Guano collectors and painted caves

Niah, Sarawak
9th September

Another expensive SUV ride later (during which Ariel was sick thanks to a stomach bug exacerbated by the bumpy road) and we arrived at the Niah caves. It was here that, in the late '50s, a professor found the earliest Homo sapiens remains in Asia, dating back some 40,000 years, and caused a rethink of human history. The archaeological dig in the cave entrance is preserved, but really the highlight is the fantastic set of caves carving through the large limestone outcrop beside the town.















Niah's main cave is huge - there is a full-sized wooden cottage in the entrance that you could almost miss (click on the picture to reveal the detail) - and is occupied by a population of bats and swiftlets, which combine forces to create a vast amount of guano (poo) on the cave floor. This is harvested by some locals and sold off for fertiliser.

Here's a video of Aron pretending he's walking on the moon in the weird landscape of the Traders' Cave, where guano collectors used to live when working:


Some brave individuals take to the main cave ceiling via poles and ropes to harvest the swiftlets' nests, which are cleaned and sold off to make Chinese bird nest soup. In the local town, five cleaned nests, looking a bit like pasta swirls 20 cm across, were selling for 250 Malaysian ringgits (that's about £50)!













A walk through the main cave and down a long, dark, and rather slippery passage (don't forget a reliable torch) leads you to another cave, where ancient paintings in red iron ore on the walls depict the passage of the dead into the afterlife - in boats that they mimicked in the coffins that once filled the cave. Most of the art works are fenced off and hard to make out, but Maja discovered a couple further down the cave that had been left unprotected.

[Some hornbills are cackling in the trees, distracting me as I write this in Sukau, Sabah]



















The walk to the cave is also spectacular: a board walk path across 3.5 km of primary forest. Huge trees perched precariously on sharp-edged limestone chunks; monkeys and flying lizards/squirrels potentially to be seen; and fireflies littering the trees after dark. Lovely.

And here's another pic of Aron in the moonscape of the caves:













[Note: all pictures on this blog are copyright Maja Kardum and not to be used without permission]