A dose of Salts...: Creepy Crawlie Heaven!

This morning I was on the loo at our camp deck when I heard a scream from above, followed by an “Emma come quick! GIANT SCORPION!!”

Bro had picked up our washing bag from the floor and this cheeky chappy was sat underneath, at the foot of our bed….

I kid you not he was about 6 inches long (longer if you were to unfurl his sting) and his bloody pincers were almost as wide as he was long…And he was nooooot happy! When we fetched TJ he said it was the biggest he’d ever seen and this boy lives in the jungle!! Annoyingly after a brief moment of excited gawping, he scurried under a gap in the side of the camp deck before we could get a proper picture, and equally annoyingly there was no chance we were going to leave him there so that he could wriggle into our bed or make a home in our backpacks. So we had to get this very angry, very large scorpion out. We eventually succeeded by getting a stick and poking him from behind until he ran out onto the camp deck, claws flared, sting up, and me, Bro and TJ diving all over the place like lemmings. I have a feeling I’ve said this before, but this was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen! Giant scorpion in bedroom, TICK!

The day got better as we were having a rare day off so Janet and TJ drove us to a nearbye tourist spot where you can visit limestone caves high up on a limestone hilltop. This was great as not only did it give us great views of the area, and the river, it is also an old burial site, so you can see coffins placed in the caves that climb up the hillside that have been there for 700 years!

After this we picked up Michael (a rather enthusiastic return guest at the Eco Camp who can way-out talk me by a country mile which you all know is no small feat, and has a ridiculous knowledge of local fauna for someone who’s spent almost his entire life in greater London), and we visited Gamantong Caves-an incredibly impressive cave which is covered in swiftlets and bats. The whole cave sung with the high-pitched screech of bats, and the twitter of hundreds of thousands of birds. These caves are frequented by specialist Malaysians every few months who climb the dizzying heights on flimsy rope ladders and retrieve used nests which are then sold as a delicacy for bird nest soup (it’s the bird spit that apparently hits the spot!!!). This place was like no other I’d ever been and it was a sensory overload of epic proportions. So many noises, so many new things to see and an absurdly potent stink of ammonia from the giant mound of bat shit piled high in the middle.

These are some Pig-tailed macaques and a baby Red Leaf monkey we passed in the forest on our way (our first sighting of this type of macaque so we were rather excited!)

Ecologically, this place is a dream to experience…There is a constant stream of bird and bat ‘goana’ (poo) flying down from on high (more savvy tourists came with raincoats, goggles and face masks to avoid the inevitable onslaught…we were a little less-prepared and suffered the consequences accordingly…One particular group of Americans were so geared up they looked like something from the set of Ghost Busters), but rather than the floor being covered in the slimy white bird/bat crap we’re familiar with, it actually looked more like a living, crawling compost heap as there is this tight little system of decomposition where cockroaches, cave crabs and other decomposers get working the minute it hits the floor to break it down and do their thing, and this system works beautifully. It’s not for the faint-hearted (we met a couple coming out as we were going in, looking decidedly pale who told us they couldn’t stand it so had to leave)…you will get pooped on, you will have cockroaches scurry over your feet, you will put your hand in bat shit and have to stop yourself from retching but it was totally awesome and I loved every minute of it!!

Here are some of the little gems we met in the cave to whet your appetite!