A trip to Bako National Park

One of the other highlights in my recent trip to beautiful Kuching was my trip to the Bako National Park… Having always heard a lot about it, it was indeed a dream come true to finally get to go for a little trip there…

The Bako National Park happens to be the oldest national park but it also is the smallest one at about 2,728 hectares in Sarawak, and has complete ecosystems from beach vegetation, heath forest, cliff vegetation, mangrove forest, grasslands vegetation, mixed dipterocarp forest as well as the peat swamp forest…

As our trip began from our temporary home in Sarawak, which was the Damai Beach Resort, it took us an hour’s van trip to get there, but I understand if you were to travel from Kuching it would also be about the same distance of time…

Our van dropped us at the Bako Village and we had to wait about 15 mins for our boats…. There were 12 of us and since the boats were small so we had to go in two boats..

The boat ride is more or less 20-minutes but we stopped at the Pandan Kecil Beach to take some photos of Bako’s trademark sand stone formations called sea stacks which have been carved by the waves over the years…

Some of these sea stacks are pretty unique and it all depends on which angle you see it.. There is a face of a man… Or in my opinion, bat man…

Then the main trademark sandstone my boatman called the snake (cobra?) head… Whatever it was it was interesting and we were kind of gawking over it as well as busy taking photos of it..

Then our boat man took us to the middle of the South China Sea.. And we were slightly confused as wasn’t the entrance to the park aka the Bako National Park Headquarters just around the corner from that Pandan Kecil Beach…

But it soon became obvious when we were excitedly pointing out dolphins… If we were delighted we saw a couple of dolphins frolicking at the Kuching Wetlands tour… There were schools of dolphins here.. Both the grey pink ones and the darker grey Irrawaddy dolphins… And it was such an amazing euphoric feeling watching them race each other or play with each other…

After about 15 minutes or 20 minutes later, we decided we finally had enough of dolphins, and headed to the Bako National Park Headquarters… The first signage that caught my eye was “Beware of Crocodiles” and yes, there are estuarine crocodiles around, but unfortunately, I did not see any..

Our guide registered us in and we had a quick lunch at the canteen before heading in for part of the Lintang trail..

However while having lunch, we spotted the very unique Bearded Pig which was casually walking around the park grounds, and headquarters… It was a slight cause of excitement… Hahaha..

Once lunch was done and our guide ensured everyone had their mineral water, we began our hike or walk.. The Lintang trail is basically a flat and simple trail that passes through nearly all of the vegetation types found at Bako… The whole trek would probably take between 3 and 4 hours, but since we had limited time our guide only took us part of the way…

If you are hiking or wandering off alone, it is important to stick to the specifically coloured marked trails..

Most of the Lintang trail we were on have wooden steps and boardwalks, and some of the boards might be a little old.. Though the boardwalks and all are reasonably well maintained than how it looks, you might still want to watch where you step carefully…

We did not see much animals on the trail though our guide pointed out interesting trees and plants including a giant ermmm durian tree??!!

The were also fungi or shrooms and such as well as puddles of fishes…

It was not until we were heading back to the headquarters near where the Bako National Park chalets are where we spotted two sleeping beauties high up in the tree… Two sleeping Proboscis monkeys…

On another tree the (common) brown long tailed macaque was playing…

From there we headed to the mangrove area of Teluk Assam where we watched the tide come in as well as fire crabs, hermit crabs and mud skippers littering the muddy mangrove area before taking the boat back to Bako Village…