Borneo’s Gunung Mulu National Park comprises an array of spectacular geological features, including Sarawak Chamber – considered to be the largest known cave chamber in the world by area and the second largest by volume, behind only Miao Room in China.
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The chamber is part of Gua Nasib Bagus, or Good Luck Cave. It’s “impossible to tell when one actually enters the Sarawak Chamber," says the Mulu Caves Project on its website, "and its size can only really be gauged by spreading out a team around the treacherous, boulder-strewn floor and listening to whooping echoes travelling on into the distance.”
This description makes sense, since the chamber’s dimensions are truly impressive – 600 metres long and 435 metres wide, with a maximum height of 115 metres. The total area of the chamber is estimated to be between a whopping 154,530 and 164,459 square metres – that's large enough to fit 8 jumbo jets.
When was the Sarawak Chamber discovered?
Three British cavers – Andy Eavis, Dave Checkley and Tony White – first explored the Sarawak Chamber in January 1981 during the British-Malaysian Mulu’80 Expedition.
At the time, the largest cave chamber in the world was thought to be the Big Room in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, which has a total area of around 33,184 square metres.
No wonder the size of the Sarawak Chamber truly astounded the cavers who first explored it. One of them, Dave Checkley, has described traversing the chamber as being like “climbing a long scree slope up an English mountain, but climbing it in the pitch dark.”
Still able to hear the river roaring in the far distance, the cavers surveyed the chamber for twelve hours.
“It wasn’t until we drew up the survey the following day that we realised that we had found by far the biggest chamber in the world,” said Checkley.
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How can you reach the Sarawak Chamber?
Reaching the Sarawak Chamber is not easy, and you’ll need to book official permits and licensed guides at the Gunung Mulu National Park headquarters.
The mouth of Good Luck Cave is located about three and a half hours walk from there. And that’s not all – once you reach the cave entrance, you’ll be faced with a 1.5km underground river that needs to be followed upstream.
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Top image: The Great Cave chamber with its majestic entrance at Mulu National Park, Sarawak. Credit: ThamKC/Getty Images
