Bako, Sarawak's oldest national park, is a quiet sanctuary for nature lovers

The Star

7 days ago

THERE's a moment, just past the bend of the Telok Delima trail, when the forest seems to inhale.
The trees lean in, shadows lengthen and the air thickens with the dense breath of the tropics.
Here in Bako National Park, time is slowed by green.
For the nature lover, it is a sanctuary of movement and stillness – a place where observation becomes reve­rence.
Located at the edge of the South China Sea, where the land folds into estuarine mudflats and sandstone cliffs, Bako is Sarawak's oldest national park and also its most revealing.
Covering only 27sq km, it is small, but inside this miniature Eden lies nearly every type of Bornean habitat.
Mangroves give way to the heath forest. Dipterocarp giants rise beside peat swamps.
Clinging silently to a tree trunk, the elusive Sunda colugo melts into the bark.
There are dry coastal cliffs and lowland streams, and pitcher plants the colour of rusted copper, gaping like small hungry mouths beneath the shrubs.
Visitors come first by boat, a 20-minute ride across the estuary from Kampung Bako. The crossing is often calm, save for the chatter of macaques in the canopy and the slap of water against flat-bottomed fibreglass hulls.
As the boat glides towards the beach, the landscape sharpens.
Sea stacks rise like the bones of some ancient leviathan.
The forest begins at the shoreline, a dense green that pulls you inward.
There are no roads in Bako, only trails. Sixteen of them twist like roots through the park's interior. Each one, a different rhythm of terrain and tempo.
Tiny but vibrant, the male fiddler crab brandishes its oversized claw like a violinist mid-performance.
The Lintang Loop is the most generous: a half-day circuit through swamp, scrub and ridge.
Along the path, silvered tree trunks bear red trail blazes, but it is often the forest itself that guides.
Cicadas scream like power tools. Horn­bills wheel overhead in pairs, their wings flapping with a leathery thud.
In shaded glades, the ground is littered with fallen leaves the size of dinner plates.
Nature here does not shout. It waits.
In the mangroves, long-tailed macaques hop nimbly from root to root, watching the humans with frank insolence.
Up in the trees, proboscis monkeys lounge like aristocrats, their bellies swollen with fermented leaf matter.
Their strange pendulous noses lend them a mournful dignity as if they carry some deep evolutionary regret.
Coiled in stillness, the green pit viper waits in perfect silence. In Bako, danger is as dazzling as it is beautiful.
The botanist finds wonder too. Bako is a study in adaptation.
On the sun-scorched plateau of the Bukit Gondol trail, the forest shrinks into a scrubby, open heath.
The plants here are hardened things – wiry, low to the ground, shaped by wind and sun.
Carnivorous pitcher plants are every­where, thriving in poor soil by devouring insects unlucky enough to slip into their slick digestive cups.
Further in, the ground softens.
Ferns uncurl beside rivulets that trickle through the undergrowth.
In this wetter forest, giant pandanus leaves sway over the trail like tattered green fans.
The air smells of damp wood and the ­tannin stain of wet bark.
Time dilates.
Bako's welcome to visitors includes a stern reminder: this is wild country, and even the waters hold their own quiet predators.
Minutes stretch into hours.
Each footfall is met by silence or surprise – a rustle in the underbrush, a splash in the distance and the flit of a kingfisher's iridescent wing.
By late afternoon, the sun throws a long gold light across the forest floor.
The trail to Telok Pandan Kecil opens out onto a cliff edge. Below, the sea is a shiny brass plate.
A narrow beach curves into the cove, bordered by sheer walls of rock painted with lichen and age.
The only sounds are the rhythm of the tide and the rustling trees high above.
It is here, on this windswept outcrop, that the wilderness feels both intimate and eternal.
Bako has no great height. No vastness. But its richness lies in its detail.
Nature lovers scan the treetops from Bako's wooden boardwalk, where proboscis monkeys and tropical birds often emerge from the green veil.
In the gnarled roots of the strangler fig. In the wary eyes of the bearded pig as it rummages through leaf litter.
In the countless ants that march unseen beneath your boots... every inch is alive with purpose.
For the naturalist, the quiet observer, this is not a place to conquer, but to witness.
Evening comes suddenly in the tropics. The forest darkens in slow waves.
Frogs begin their nightly chorus and fireflies blink to life in the underbrush.
The trails go quiet. The last boat has gone.
And for those who stay, there is the ­humbling pleasure of a night in the jungle, of being just another creature in the vast, breathing wild.