In her review, Randi explains that she visited Niah during the same year as Els, so their visits are very similar. In my case, I visited Niah the day after Els' visit! We even had dinner together in Miri and I was able to benefit from her advice following her visit. My account will therefore also be very similar to hers, but my appreciation of the site differs greatly.

Like Els, I travelled to the park by bus. However, unlike her visit, cabs were waiting for tourists at the junction in my case, and a driver found me before I even started looking for him. The return journey was equally straightforward, with a bus waiting at the junction when the driver called by the receptionist dropped me off. After registering, I crossed the river by boat and began my visit to the museum. The museum is informative, but not particularly well presented. There's little structure between the many panels, some are redundant and most seem to have been created by students with no sense of synthesis. Artifacts are unfortunately few and far between. The temporary museum in Lenggong Valley was even better than this one.

The hike to the caves, however, is very pleasant (I can't remember if the sidewalk was slippery). The forest is dense and lush. I saw insects, millipedes and lizards all along the way. The first cave (which is more of a rock shelter), Traders Cave, contains scaffolding used by bird nest collectors. Even more breathtaking, however, are the bamboo structures left by these reckless collectors in Great Cave. You really must be brave to climb these. I'd have found something else to eat if it had been my job! The archaeological zone is also right at the entrance to the Great Cave, but there's absolutely nothing to see there.

The fun begins when you enter the gigantic mouth of the cave. It's one of the most spectacular caves I've ever visited. Even in Mulu, the extraordinary park I visited a few days after, only Deer Cave can rival Niah. I know this opinion is controversial and Solivagant and Els will disagree, but I loved the walk through the cave. You must navigate it by the light of a flashlight (or a phone in my case), until a spectacular beam of light enters through an opening in the ceiling halfway through. Invertebrate fauna, bats and birds are abundant. Several attractive geological formations, including dripstone, punctuate the path. On exiting the other side, a short path leads to Painted Cave. The paintings here are behind a fence, and the distance and lack of light make it very difficult to appreciate them (they look better in photographs with prolonged exposure). From here, it's just a matter of retracing our steps back to the reception area, through all the caves mentioned.

All in all, I loved my experience in Niah. It's one of my favorite visits to Malaysia. However, I was very disappointed to see the site listed solely on cultural criteria. I believe that Niah's spectacular beauty and biodiversity deserve natural criteria. From a strictly cultural point of view, it's a mediocre site with nothing to see and a banal museum. In the category of Hominid fossil sites, it ranks last, well behind Lenggong Valley and Sangiran Early Man Site in terms of visitor experience in my opinion. I therefore had the same difficulty rating it as Quebrada de Humahuaca. I would have given a four-star rating to a mixed site, but the cultural aspect of Niah hardly merits more than two. Niah is an incredible place that I highly recommend visiting, but it's listed for all the wrong (or at least not all the right) reasons.