I had high hopes for sleeping in this morning but we were woken up at 5AM by a toddler screaming in the room next door to us. My brief annoyance quickly turned to gratitude that those days are behind us.

We didn’t have anything planned until a 2PM tour, so after breakfast Millie and I went swimming. Nick came and joined us after an hour and hopped in with her to be the fun parent.

We rescued a ginormous cicada (I think?) that was in the pool. It was one of many huge insects we saw today. This post will be full of me attempting, and failing, to show the scale of huge things.

We had a quick lunch and got ready for the hotel shuttle to take us to the entrance of the park. At 2pm we joined a small group and set off for the caves.

We walked about an hour through the dense jungle.

It wasn’t crazy hot in the shade, but it was very humid and there wasn’t a bit of breeze. It made me realize how people can get overheated by humidity rather than heat. Our sweat did nothing to cool us down.

Another interesting thing. It’s a perfect mosquito breeding ground here, wet and hot and dense with leaves. But there are so many bats that they get eaten and don’t bother people much.

We stopped to look at this tree that had diagonally notched scars on the trunk. I knew exactly what it was after seeing a video about this at the Borneo Cultures Museum. It’s a poisonous tree that people made poison darts from! They cut these marks, collect the sap, and then distill it down into something that can kill an animal or person within 3 minutes.

We arrived at the first cave, Lang Cave. This was a “traditional” cave full of stalactites / -mites / etc. Caves are so magical in person and so lackluster in photos, like sunsets and fireworks.

We saw the second giant insect of the day, a spider the size of my hand.

We then went to the neighboring Deer Cave. This one was hard to comprehend in person. It gave me the same feeling I got when visiting the Grand Canyon for the first time as a child, almost a nausea from the scale and beauty. It is the largest cave opening in the world at over 100 meters tall. My photos of it all look like trash.

There is one viewpoint known as “Abraham Lincoln” which seemed strangely US-centric but when we got there I understood why. The rocks lined up to form a perfect Abe profile.

We walked the full interior loop, careful to avoid any bat guano. It is piled up inside. At 6pm we sat outside the opening and waited for the bats to fly out. The boardwalk, the smell of bats, and the light coating of sweat on my entire body made me nostalgic for when Nick and I used to run miles around Town Lake in Austin. The first batch of bats emerged, then 10 more, each undulating in the sky like giant snakes.

We started the long walk back to the visitors center. As the sun set the jungle started to get louder. There was a frog that sounded like it was yelling “what?!”. We saw more giant insects. A centipede and a snail (hotel room key for scale).

Millie did great all day considering how sweaty it was. She fell in love with our guide. She has recently started developing what seem like her first crushes. It is very sweet (also kind of weird) to witness.

After being dropped off at the hotel we went right to dinner, even though we probably should have rinsed off.