In which Tim explores a cave and a half...

I was visiting my good buddy Joel for the weekend in the North of the country. He lives in a village a bit bigger than mine, but similar in that it's located in the mountains with stellar views. It was exciting to see friends, and refreshing to spend a few days doing fun things that are completely unrelated to my work.

Yesterday afternoon we went on a hike to some pretty neat caves near his house. By "near" I mean about two miles straight down one mountain, across a river, and then up a second one through thick woods. We soon came to a cliff with a dark cleft that beckoned us toward adventure. We entered to find a cavernous network of darkness where we could hear bats fluttering around our heads. It was pretty awesome.

After playing around for about half an hour and coming back out, our Dominican guides led us to what they told us would be a much cooler cave. After hiking a little further into the woods we came upon a hole in the ground that we could not see the bottom of. We started to get a little bit nervous when they told us that was the way in. I mean, wouldn't you be nervous if you were being told to climb into a dark hole?

Our guides began looking for a branch that we could use to slide down into the abyss. One of them pulled on a vine right above my head, and I watched a massive branch swing down right toward my head. It was too fast for me to duck, and it left me looking like this:

We did all the normal tests for brain damage. I wasn't dizzy. My pupils were acting normally. I remembered my social security number. My head just felt like...well...like it had been whacked by a large and heavy piece of wood. Yet there were adventures to be had, so I got up and carried on. We scrambled into the hole, happy to find that it was only about ten or eleven feet deep, and pretty easy to descend.

This was when things started to get interesting. They told us that we would be following a series of tunnels and exit several hundred yards from where we entered. I looked around and couldn't really tell where the tunnel started. It looked like this cavern with a hole in the ceiling was all that there was. Then I saw the little hole in the corner. We had to get flat and worm our way in and down, and it was pretty steep. We kept going down, and down, and I began to feel like a character in Lord of the Rings wondering whether or not this trip into the mines was such a great idea. I mean, what if we woke up some giant flaming beast in the depths? That would be bad.

Pretty soon we came to this part of the tunnel:

The kid in the picture is looking straight UP at us, through the widest part of the tunnel. We might have fit, with a little twisting and turning. Our agile and skinny Dominican friends certainly had no problems. But we Americans realized that none of us were quite as agile or skinny as them. We debated for about fifteen minutes whether or not we should keep going. Our sense of adventure tempted us to believe our guides word that there was indeed a way out somewhere up ahead, and proceed. Yet our fear of being buried alive got the better of us. We didn't want to find ourselves quite literally between a rock and a hard place with no way out. So we went back the way we came, and climbed back out the eleven foot hole.

In retrospect, I am glad that this story didn't get any more exciting. I might not have lived to tell it... ;-)

Here is a portrait of the merry band of adventurers: