Gunung Mulu National Park — national park
Nur Nafis Naim · CC BY-SA 4.0

Gunung Mulu National Park

  • 2 min read
  • 4.043° N 114.813° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage
  • UNESCO natural beauty

Interesting facts

  • The Sarawak Chamber encloses roughly 12 million cubic metres of space beneath a roof that spans about 300 metres without any supporting pillar.
  • Mulu is regarded as the most thoroughly studied area of tropical karst anywhere in the world.
  • In 1858 the British consul in Brunei, Spenser St John, wrote of water-worn limestone full of caverns here, then failed to climb Mount Mulu.
  • Mount Mulu was first climbed in 1932, when the Berawan hunter Tama Nilong led an Oxford expedition up a ridge he had found while hunting rhinoceros.
  • The Royal Geographical Society expedition of 1977–1978 put more than 100 scientists into the field, the largest such expedition Britain had ever sent abroad.
  • Clearwater Cave grew in stages as explorers found connections to neighbouring caves in 1988, 1991 and 2005, taking it past 100 and then 129 km.
  • The caves began to form as the limestone was lifted up by tectonic forces roughly two to five million years ago.
  • Some 20,000 invertebrate species, 270 bird species, 81 mammal species and 28 species of bat have been recorded in the park.
  • About 90% of the park and 95% of its caves are closed to visitors and reserved for research.
  • Excavations in the Cave of the Winds have uncovered human remains and artefacts between roughly 500 and 3,000 years old.

Why it is worth it

In the interior of northern Sarawak, close to the border with Brunei, three mountains rise out of the Borneo rainforest and hide beneath them some of the largest caves on earth. Gunung Mulu National Park covers 52,864 hectares and was gazetted in 1974, opened to visitors in 1985 and inscribed as a natural World Heritage Site in 2000. Mount Mulu itself, 2,376 metres high, is sandstone; its neighbours Mount Api and Mount Benarat are limestone, and it is inside this band of limestone that rivers have carved nearly 300 km of explored cave passages, surveyed by a long series of British-led expeditions since the Royal Geographical Society's fifteen-month expedition of 1977–1978.

The superlatives are real. Deer Cave has one of the largest cave passages known, 120 to 150 metres across. The Sarawak Chamber, discovered in 1980, is one of the largest underground chambers in the world, about 600 metres long and 415 wide. Clearwater Cave is the longest cave system in Southeast Asia, with more than 227 km of passages mapped. A handful of show caves, among them Deer Cave and neighbouring Lang's Cave, are open to ordinary visitors.

The most famous sight happens outside. Around dusk on most evenings, between about 17:30 and 18:30, a colony of between 2.5 and 3.5 million wrinkle-lipped free-tailed bats pours out of Deer Cave in long, twisting ribbons that spiral over the forest canopy; on rare days they do not come out at all. The walk to the observatory in front of the cave is free.

The rainforest around the caves is extraordinarily diverse, with some 3,500 species of vascular plants, eight species of hornbill and dozens of endemic species, including pitcher plants found only on Mount Mulu. For the fit, a three-day, two-night trek from Camp 5, reached by boat and a 7.8 km forest walk, climbs to a view of the Pinnacles, razor-sharp limestone blades rising through the trees on Mount Api. The area is home to several peoples, including the Berawan and the Penan, some of whom have settled near the park's edge.

Getting there

There is no road access for ordinary visitors. Mulu Airport (MZV) is about 1 km from the park headquarters, with flights from Miri (about 30 minutes, usually twice daily), Kuching and Kota Kinabalu. The nearest town, Marudi, is about 57 km away, and the only overland route from Miri is a combination of chartered four-wheel-drive and river boat.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Malaysia 8The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed National Parks 27The Most Beautiful National Parks 61The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Gardens, Parks and Forests 61The UNESCO Sites of Exceptional Natural Beauty 77The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests 232The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

The Gunung Mulu National Park, also known simply as the Mulu National Park is a national park in Miri Division, Sarawak, Malaysia. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that encompasses caves and karst formations in a mountainous equatorial rainforest setting. The park is famous for its caves and the expeditions that have been mounted to explore them and their surrounding rainforest, most notably the Royal Geographical Society Expedition of 1977–1978, which saw over 100 scientists in the field for 15 months. This initiated a series of over 20 expeditions now named the Mulu Caves Project.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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