Death defying feats

Sarawak is quite the interesting place. It's got a colorful history of white rajahs and local headhunters, and an interesting mix of Malays, Chinese, Indonesians, indigenous groups, and more.

After flying into the town of Miri we took a bus to a small town near Niah Caves National Park. We were only planning on staying there one night and checking out of our hotel my noon. We ate a really light breakfast (we couldn't find the bakery in town) and walked along the river for 30 minutes to get to the park entrance. These caves were amazing so we decided to spend the whole day there. Out of more than a half-dozen caves I've seen in Asia, and more than a dozen in the world, this was by and far the most incredible. Think 200-foot tall ceilings a football field (or five) long. We would our way through the earth, passing through pitch blackness illuminated by one light, the only sound the constant palpitations of millions of bats flying or perched throughout the caves.

Even more amazing than the caves themselves was the history of these caves and the tradition that lives on today. The nests of swiftlets (birds) are made into a soup which is among the pricier foods in the world. The nests can sell for over US$500 per kg. Wooden poles (visible in the photo, though it hardly does justice to how thin and tall they are, and how precarious they look, often with no footholds except for 20 feet apart) are erected in the caves so nest collectors can scale 60m (200ft) up to the roof and collect the nests two or three times a year.

There is also very limited scaffolding in some places in the roof so collectors can collect more nests on one climb. Many of the poles are placed over large deposits of bat guano to provide padding in the even of a fall but there is still a fatal accident every few years. Walking through the caves and seeing these 50-60m poles hanging from the roof and the few poles that provide aerial walkways - and knowing that people climb up them for such a prized delicacy - was mindblowing.