Chapter 5: To Mt Mulu

‘Ho-ho, ho-ho, a bussing we will go.’

Actually, I hate buses as much as I hate planes. But they are a necessary evil when you travel. I’d had to bus to a hotel in town for the night. I then bussed to a different airport. I then jumped on my next flight to get to Kuching and then another one to get to the Mulu airport.

A friend had organised for me to stay in Mulu Village with a family that he had stayed with previously. From here, I could pretty much do as I wished. I’d organised a couple quick tours with the guides first, to find my way around.

I also had to qualify on an intermediate cave before I could explore the better caves. I’d been in a few in Australia but had never got into professional cave climbing, this was the main reason I was here.

My contact Adnan and his lovely wife Maya met me at the airport. Adnan was a tour guide, and I was planning on fitting in with his schedule, as I was staying longer than the average tourist did.

They got the rest of his group of ten people plus me, signed in at HQ to get all the appropriate licences we needed and then they told us how they ran things. He signed me up to get my caving experience, and he told me it only took about two or three days.

I mostly spent that week with his group just learning all the dos and don’ts. One of the most interesting things about that week, other than all the awesome sites, was the fact that by the end of it, I was speaking the local dialect like a pro.

I also didn’t seem to have the same problems as the other guests with bugs either, both flying and intestinal ones. I could eat whatever the locals ate. The flying bugs left me alone.

I also met Eca. She’d taken a shine to me my first week. She had a bit of French blood in her ancestry and was at least 165cm, which is tall for a girl around here. The main thing was that she and Junior got on well enough.

I warned her I was only staying the six weeks and didn’t intend to marry her, even if she did get pregnant. She agreed, but I’m not sure she truly realised I was serious at first. She had taken a real shine to me and let me move into her small home.

I even told her parents that I was happy to look after her while I was here, but she wasn’t going home with me. Her father said that as long as I knocked her up before I left that would be fine.

Eca was in her early thirties and had not had a child so far. She had also been through two husbands. She had a good job and was an independent woman, so what she did was her own business her mother told me.

I think I annoyed Eca by not being real lovey-dovey with her. I’d give her a kiss in greeting and if I was going out. Otherwise, unless I was fucking her, I didn’t hug and kiss her much.

She was pretty enough and had looked after her body reasonably well. The hips were fleshier than I like but the tits were beautiful. Eca was a pleasurable fuck, and she would let me fuck her often, so Junior was happy.

I found that I loved caving, as it was excellent fun. I’d done a bit of cliff climbing in my time, so took to caving like a kid with a new toy. The second week was spent in and out of a heap of impressive caves. I even learned a form of scuba diving.

We only had small a tank with a small, lightweight carbon scrubber and a battery pack. It cleaned the air and refilled the tank as we climbed around. We could stay under water for about thirty minutes at a time. With the scrubber, we could use the tank indefinitely, as long as the batteries worked.

Outside the caves, we set up a solar powered charger that I had purchased. Its deep-cycle battery system was ideal for topping up our smaller batteries overnight. I built a special travois to lug the gear around from cave to cave. I planned to leave it all with Adnan when I left.

I did all my qualifications, and one of the guys said I was a bloody expert by his reckoning. I didn’t seem to get lost and could track back in and out of any system I’d previously been in.

Adnan and I had gone exploring in between his tours and found a new entrance to a seriously awesome set of caverns. A couple of days later a group of Yanks were visiting, and they were supposed to be geologists and a heap of other fancy titles and all expert cavers.

So Adnan and I took them for a run in our new cave. Adnan said to them that I was the guide and they must do as I say. We’d found some seriously impressive features. I handed the geologist an unusual stone I’d found. His eyes lit up. “So is it an opal?” I asked.

He looked at me and guessed I knew more than I was letting on. I grinned and said, “Gotta go to Coober Pedy for a holiday once.” I think my accent finally registered with him. Adnan said I’d picked up a bad habit of talking like a local. I think the ‘gotta’ gave me away.

“Just a builder, huh?” he said.

“I like to travel,” I replied.

Apparently, the Malay government was letting foreigners in to find new areas of wealth for them. They were in debt up to their ears and needed capital. If it weren’t for tourism, they’d be in serious trouble.

“This set of caverns is close to the edge of the park. Lots of Westerners loved to pay to come fossicking,” I said. The guy was called Butler, and he looked at me in interest.

“They wouldn’t be going outside the Environmental agreement, and the government could put a nice little tax on anything that comes out. They could even let them buy a small lease like for a week and have a ‘Picks only’ rule.”

Butler grinned at me. “And, it would cost fuck all, to initially set up. Other investors would foot the costs for expansions.”

I nodded. “It might not hurt to do a bit of work on the airport, and the main road, so bigger planes can land, and some better buses could be brought in. A lot of the villages and resorts here are already under-utilised. These people will work if the work is there.”

I’d come to like most of the people I’d met here. They were friendly people for the main part and just trying to get by in a troubled economy. The only guy I’d had a run-in with was a self-appointed arsehole.

He hated tourists, especially if they didn’t smoke his weed or buy his pills. Adnan had warned me about him. One of his dealers had approached me the first week I was here and had a hard time accepting that I didn’t touch the stuff.

When they realised that I hadn’t gone home with the group I’d been hanging around with and was sticking around, they became a bit more insistent. I’d had to break the dealer’s hand when he tried to lift my wallet when I wouldn’t buy off him.

Taib, the arsehole, wasn’t happy. But Adnan got to the local magistrate first and complained about the dealer was scaring off his customers. An Australian tourist getting rolled by a local thug was bad for business.

The magistrate also had a lot of money tied up in one of the resorts that many Australians liked, so he didn’t want the bad business. Taib didn’t pay him enough to jeopardise his own legitimate income. He didn’t care about Taib selling, but theft from, and harassment of the tourists was a different matter.

It was also around the end of the second week I learnt that Eca was on Taib’s ‘lust list’. Apparently, he wanted her, even if she didn’t want him. Other rumours suggested he wasn’t real nice to his girlfriends. I’d learnt over the years that a bloke who listened learned a lot.

I asked Adnan about what had happened to her previous husbands. When his lips tightened, I guessed I wasn’t going to like the answers. She was a good-looking woman, and while I didn’t mind fucking her, she wasn’t the best lay I’d ever had, but she was improving.

All the same, I didn’t like the idea of some drug dealer who beat up his girlfriends, lusting after her. She deserved better than that. As much I was using her, I had been honest about it, and I sure didn’t beat the crap out of her. I just fucked her stupid.

The flu epidemic had hit this region hard. They had a greater number of men dying from the combo of viruses, and those left took advantage of the women. Their culture didn’t help and not enough time had passed to change things for the women.

Adnan said that Eca’s first husband had gotten the flu bad the first time it went round but had pulled through. However, he also lost his job. He’d started working for Taib to make ends meet. He had been found dead one day from an overdose.

Apparently, he had helped himself to Taib’s merchandise and was selling on the side. Eca didn’t believe this, as he had been a steady, honest man and didn’t smoke hash or take the drugs. She would have known.

The second husband was found floating in the river, but no one knew for certain what had happened to him. Both times Eca had been widowed within in two years of her marriages. Taib had offered for her several times, but she didn’t want to marry him.

He also hadn’t produced any children in the last four years since the epidemic, in spite of the number of girlfriends he went through. Eca wanted a child, and he wasn’t on her donor list. I asked Eca why she thought Taib wanted her.

She told me it was because she put the three scars on his face and marked him as a rapist. They all knew he had raped her when she was fifteen. Her father had wanted her to go away, but this was her home, and she wouldn’t let Taib drive her away because he couldn’t face his own shame.

He thought that if he married her, it would prove that she wanted him. “I’d rather die first,” Eca said with venom. I hugged her and said I was worried about her once I left. I knew I didn’t love her enough to marry her, but I had a lot of respect for her, and I didn’t want to see her hurt by Taib.

I don’t think she was too happy with me telling her that I didn’t love her, but I had promised that if she stayed with me, I’d always be honest with her. I think she was starting to get the picture.

Junior didn’t get wet for a couple of days after that little admission.

It didn’t take long for the stories of the opals to get around.

The problem for those interested was that only Adnan, and I actually knew how to get into the system where we had found them. The Yanks had taken their recommendations and my idea on how to run it, back to the government. Until then, we were to sit on our information.

The ruthless people also knew if either of us went missing, there would be hell to pay. Adnan and I had worked out that certain people were tracking our movements in the hope of us leading them to the cave system with the opals.

It’s not easy to track people traversing through caves if you don’t want them to know you are there. You had to have light and even very dim lights shone a long way if you turned into a more open area.

Tracking by the lights of people in front of you was also difficult, as they may have crossed a hazard that would now be invisible to you. It was also difficult to move without making noise, as it had a bad habit of echoing.

By the fifth week, I guessed Taib decided I was the most expendable of us two, plus I was with Eca. The guy had taken a severe dislike to me. My medallion had warmed several times when he was in my vicinity.

This day, I was actually in another new set of caves. They were nowhere near the ones that he wanted to know about. I thought they didn’t know about them, as we had only been exploring these caves for a couple of days, and I didn’t believe that they had followed us here.

He and three of his goons must have tracked me to the caves the day before and now lay in wait for me. Someone at HQ must have told him that we were planning on spending the week exploring in this region.