29/July/2024
Today we explored Niah Caves. Niah Caves were a bunch of huge caves made because of shifts in the tectonic plates, we think this because the roof was on a massive angle! We learnt that people harvest Swiftlet’s* nests to have in soups! (they don’t actually eat the nests, they just put them in for flavour) Pretty disgusting if you ask me! Weirdly it is actually a delicacy! The drive took an hour to get there, we then walked for an hour and ten minutes to Trader’s Cave. We saw lots of massive brown lizards, and we also saw some wild monkeys! We didn’t see any snakes or anything really exciting though.
When we finally got to Traders Cave we saw the massive overhang caused by the tectonic plates. At the entrance to the cave there were lots of wooden poles that we thought were supposed to be holding up the roof of the cave. Later we figured out that they weren’t actually supporting the cave roof but instead the old remnants of the buildings that were built to host the traders! The edge of the overhang looked really cool because there were lots of vines, weeds, and more greenery hanging down! There was even a tree that had fallen down and looked-like it was the only stopping the massive slab from falling. (Key word in that sentence: looked-like, so it wasn’t actually holding it up)
After exploring Traders Cave, we then walked to The Great Cave! It was ginormous! This was were the archaeologists had found the old bones of a teenager that had been slowly covered up with rocks, mud, dirt, and bat poop. It was also where the people would climb up 60 metres high to get some precious nests. We then started walking through The Great Cave because you had to go through the cave to get to
The Painted Cave. It was a long walk , we also encountered wildlife, though some of the wildlife wasn’t as pretty as the butterflies outside. We had to stay in the middle of the rickety wooden board pathway that went down into the pit of the cave and climbed back up because there were huge spiders everywhere! Luckily they weren’t moving much, but they were still creepy. We had to put up with the reeking smell of bat poop, (luckily for us we had been into a cave that was home to around 50000 bats!) We all got a few frights from the freaky cave wetas that were popping up all over the place! Dad said we were very lucky to even see one! The look on mum’s face said otherwise.
I think dad cursed us, I stopped counting the wetas after 25, they were really freaking out mum, I felt sorry for her, after mum had been frightened about ten times, she started to only flinch and say “just walk around Alex, its alright, they don’t bite (mum mumbled something incoherent) “ It got so dark we had to use our torches for a while, we did come across some massive cockroaches, (mum stayed still until I decided to flick my foot at it and it ran away) But the main highlight was… a snake! We all got a surprise when a super fast green snake appeared on the steps of the boardwalk about 20 centimetres away from dad’s foot! After I told everyone that it wasn’t poisonous so we didn’t need to worry about dying, but it could still bite and that would still hurt. Dad told me to run and jump over it when it didn’t want to move. It was kinda funny when the snake (after watching me jump over it, just angled it’s head and hissed a little bit so it could look at both of us. I got mum’s phone before I jumped over and took a video that you can watch if you want. It finally slithered away when I told everyone to back up a bit so it wouldn’t feel trapped. Mum got a few photos because it didn’t go away all the way, and dad, mum, and abi went down the steps to the left. After that exciting experience we continued on our walk through The Great Cave. It got a bit boring after a while because it was all the same really; rock, a cave weta, more rock, bats, some moss, spiders, more rock, some more bats, a whole lot more spiders, and some more rock. When we finally got to the exit of the Great Cave, we were all hot, sweaty, bored, and hoping that it wasn’t a long walk to The Painted Cave.
Mum had told us that the painted cave had cave-men-like pictures on the walls, and that they would be easy to find, simple answer: they weren’t. Mum, Dad, and Abi walked down into the cave (the cave was basically a tunnel, it had an entrance at the top that you had to walk up to, and when you were inside of the cave you walked down to the other entrance) to try and find some of the paintings there, while I scoured the top of the cave for paintings there. I was successful. I found some faint red drawings of some boats, (three in total), they were hard to get to because you had to go on all fours to climb up the smooth rock. We looked at the paintings for a while, but then we decided to start heading back, then it hit us; we were at point B, and we had to go all the way back to point A. “Yay” Abi sat down on a nearby rock and started her famous talk of complaints, “why do we have to walk back?!” “Why did we come here?!” “It's so hot!” “UUUUUHHHHH!” “This water is hot!” “Are we even going to go already?!” “there's so many steps!” It goes on. Dad said that we could have a short break before we would need to go back that very very VERY long walk to the taxi.
We started to walk back, like all walks, it took much less time to walk back than it took to walk there. On the way back we got to go out of the Great Cave a different way that we came in, it was a bit more smelly, but it was much quicker, and wouldn't have to go back through the Spider Pit! Plus there was also a channel of cold air. Once we were out of the Great Cave and halfway back to the taxi, we saw some old run-down buildings! I think they looked like the witch’s house in Brave. We saw some more monkeys and lizards, and cool looking birds too, but we all saw a big black snake slither as fast as it could, to get away from us, it looked to be about three quarters mum’s height. (We saw it when we were almost at the dock to cross the small river) It was an exciting, adventure-full, day.
Kommentit