There are some that will breathe fire. Some will create darkness with a flap of their huge wings. Some will lurk in the lair of dark caves. Some will make mighty a man, and he, and his knightly sword will become legend. Myths and folklore about dragons abound. Shying away from fantasy books in favor of realism and natural history, I've never really been a big fan of dragons, other than those that Harry Potter's Hagrid tended, and of course, Toothless. I also love how the paper bag princess in Robert Munch's book of the same title outsmarts the dragon, and her wimpy prince Ronald. But beyond these children stories of dragons, I know little else.
And I know less about the dragons of Borneo. Perhaps it's because I have not done too much research about this trip, aside from a dip into the Lonely Planet, and a recent national geographic article a friend gave me about caves of Borneo.
Yet, nothing could have really prepared me for what I saw.
Let's begin with a look in the lair. Mulu National Park boasts some of SE Asia's best and biggest limestone caves. The park is a UNESCO world heritage site. In two days I'd visit twice as many show caves: Lang Cave, Deer Cave, Wind Cave, Clearwater cave, and Ladies Cave. Each was unique.
For example, moon milk grows in the Wind Cave. The moon milk fungus, looks like sparkling snowflakes, like freshly fallen dust on crust, and gives the walls a white washed look. A hole in the roof of a chamber is beautiful. I was reminded of a cave I visited in Vietnam, with a similar hole to the sky. When I asked there about how it got there, the guide looked at me and said, "You put it there". Let that sink in a minute. Viet Cong were hiding out in Vietnamese caves and the US American army dropped a bomb on the cave, collapsing the roof. Here, at the Wind Cave of Borneo, the skylight however, is from many years of rain, pooling until the limestone collapsed.
Up 200 steps from a picnic shelter where we first take tea and biscuits, and then later lunch, we enter The Clearwater Cave. Named for the 220 km under water river system, that churns below, there are some tell tell pockets and benches in the cave walls. Also here are phytokarst, sharp rock like Cyanobacteria bacteria growing toward the sun. The bacteria produces CO2 as a byproduct, speeding up the dissolving of the limestone leaving behind pits and characteristic high points and sharp edges. Now that cave scientists know about this, the phytokarst is protected with extra railings, and standing there leaning over to admire the details of the points I'm reminded of the desert soils, living upper crust, cryptobiotic crust.
Lang cave, which reminded me of Janolan Cave in Australia, hosts the most magnificent stacltites and stalactmites. There are also helicites, that defy gravity with capillary action. Tentacles of jellyfish hug the cave walls and later I see a silhouettes of a shapes. In the wind cave we see an eagle, the king and queen, a hand, frog, hugging people, a mom carrying a child, camel head. It's all perspective, especially if you have an imagination.
The profile of Abe Lincoln, and the map of Africa mark the entrance to the Deer Cave, dripping with Monophylla pendula, a single leaf plant endemic to Mulu. This cave is enormous, the passages so huge that light paints striations of green of all colors of army camouflage color on the walls. The air is perfumed by the guano of millions of bats. Guano, as bat shit is called, is to a cave like sun light is to forest. It sustains the cave ecosystem. It sparkles, like fine grained coffee grounds mixed with sugar, in the shine of headlamps. A fellow traveler shines his hand-held torch towards the holes in the ceiling, that our naturalist Maria tells us are often shared by birds and bats. Indeed, we see small nests, and in many, the tail feathers of the Pacific Swallow feeding young. I know the latter to be true, for in one nest we see just the bald red heads of newborn chicks with big blue eyes waiting for the parent's return. The air chatters with the click and ticks of both the bats and swallows.
My guide tells us where to sit for the best seat in the Bat Observatory in Mulu National Park. With the rest of the park's visitors, we wait in silence at dusk to see the Borneo Dragon.
Rising like a mirage from the limestone walls, the dragon takes flight. Two to three million bats make their nightly exodus. Swirling in a helix corkscrew like a Chinese dragon, each of 20 or more groupings, the spectacle is the most magnificent natural phenomenon I've ever seen.
Deer cave hosts 2-3 million bats, 12 species of bats, the highest number of bat species in a single cave ever recorded. These two to three million bats that call dear cave home will consume and estimated 20 tons of flying insects every night. Each bat weighs 15 g in nice about 2/3 of its body weight in a single night.
The entire swirling phenomenon is an evolutionary adaptation to avoid predation. Like the bats who forge for insects for dinner, so do the bat hawks who dive from above to pick off ones from the end. The wallis hawk eagle, preys on the hawk.
I lean back into the slanted back hardwood bench of the Observatory to witness and watch. Half of the time I take up my swords, not in fear, but in awe: the fish eye lens shows me the entire canyon with the dragon center stage; the 300 mm lens shows me individual bats and their wings shape; the video camera captures a dragon's movement, the dance on the sky. Half of the time, however, I simply let the swirling mark my memory. I try to be a blank piece of rice paper, and let the dragon be the master calligrapher with Sumi ink, pushing the brush into my heart and then swirling it, leaving the flying white at each edge.
Then, dusk becomes dark, and the humans head, too, for dinner, walking the boardwalk back to the Mulu Cafe. For nearly an hour walk it's a cacophony of cicadas, leaf insects, and frogs. Each frog racket is like a ratchet. Crick, tkk tkk. Crick, tkk tkk. Some species say, what sounds like "what". What. What. It's that one I stop to spot. I lean over the hardwood boardwalk railing and listen. I turn my headlamp on and I spot a rough sided frog. The throat puffs up like a bubble gum bubble, what. What. What.
We return to the place of myth & origin. Where all myths are basic truths twisted into memory. In the Borneo jungle, from the caves deep greens, it's not a myth; I have been slayed. The pen is mighty than the sword.
