The next part of our cave adventure consisted mainly of more typical "caving" activities.
There was one spot, where there was a perhaps one and half meter drop from one level to the next. At this point, someone had installed a metal slide, (arrowed in blue above) similar to something you would see at a playground. The slide was constantly irrigated by constant flow of water from the stream. Each of us got on the slide and slid down. While the length of the slide was perhaps 2 m, the drop was perhaps maybe 1 m at the most. This struck me as some sort of a token effort at providing perhaps the experience of sliding down a waterfall. At this point in the trip, we had all demonstrated sufficient agility, to the point where we were fully capable of negotiating a 1 1/2 meter drop from one level to the next.
After the waterfall slide, we had a few more caving experiences. Most of this was crawling and squeezing through very narrow tunnels and crevices. Imagine a row of four dining room chairs. The chairs' seats and legs form a tunnel. That's about the amount of space that we had to crawl through.
|
Keep in mind, hat you are squeezing through this little tunnel also wearing a helmet, and two layers of wet suit. So, your normal sense of the boundaries, or periphery of your body, are not quite accurate. You look ahead of yourself and see a tunnel and think, “Okay fine. There's plenty of room to squeeze through.” But, you get midway through the crevice and you start banging up against the walls and roof, and you realize that you're navigating something much thicker than usual. The width and the thickness of your body have increased in all directions. So your previous sense of confidence that you can easily squeeze through a narrow space is somewhat weakened now. And, there were several these little tunnels. Sometimes the tunnels were interspersed with areas where you could stand up and walk at full height. At other points, you had to crouch over.