We had another day of exploring Gulung Mulu National Park. We had to set an alarm this morning to make it to breakfast and then an 8:30 shuttle to the park. When we arrived we got on a traditional long boat and started our way up the river.

The first stop was a local handicraft market. I know these people depend on tourist money for their livelihood but I always feel a kind of weird being brought through these. We never want anything, and I wish there was a “donate to local families” jar instead.

From here we continued up to our first stop, Wind Cave. The journey was peaceful and reminded me of the Guadalupe river at home. Strangely, a lot of Borneo reminds me of Texas.

And Wind Cave we walked up and into the entrance. As always, photos don’t do it justice. It is called wind cave because of a draft that runs through it, making it feel like it has natural AC.

After spelunking through here, we rode up river a few minutes to Clearwater Cave. They are interconnected but inaccessible to non-cave-experts like us. To get to Clearwater Cave we had to climb many steps on the outside. We bribed Millie with cookies, which kind of worked but didn’t stop her from yelling “this is not interesting!!” while inside the cave. If you haven’t tried to calm down a child inside a cave while on a group tour with all adults, you’ve never lived.

She also said loudly “those guys have weird shoes” about this Chinese couples’ shoes. She is so used to people not understanding us, but these guys spoke perfect English. To be fair, the shoes were weird.

So she was right about the shoes, but wrong about the cave. It was very interesting. It was huge and had a river running rapidly through it. It has a few openings at the top where sunlight beamed in. Just so, so beautiful.

At the end of this walkthrough, we put on our swim suits and swam in the outside portion of the river. It was crisp and clear.

As we were leaving, another tourist realized she had dropped her expensive watch in the water. I always make fun of Nick for bringing his snorkel everywhere, but this was his moment to shine. He offered to run back and jump in to find it. Sure enough, after 10 minutes of swimming around the area, he came out as a hero.

We rode back and then took the shuttle back to the hotel. Millie and Nick had lunch and played at the pool while I sat in bed. I met up with them and we swam and then came back to the room to laze around. We had an early dinner and then got ready for our evening activity, a nighttime hike in the jungle!

We had a dramatic start to the tour. First, the wife of the other couple who was with us fell off the boardwalk. It was very Dumb & Dumber “fell off the jetway again”. She was okay but shaken up and she hurt her knee too badly to continue. Then our guide came out with a bandaged up leg after an afternoon soccer injury. So we were the last ones standing, and had to join the later tour group.

We waited and then set off at 7:30. It was pitch black and loud with frogs and insects. Millie felt nervous and I had to pretend I didn’t also feel a little scared.

We saw lots of things: huge spiders with eyes that glittered and shined, stick bugs making love, leaf insects that made very loud noises, allegedly poisonous caterpillars, frogs, toads, mice.

We saw a highly venomous baby pit viper.

And my highlight of the night, a slow loris! It was so slow. And so cute. We sat and watched it as it made its way down a tree, ate some snacks, and then licked its hands like a cat.

Millie squeezed my hand tight most of the way, but was brave and stayed engaged with all the stuff we saw. We were both happy when we saw the lights of the park office at the end of the trail, and even happier when the shuttle dropped us off at our nice hotel.