Caving!

So, yesterday I took advantage of the great and illustrious MUAC club again. I went caving, or spelunking, for those of you who like fun words.

This required waking up at 7:00 in the morning, which anyone who knows me knows, I don't do very well. Well, I didn't do it especially well this particular morning. So that you guys can grasp the extent of my fatigue, I feel obligated to relate a particular anecdote. . .

I live in the largest dorm residence in Massey University, Walter Dyer hall, which consists of four floors with three wings of 7-8 students each. So, for most of the first half of the school year, we had one empty room in our hall, and the five of us that live in my wing got to know each other really well. Everybody's awesome, we're all pretty good friends at the moment. But, throughout the entire year, we knew that eventually that little room was going to be filled, and it would take a very particular personality to fit in. Somebody cool, relaxed, calm, amiable. Somebody like that.

Well, that's not the person we got.
Instead, we got somebody who actually had a full school schedule, somebody who needed to actually sleep every night, somebody very particular about his musical tastes, somebody who was not afraid to let his opinions be known. He really didn't go over well in my wing. There was always a little tension whenever we were loud (and by we, I mean mostly everybody else) and he would come out of his room and tell, note the word, everybody to shut up. He needed to sleep. And he probably did, but that was not the way to tell us. So he was effectively living in a quite hostile environment, not from me, of course, but from my very vocal wing-mates. Apparently, when I was away on my great adventure, things came to a head, bodily fluids were spattered across his door, and good times were had by mostly all. Needless to say, he got pissed and moved out. It was probably for the best. I have no problem with the guy, he's a cool guy, he just got placed in the wrong wing, a pity. The upshot of this, is that now everybody in my hall feels obligated to be a little bit louder for his absence. Which is generally fine with me, we all go to bed around 2:00 or so, so it's no big deal. Mostly because we can all sleep in relatively late. Unfortunately for me, the day before my big caving trip, they didn't really turn off everything until at least 2:30. I got up at 7. After one does the math, I slept about 4 hours.

Anyways, back to the story. I'd set up earlier in the week to be picked up and driven by my German friend, Bastian (just like in the Neverending Story!), and we were gonna carpool to the cave. He showed up at 8:25ish, we picked up one more person, and we drove to Indecision Cave. Naturally, since he was driving, that made me navigator. Again, anybody that knows me, that's not a good thing. But, hey, I'm proud to say that we only got lost 2 or 3 times. That's a personal best. So we arrived, and luckily for me, I'd gotten to know one of the main instigators of the event at basic rock 1, and I met and talked to the other one during a bouldering trip. So I got one of them, Alister, to "loan" me some coveralls for the trip, and I got the other one, Alice, to loan me a helmet and a headtorch. Thus equipped, we set off.

There were two ways to enter into the cave. Way 1: Abseil down into the cave from a hole into the ground like James Bond. Way 2: Climb down a steep incline with the help of a rope and use a rope ladder to descend into the bowels of the earth. Since they told us that only an experienced abseiler could use way 1, I opted to take way 2. This was my first time caving-ever. I'd just like to say, for the record, that it was awesome. Upon finally descending the rope ladder I was greeted by darkness, complete and utter. If you think you've seen darkness before, you're wrong. The only possible source of light in the inner caves are glowworms. And those are points of a green fluorescent light, something like little green stars, promising the existence of light without actually giving any. I was grateful for the headtorch.

As for the experience as a whole, it was amazing. I crawled on my hands and knees through shin deep muck, all the while looking through the steam that my own body heat was creating, with only the slender light of an LED light to guide me. I climbed up rocky limestone chimneys that emptied into a beautiful cave. I squirmed my way through openings so small that I couldn't have a breath in my lungs if i wanted to fit through, I had to breathe out every time I wanted to move. I crawled on one arm and leg through water that reached up to my waist when I was submerged. It was surreal. These were the kinds of things you only see people do in movies, and I was part of a 4 man group, (Ben, myself, Russel and David) who spent four hours doing things that you only hear about in Hollywood flicks. It was a completely new and unique experience, and one that didn't freak me out nearly as much as I thought it would. My only regret is that, upon arriving at the site, my camera decided that it was out of batteries. Butko luck, eh?