Below the earth there are places that seem to transport you
to ages long ago. The caves are alive, constantly changing and evolving,
offering us a magical underground environment that is world’s apart from the
ground up above. Last week we were fortunate enough to go adventure caving in
Yanchep National Park, just north of Perth. Our guide, Inga, led us on a guided
tour through the Yanchep cave for the morning.
A vast underground labyrinth of tunnels and chambers, the
cave was only a few metres deep ( the shallowest cave in the park) which was
carved out by sand and water. As in most of the caves we’ve seen in Western
Australia, the cave had a lot of stalactites and stalagmites. Stalactites, as Inga
explained to us, are like rock and calcium icicles that hang from the ceiling
of the cave. Stalagmites grow up from the floor of the cave and are the result
of water dripping onto the ground that has a small amount of acid in the drops
of water. The drops of rain water from the soil above the cave seep through the
cave and slowly, over time, dissolve the limestone and create beautiful columns
of rock on the cave floor.
We spent the morning shimmying through some tight spaces,
crawling down rock formations and exploring the cave. Although one of the
smaller caves we’ve done here in Western Australia (we went to Jewel, Lake and
Mammoth Caves further south a couple weeks ago) it was still a fascinating
experience to travel through such as extraordinary environment and having our
own guide, Inga, to take us through and share her knowledge of them.
