I say that the path is roughly similar to the Autobahn, just without the concrete? And yes, you have to have a guide. You might trip, and may need someone to help you up.
Until next time...
