What are cavers looking for in the giant underground voids beneath Malaysia's Gunung Mulu Park?
It was a sultry April morning. Two thin Englishmen, cavers Frank and Cook, climbed into an underground passage deep under the jungle of Kalimantan.
Descending past a heap of petrified guano, cavers wondered if they would be able to go down in history. They crawled into the Cave of the Winds, hiding in the very depths of the Gua-Air-Jernih cave system (in English - Clearwater, "clear water") to find a passage leading from there to the Racer Cave, part of another system - Racer-Easter.
By paving this path, one of the longest underground labyrinths on our planet could be opened: such grandiose events in the world of speleology are extremely rare. Thinking in this way, Frank and Cook, descended lower and lower, screwing and driving screws into the stone walls, for which the climbing ropes were fastened.
Gua Eir Jernikh stretches for 225 kilometers, and some of its caves run rough rivers, and the Racer-Easter system has huge underground halls that could easily fit, say, a passenger airliner. In other words, the limestone beneath the Malaysian Gunung Mulu National Park is home to some of the largest and most breathtaking underground voids in the world.
Jagged limestone cliffs pierce dense vegetation in the central part of Mulu National Park in Malaysia. These karst formations, created by the erosion of a thick layer of limestone deposits, provide some insight into the incredible caves lurking underground.
Imagine Frank and Cook deep underground, all covered in mud, grinning at the thought that they are about to transform the two cave systems into one giant whole. And not far from them, and also very deep underground, in the Racer cave, another team of speleologists is making their way in the dark. With their hammers and drills, the two teams must begin to destroy the wall between the caves, trying to catch the noise that the colleagues on the other side are creating, to find their way to each other - and to their guaranteed place in history.
Somewhere above them, in a large underground gallery, I sat and tried to distinguish the noise of their drills. The cave was completely untouched by man: it was opened only a few days ago, and I was one of the first to enter it. Sitting among stalagmites and huge stone "mushrooms", I was surrounded by many sounds: water was dripping, thousands of swiftlets were scurrying over my head - tiny black birds that spend most of their lives in underground darkness. They chirped and made clicking sounds - so, using echolocation, they find their way to the nests. These bird dwellings are made of silt and moss, which are held together by saliva.
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More than any other sport, sports speleology is about mysteries that cave specialists are willing to do a lot to solve. Sometimes all you have to do is sit and wait for the darkness to reveal its secrets. So, desperate to catch the sound of the drill, I lay on my back, turned off the flashlight and began to listen to the swiftlet. Sometimes the birds flew so low that their wings touched the face.
Grotto Sarawak, for a moment illuminated by a dozen flashlights, - the largest underground grotto known today: it is more than double the size of Wembley Stadium in London. Thousands of little birds live here - swiftlet.
“This is a delightful place. Where else on earth can you find so much unexplored territory? Andy Ibiza's face lit up with a wide smile. Then the leader of the expedition frowned thoughtfully. “No, well, we know very little about, say, Papua New Guinea. And of course, the seabed. But if we talk about caves, then Kalimantan has no equal”.
Ibiza, quite strong and cheerful in his 70s, knows what he is talking about. He spent over 50 years exploring some of the most inaccessible and fantastic cave systems, and has worked in almost every existing international speleological organization. He helped award caves with titles like "largest" or "deepest". In short, Andy Ibiz is a real ambassador of the underworld.
In the jungle, morning came into its own. Ibiza stood on the porch of the research station near the National Park Administration building, preparing to descend underground. The wind rustled in the treetops, drowning the chatter of countless insects. Ibiza pulled on black running tights - a standard piece of equipment for explorers working in hot caves such as Kalimantan (where temperatures can rise to 26 degrees).
“When I started, we didn't have anything like this,” explains Ibiz, pointing to the leggings. “And that wasn’t either.” He picks up a worn-out red safety helmet and fixes the flashlight on it.
“In those years, we were essentially crawling in the dark. And we didn’t even imagine how enormous what we have discovered is.”
The speleologist standing at the huge (150 meters high) mouth of the Deer Cave seems to be a tiny point. The sun penetrates deeply into this cave, due to which mosses, ferns and algae grow in abundance at the entrance. The floor is home to crabs, insects and bacteria that feed on the droppings of birds and bats.
In 1979, Ibiza arrived in Kalimantan as part of a British expedition. Their goal was to explore the jungle and help the authorities of newly independent Malaysia develop the newly created Mulu National Park. Sports speleology was still just beginning to develop, and Ibiza and four of his colleagues were included in the expedition only after it became clear that there are also huge caves in Mulu that need to be explored.
Before that trip, Ibiza and his colleagues were honing their skills exclusively at home, in Britain, where all the caves are small and cold - Kalimantan became for them an outlet to another dimension.
The first discovery awaited them in the Olenya (or Gua-Rusa) cave. The entrance was so huge (almost 150 meters) that sunlight and fresh air penetrated very deeply. As a result, an amazing and bizarre habitat was formed on the border between light and darkness: a monstrous colony of bats settled on the ceiling, and a thick layer of their droppings that covered the floor was teeming with cockroaches, crabs, worms and armies of microorganisms for which such an environment became their home.
The British found that the Deer Cave was almost three kilometers long, and for the next decade it was considered the largest cave passage in the world. And even when in 1991 in Vietnam, the Seongdong Cave was opened, which turned out to be larger in size, this did not diminish the attractiveness of Gua Rus in the least.
A waterfall 120 meters high falls from the ceiling of the Deer Cave after a heavy rain. Several of the caves in Mulu National Park have large rivers that turn into violent streams during heavy rains.
The huge Deer Cave suggested that there was still a lot of interesting things hidden under the ground: something that must certainly be found. After spending more than three months in Mulu, speleologists, with the help of guides from the local Penan and Beravan tribes, found many manholes leading straight into the depths of the ancient Kalimantan limestone.
Finding them was not easy. Some of the passages began with cracks in the surface of the cliffs covered with bush branches and led to dark caves, usually located higher, more ancient and relatively dry; in a word, these holes went to the very heart of the Mulu mountains. The other caves below were like giant drainpipes - huge holes in the rock, passing through which rainwater turned into underground rivers. These river caves were younger - they were formed several hundred thousand years ago, they were decorated with bizarre limestone formations, and they were also home to many living things: fish, birds, snakes, ghostly white crabs, myriads of insects and spiders.
In 1979, Andy Ivis and his comrades did the impossible: they explored about 50 kilometers of caves. And now, almost 40 years later, standing in the newfangled black leggings, Ibiza smiled, remembering those times.
“No other expedition has ever been able to explore so much in one go,” he notes. “Until then, we were just simple English cavers. "Mulu changed us."
A member of the expedition, ascending to the ceiling of the Deer Cave, hangs against the limestone ledges that fold into the profile of Abraham Lincoln. The natural "profile of the 16th president" is one of the many curious features of this cave system.
The 1979 expedition began the exploration of Malaysian caves. Over the years, the distant Mulu has been visited by various teams of cavers, and Ibiza led many of them. In 2017, on his 13th expedition, Andy organized a group of 30 cavers, including his son Robert. Many members of the group have been to Mulu more than once. Calling Ibiza on his mobile at the end of March 2017, I found him in Kuching, a city on the west coast of Kalimantan, on the way north, where the rest of the cavers were waiting for him.
“We may open 50 kilometers of new caves,” he said confidently then.
Two weeks later, when I met with Ibiza in Mulu, he no longer looked so confident. The cavers were divided into three teams. Two searched for new passages in the remote corners of the jungle, and the third pored over maps, trying to determine the places where the cave systems might have connected.
Research was progressing very slowly, and the sacred speleological Grail (which Frank and Cook would later try to get) could not be found. Andy Ibiza admitted that he was disappointed, but his teams still opened more than ten kilometers of new passages, and much more had to be opened.
The very next morning after arrival, I joined a small group led by Ibiz, who went to the Gua Nasib Bagus (Cave of Fortune) cave, where the amazing Sarawak grotto is located.
Ibiza and his companions opened both this hall and the entire cave in 1981, going up the river flowing from the side of the mountain. For several hours they made their way along the channel, now crawling, now desperately climbing, until they finally found themselves in a quiet, calm place where the river went into the ground. The cavers took out measuring tapes and began to explore the dark void, expecting to soon reach the opposite wall.
But the wall did not appear. Then they changed their tactics: they began to turn sharply to the sides, hoping to rest against the side wall. The swiftlets chirping overhead was clearly audible, a river was rustling somewhere underfoot. There was no wall. The beams of the lanterns simply disappeared into pitch darkness.
After spending 17 hours underground, the cavers got out of the Cave of Fortune, drenched to the skin and completely bewildered: either they walked in circles, or made an amazing discovery.
Subsequent expeditions confirmed that the Sarawak Grotto is the largest enclosed space on Earth: 600 meters long, 435 meters wide, and a ceiling height of 150 meters: more than double the size of Wembley Arena, the most famous British stadium.
As we made our way to Fortune's Cave through the dense jungle, I asked one of the expedition members, Philip Rousell, nicknamed Mad Phil, why ambitious cavers are drawn to return here, to this repeatedly explored area, where many records have already been recorded. He confidently replied that the caves never reveal all their secrets the first time: you need to return again and again.
The Sarawak Grotto is so huge, they explained to me that almost certainly new passages open from it - in particular, in the ceiling, which no one has ever explored. We usually imagine caves as something like coal mines - tunnels that go down relatively evenly, but natural caves are by no means straightforward, they expand and narrow, obeying the structure of rocks and the whim of water.
The concepts of "up" and "down" underground, where directions can completely change over several million years, are not as straightforward as on its surface. And if some cavers explore the lower part of the cave, others can try their luck from above. Great specialist in this Mad Phil.
He apparently got his nickname for a dangerous canoe stunt he performed as a student, but among cavers Philip is known as a man who climbs the walls of caves that no one else would even try to climb. He and Ibiza planned to climb to the ceiling of the Sarawak grotto to look for tunnels there - as they search for secret passages in the attic of an old mansion.
An hour later we came to the entrance to the Cave of Fortune, where an underground river burst out from a high crevice in a limestone rock. We entered the river and walked up. Warm clean water at first was up to our ankles, then rose to the thighs, and then began to push into the chest.
The passage widened until it began to resemble a railway tunnel. Bats scurried around, falling into the rays of the lanterns. The river turned into a stream, rushing along narrow channels of limestone and carrying us to the boulders. The path was dangerous: in some places, earlier explorers had nailed ropes to the walls so that they could cling to them and fight the current. A kilometer and a half later the river disappeared into the ground, and the Sarawak grotto welcomed us with open arms.
Even with all our lights upward, we could only catch a faint hint of a huge dome. Having directed the rays forward, we did not see anything at all. I imagined Andy Eaves and his comrades wandering in this void many years ago.
"If you search, you can find our old tracks," Ibiza grinned. "We wandered around here at random like blind kittens."
The Credence cave system arose as a result of the action of underground rivers, and then tectonic forces slowly lifted Credence up, due to which there was no water left in it.
Away from the sun, time is measured by meals, tea, and chocolate bars.
Everyone went about their business. Near the entrance to the grotto, Mad Phil began vigorously screwing screws into the wall to make his way to the ceiling, first bypassing the hefty overhanging ledge. The others carefully explored the lower part of the grotto, moving further and further through the largest enclosed space on our planet.
At "nights" we spread the beds on a flat stone and pulled the string to hang the socks to dry. It was humid and warm in the grotto - it seemed as if the darkness itself was saturated with moisture. Around our camp in the light of the lanterns, constellations of small diamonds glittered - the eyes of countless spiders, some of the arthropods the size of my palm.
One "afternoon" we, together with Mad Phil and a younger caver, Ben, illuminated ourselves with flashlights, studied the left edge of the grotto. We were looking for another entrance. Sarawak is so big that its walls are made of different rocks, and on the way we overcame several such sections: passing heaps of dirty cobblestones, we got into a limestone labyrinth, whose walls resembled a cheese grater, then we ended up in a niche, the floor of which was densely covered with feathers and guano.
Further, there was a secluded corner, where it was so warm and calm that the swiftlets calmly laid their eggs right on the bare ground. We never found another way out of the grotto, although there is no doubt that it exists: this was indicated by the sound of water we could hear and the presence of many birds.
Dense thickets of stalagmites rise on the lunar-pale shores formed by sedimentary rocks in the Drunken Forest - so this cave was named due to the fact that the local mineral formations bend at unexpected angles.
The Ibiza team did not have a chance this time to make new discoveries worthy of being entered into the book of records. Frank and Cook were unable to connect the Gua-Eir-Jernich cave system to another neighboring one, although their goal seemed tantalizingly close. However, the expedition discovered and mapped as many as 23 kilometers of passages - this, of course, is a very solid achievement.
A few weeks after leaving Kalimantan, I again spoke with Andy Ibizom, who managed to return to England. He said that he plans to come back to Mulu National Park soon - Ibiza does not lose hope of connecting the caves.
“We were very, very close to that,” he said. And he assured me that he was not driven by the desire to become even more famous (no doubt, he is already famous - as much as a caver can be). It's just that these caves do not go out of his head. Ibiza's children have learned the stories of his adventures under the jungle by heart: he tells them tirelessly.
“I think only 50 percent of the aisles are open today,” Ibiza tells me. - Isn't it interesting what is in the rest? Mulu is an incredible place, and I can't wait to find out what's down there. I want all the pieces of the puzzle to fit into place. That is why I will go there again."
Text: Neil Shi. Photo: Carsten Peter