Caves Are Awesome!

I had never been in a cave. Caves scare me. I'm not a small person, and there's no better place for a large person to get stuck, than in a cave!

Having said that, I had a lovely friend in town visiting, and we decided to go to the Crystal and Fantasy Caves.

Three things stood out to me after the experience:

a)  It is HOT down there, uncomfortable amounts of sweat were apparent, plus more sweat.
b)  The caves look fake, like someone put it there so I would give them $27 to see them... but I have been assured that, that is not the case.
c)  I am so very terrible at science!

We went to the Crystal caves first. This is the story of how the caves were discovered:

"In 1905, two young teenagers named Carl Gibbons and Edgar Hollis were engaged in a spirited game of cricket. One of the lads struck the ball with ferocity and it disappeared into a hole several yards away. This ball was a prized possession and no effort was spared at attempting to retrieve it. As one of the boys crawled  down deeper and deeper, it became apparent that this was not your ordinary hole. What the boys had discovered was, in fact, the entrance to a spectacular natural wonder. When the Wilkinson family, owners of the property since 1884, were told of this discovery, they wasted no time in setting off to explore the entrance and to find out how deep it went. Bernard Wilkinson, the fourteen-year-old son of Mr. Julian Wilkinson, was lowered into the hole by his father using a strong rope tied to a tree. Bernard descended 140 feet with a lamp from a bicycle to light his way. What he found was beyond his or the Wilkinson family's wildest dreams. It was an underground world of delicate splendor with magnificent crystal formations of every size and shape surrounding a clear lake 55 feet deep."   

- Crystal Caves

We had a lovely tour guide for the Crystal Caves, and then a hilarious tour guide for Fantasy Caves. He showed us a few trees on the walk over in the beautiful garden they have there, and one was the allspice tree. The leaves smelled like everything awesome. The flavours are made up of (and I assure you, I know that I must sound like a tool for not knowing that allspice was a singular spice, from a tree, and not just a big mushing of a bunch of spices, making it the "all-spice"...), nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves.

Enough random spice talk, here are some shots of the Crystal Caves mixed in with some shots of the Fantasy caves, because I can't remember which is which. Beautiful either way.

 

 

The "icicles that come from the top are stalactites, and the ones that come up from the bottom are called stalagmites. I knew nothing about any of this going in (thought science through high school would expect I did). 

I found this nifty little diagram, just like one that I'm sure I saw in school and promptly forgot about, because who's going to see a cave? Me. 

Today's little cave lesson is complete. If you're coming to visit, definitely check them out (with out without me, though my huffing and puffing up the steep stair climb out is quite funny to see, though less funny to me).