The Sarawak Chamber is a huge chamber in Gua Nasib Bagus (Good Luck Cave), which is located in Gunung Mulu National Park, in the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo.
Three Englishmen discovered the chamber in January 1981. Andy Eavis, Dave Checkley and Tony White (all experienced cave explorers) had been exploring the dense, unpopulated area of the Gunung Mulu National Park jungle in Sarawak, in the north of Borneo, in an expedition led by fellow Englishman Ben Lyon. While they were surveying some of the newly found caves in the region, they stumbled into what seemed to be a huge cavern. Even with their powerful lamps, the other end of the chamber couldn’t be seen through the thick darkness.
This cave contains the world’s largest natural underground chamber. Lubang Nasib Bagus (Sarawak Chamber) is more than 600m long, 400m wide and 100m high. The exact size of this chamber is not easy to determine, as a caver needs an hour to cross it, and it is still not completely explored. Headlamps are not able to light more than a per mille of the big hall, some photographs made with special equipment show parts of the chamber. They were made using special magnesium flashes.
Gunung Mulu National Park in Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, on the border with Brunei, is a World Heritage Site that encompasses incredible caves and karst formations in a mountainous equatorial rainforest setting. The park is famous for its caves and the expeditions that have explored them and their surrounding rainforest, most notably are the Royal Geographic Expedition of 1977 - 1978, it saw over 100 scientists in the field explore it for 15 months. It is big enough to fit St. Peter’s Basilica or several jumbo jets inside it.
Other notable caves are Benarat Cavern, Deer Cave, Wind Cave, and Clearwater Cave, which exposes parts of a long underground river going through the park. Ulu is a very inaccessible area; the only practical way of getting to and from it is by air, mainly from Miri airport. It is possible to travel to the area by riverboat, but it requires a chartered long boat for the last part - and the whole trip by river would take around 12 hours to complete from Miri, while the flight takes only 30 minutes.
Despite its size - or because of its size - the visit to the cave is not difficult. But as most of the time the passage is filled with water, the ability to swim and appropriate clothes are essential. Because of the high temperature the trip is, despite the water not very hard. But it’s a lot to walk, from the headquarter to cave entrance it’s a walk of about 4 hours. Often this is done with an overnight stay in a base camp 1 hour from the cave.
