Adventuring

This morning we went on an adventure. We drove a few minutes out of town and with our torches and lanterns we explored the caves.

The country around our area is magical and majestic with hundreds of limestone caves formed when this land was an inland sea a few million years ago. You can see many different formations in and surrounding the town, but inside of the caves are endless passages, formations and chambers. 

 Now there are heaps of caves around the area and you can do Ranger guided tours on 3 of them, but there are also countless others that you can explore yourself with little more than a torch, some decent shoes and a good sense of direction (to find your way out).

We started off walking down the path towards the cave opening......

This track continued on for a few hundred metres then we came to our first minor obstacle... to get through these rocks. The kids are amazing, just like little mountain goats and they love the climbing and scrambling that goes along with the adventure. They are really good at working together, helping each other and looking at the safest way to move forward. I am normally right there with them and quite agile though this morning I felt every bit of being 28 weeks pregnant while not so elegantly moving over the rocks.

Then we walked on and came to the cave opening through here...

Inside the caves it is dark... like pitch black. When you turn your torches off you literally can't see a thing, you wait for your eyes to adjust.... but they don't, it's that dark in there. The temperature is always beautiful about 23 degrees I believe, many years ago the town people used to picnic in the caves to escape the heat in the blistering summer..... now everyone stays inside in the air conditioning, emerging to collect the mail and run errands in the cool of the afternoon.

Once inside the walls are covered in different textures of rocks these are just some of the pictures snapped this morning inside the cave. It's well worth doing the Ranger guided tours before you go off exploring by yourself so that you can learn all about how the caves and walls are formed. I find them so magical!!

Master 2 was very sweet this morning always turing around and asking "are you right Mum?" and " hows the baby going?" before bounding off through the cave torch in hand to spot the next spider, toad, bat or animal skelton. I think these adventures will have a lifelong impact on him, he is already showing such a sense of adventure and a caring nature towards and wonder of living things.

In the height of the wet season some of the caves flood and you can see previous water marks imprinted in the most beautiful earthy colours on the floor of the cave. I was surprised at how damp it was inside even though we haven't had any decent rain recently.

Miss 8 was our only complainer this morning, she was a bit nervous in the dark small passages but loved the beautiful green mossy areas like the green velvet chamber, where the floor is covered in delicate green moss.



I love the open chambers where you walk through a tunnel and the next chamber unexpectedly opens up to a view of blue sky framed by the rocks. This allows greenery to grow throughout the chamber where the dark chambers have no plant growth only the skeletons of birds or bats and colonies of micro bats, which aren't much bigger than moths.

My husband, Master 2 and I love the exploration part. He has visited this cave before so he knew his way around which is preferable when you have 3 small kids, a pregnant wife and no mobile phone coverage for kms. Even so we still managed to get lost briefly once. Each chamber looks different and when it so dark it is easy to miss the passages that you have moved through before.... we soon found our way by retracing our steps... it was all a bit of fun.. especially with Miss 8 and her attitude.

We were only in there for an hour and a half, it was a lovely morning out and so very different to how we would spend a holiday morning in our previous life in the city. We have some visitors coming up in a few weeks so we will have to put this on the list when they are here sharing with us....... 'these beautiful days'.

NOTE: With a busy few months coming up I am going to just Blog on a Friday for the next few months at least!!