[Photos] The German Who Stayed: 10 Years In The Sarawak Village Where Bats 'Close' The Airport

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The flight from Miri to Mulu in Sarawak takes 20 minutes.

It operates on a small AirBorneo turboprop, the kind of aircraft where you can see the jungle canopy clearly from your window seat and the runway at the other end looks, briefly, like a clearing someone made on a dare.

There is no other practical way to get here.

Technically, the highly adventurous can combine a chartered 4WD and a longboat for a ten-to-twelve hour overland journey that costs around RM1,500.

Most people take the flight.

What they may not realise until they arrive is that the flight schedule is not entirely governed by airline operations.

The Bats Have The Final Say

Flights into Mulu stop in the mid-afternoon — no departures or arrivals at dusk or in the evening.

The reason, as local licensed tour guides here will tell you matter-of-factly, is the bats.

Millions of them emerge from the caves each evening in a column so dense it registers on weather radar, and the airspace above the runway is effectively theirs from late afternoon onward.

The airport does not fight this. It simply works around it.

In Mulu, with its estimated total population of approximately 2,000 residents, that is not an inconvenience.

It is just how things work.

Where The Road Ends

Once you land, there are no taxis, no ride-hailing apps and no public buses — you walk the wooden boardwalks, or you take a longboat along the Melinau River.

There are no ATMs, so bring cash to cover park fees, guides and food, because the nearest machine is back in Miri.

Many of the local homestays run on generators that switch off after a few hours in the evening.

This is Gunung Mulu National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northern Sarawak and one of the most biologically rich and physically isolated destinations in Southeast Asia.

The park sits almost entirely outside Sarawak’s main road network — the only tarred roads within the vicinity total roughly four kilometres.

Beyond that narrow strip of asphalt, the jungle has existed largely undisturbed for 130 million years.

Getting here has always required genuine effort, and that is not entirely by accident.

Still On The Same Contract

Benjamin Wolff arrived in 2016 on a two-year contract, and he is still there.

“It’s highly unusual to manage the same hotel for ten years,” the Berlin-born general manager of Marriott Mulu Resort says.

In the hospitality industry, general managers typically rotate between properties every two to three years.

A decade at a single remote resort is almost unheard of. Wolff has renewed his two-year contract five times.

He has watched staff members stay, leave, and in some cases return. He has learned fragments of Iban and Penan — two distinct languages spoken by communities whose families have lived along these rivers for generations.

He flies to Miri once a month, where Marriott also operates a property, comes back every time and is considering retiring here.

Where The Boundaries Blur

The Marriott Mulu Resort is the only international hotel brand operating within the park boundary — and the only property in the settlement with its own power generation and full amenities running around the clock.

Everything else in Mulu operates on a different set of logistics entirely.

The national park and the hotel share the same owner.

Many of Wolff’s staff have family members working as park rangers next door.

The government clinic opens after hours for emergencies without being asked.

How Things Actually Work Here

MOCSAR — the Mountain Cave Search and Rescue unit, a specialised community-based team under the Sarawak Fire and Rescue Department — serves as the primary emergency response for a catchment area that extends 120 kilometres from the nearest fire station in Marudi.

“The entire experience of Mulu depends on everybody,” Wolff says. “Everyone is important.”

It is a statement that sounds like hospitality-industry boilerplate until you understand the infrastructure reality it describes.

The hotel’s supply lorry, shipped from Marudi by boat which takes more than six hours, arrived but could not be unloaded — the river level was too low for the vessel to dock properly.

The team waited for rain, and when it rained, they unloaded the lorry.

That is the operational texture of managing a resort in interior Sarawak.

Connectivity, Slowly

When Wolff arrived in 2016, the hotel’s internet connection ran over a TM satellite link.

Cloud cover or rain — both routine in a tropical rainforest — could knock it out entirely.

Mobile coverage was, in his words, “much, much worse than now.”

Today, the national park runs on Starlink. The hotel uses a SACOFA tower relay infrastructure.

The shift matters not just for operational efficiency but for a subtler reason: guests now arrive with divergent expectations.

A significant portion want to post content to social media immediately.

Another portion have come to Mulu specifically to disconnect — to sit in a place where the jungle is louder than their notifications.

The One Thing That Could Change Everything

Wolff manages both simultaneously, in the same physical space, every day.

The bigger connectivity shift, however, is still coming; the Sarawak government is currently constructing the MMMLL road — a project that will eventually connect Mulu to Miri overland.

The expected completion window is 2029 to 2030; Wolff welcomes it, not primarily for the tourism uplift, but for what it means in practical human terms.

Whether the road, when completed, changes the character of Mulu in ways that are harder to quantify — that question sits quietly beneath the optimism.

A place this pristine has stayed this way partly because getting here has always required genuine effort.

The UNESCO designation limits development by design; the road will test that balance in ways nobody can yet fully predict.

The School That Went To Hong Kong They Could Leave, They Come Back

Inside Mulu, there is a national school called SK Batu Bungan.

It is a boarding school with just over a hundred students drawn from communities along the river — Penan and Iban children, many from villages without running water.

Last year, the school sent a team to a drone competition in Hong Kong; they finished fourth or fifth – the kind of detail that stops a conversation.

Children from one of the most physically isolated communities in Malaysia, competing in cutting-edge technology against schools from some of the most connected cities in the world — and nearly winning.

For secondary school, students travel to Long Panai — four to five hours by longboat along the river, though just ten minutes by air as the crow flies — or further out to Miri.

Most of them come back; they want to work here, as park rangers, as guides, as part of the community that shaped them.

The outside world is available to them, but they are choosing Mulu.

A Choice He Keeps Making

Wolff is probably the longest-serving resort manager at the same property under the Marriott Bonvoy brand in Malaysia, which operates 65 hotels nationwide.

He does not say this with particular pride, but the way someone describes a fact they have had to explain many times and have quietly made peace with.

When asked what keeps him, he does not reach for the scenery, the caves, or the biodiversity, though all of it is genuinely extraordinary.

He talks about mindset, about the impact you can see in a place like this — impact that disappears into the noise of a big city but is visible and measurable here.

Guests who return several times a year, every year, for the past decade.

Heinz Gerstner, the manager of the national park, arrived roughly at the same time as Wolff and is still there.

Chief Minister Datuk Patinggi Abang Johari Tun Openg has stayed at the resort several times.

The German clientele is large and loyal; Malaysia’s MM2H residency programme has made the country increasingly familiar to Europeans thinking about where to spend the next chapter of their lives — and some of them, it turns out, keep ending up here.

Without Much Fanfare

He also talks about his staff — most of whom have been with him throughout the decade, Covid-related disruptions aside — with the quiet respect of someone who understands that in a place this remote, loyalty is not an HR metric; it is survival.

I think it’s about your mindset. The performance you make. The impact you create.

Outside, the jungle does what it has done for 130 million years; the river moves at whatever level it chooses; and somewhere nearby, a MOCSAR volunteer is on standby.

The school kids are in class.

An AirBorneo turboprop is banking over the canopy on its approach from Miri, Kuching or Kota Kinabalu, carrying the next group of travellers who will spend a few days here and leave changed in ways they will not fully understand until they are back in the city.

Wolff is at his desk, renewing something — a contract, a relationship, a choice he keeps making every two years, quietly, without much fanfare.

Gunung Mulu National Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in Sarawak, Malaysia. The Marriott Mulu Resort is the only international hotel brand operating within the park boundary. The writer visited Mulu as part of a media familiarisation trip hosted by the Sarawak Tourism Board (STB).

READ MORE: You Won’t Find This In KL, You Have To Come To Miri

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