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Borneo Calls
由 Steve Backshall
type size: [A] [A] [A]
As we dragged the heavy dugout 独木舟 over thundering rapids, waist-deep foaming waters raged around us, threatening to wrench us downstream. Two days before, our guide had proclaimed, "You are the first outsiders ever to see this place."
We looked around us in awe at a steep rock-sided canyon with pristine fine jade velvet drapes hanging over glass-clear water. Two further days of dragging heavily laden boats through the rainforest torrent and I was starting to appreciate why no one had ever been here before.
Suddenly, and with a sickening crack, the dugout we were dragging over the rocks was overcome 由 the waves, filled instantly with water, and snapped in two, causing all hell to break loose.
The supplies, stacked 2 feet deep in the boat's hull, were pitched into the river. The outboard motor was ripped off the back of the 船, 小船 and went floating downstream, a hardy boatman gamely clinging to it like a big, metal lifebuoy. We were in trouble …
The island of Borneo, divided between Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, is the third largest in the world and until very recently was covered in dazzling rain forest. In the last 20 years, about 60 percent of that forest has disappeared and may never return.
The purpose of Expedition Borneo was to attempt to get into some of the most remote, untrammeled hinterlands of this astoundingly rich and diverse island to discover new species and find, film and assess the well-being of the 动物 living there.
The expedition took our team up unscaled peaks, along rivers that had never been seen 由 the outside world, and into cave systems that had never seen light until we arrived.
The dugout disaster was the first of many harrowing adventures in which our mettle would be tested 由 an indifferent jungle. We managed to steer the gear to our carefully selected campsite in Imbak Canyon where we spent the night in hammocks 10 stories up in the crown of an emergent tree, where we played cards and drank whiskey in the lightning and downpour of a tropical night. Then we woke above the misty canopy to a chorus of gibbons 唱歌 for their breakfast.
A small crew trekked two days into the 心 of Imbak Canyon and climbed a magical seven-tiered waterfall to catch dancing jeweled frogs in coffee-colored pools. I festered (or just sat!) for four days and nights in an ancient burial ground that looked like something out of Raiders of the 迷失 Ark, where vine-entangled caves were surrounded 由 350-year-old ironwood coffins, to try and catch a huge 蟒蛇, python that lived there.
What we saw dazzled and delighted and convinced every one of us that it was a place well worth saving. I hope watching the programs will convince 你 as well.
Our crew of 24 people left from various places around the world and convened in a hotel in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, in the summer of 2006. Along with several of the finest natural history camera operators on the planet were 牛津, 牛津大学 professor of entomology Dr. George McGavin, 大学 of California, Berkeley, professor of herpetology Tyrone Hayes, ecologist and adviser to international agencies Tara Shine and ... er ... me.
In order for us to best work at finding new species, we invested much of our expedition budget on a rustic jungle base camp in a remote area of a Bornean forest reserve known as Imbak Canyon. An unknown forested valley between Borneo's largest national parks of Danum, Maliau and Tabin, it could prove to be an invaluable wildlife corridor if it could be properly protected.
Producer Steve Greenwood and I had flown 由 helicopter into the valley several months before the project began and decided it was the best place to build our base camp. I'd been on my own when locals took me to a stunning waterfall at the junction of two rivers with flattish ground nearby.
It had seemed a perfect spot to erect our base camp and I'd sung the location's praises wildly, so I looked on in hopeless embarrassment as a helicopter and a small platoon of porters struggled desperately to get 2.5 tons of film equipment into the camp down a narrow muddy trail and across a fast-flowing river, almost killing themselves doing it. It's only 日 1 and none of them are talking to me.
Other teething troubles included our ex-special forces support team failing to set up any kind of communication systems at all because the bottom of the canyon sucked up radio and satellite signals, and the scientists and crew gradually came to the perplexing discovery that we had chosen a site where 动物 were apparently in very short supply.
It was, however, a dazzling jungle where some of the world's tallest trees (some as high as 250 feet) grow and a tumultuous waterfall 下一个 to camp roared like Niagara one minute, and then two days later, dribbled like a small child who wants an ice lolly.
We were to spend nearly a 月 here, setting up temporary laboratories, editing suites and kit stores, all under the rattan roofs of our rustic jungle home.
On a helicopter recon of Imbak we discovered that the canyon's southern rim rose with vertical cliff walls to a summit of 5,000 feet called Gunung (Mount) Kuli. I contacted local rangers to get info on the peak, only to be told it had never been climbed and we would have to be fools to try.
由 now, in the full throes of explorer's red mist, I contacted the government and park's authorities only to be told the same thing. It was unreal — a virgin peak in the middle of the jungle — the kind of thing this expedition was created for.
With the summit of the peak and all the dazzling creatures that must live there in our sights, cameraman Johnny (Buck) Rogers, climbing supremo Tim Fogg and I set off with a few hundred feet of rope, 10 day's worth of noodles and one pair of pants each.
The Borneo jungle makes 你 feel like you’ve just had a mud fight in a Turkish steam bath. With no water on the ridge 或者 rock, one set of sodden clothes for the daytime and a dry set for the night, we were condemned to levels of squalor no human should ever sink to.
We spent the early evenings wandering around our camps au naturel as we didn't want to ruin our dry supplies. Every morning, we did impressions of gummy grandmas sucking on lemons as we squeezed into our soaking, stinking sewer suits. With no shelter other than the insides of our hammocks and no light, we'd retire straight to 床, 床上 just after dark and sit huddled up like swinging bananas while Tim played mournful Celtic tunes on his tin whistle (harmonica).
Our first challenge was to get close to the rock face. Over several days we hacked our way through the forest, ascending from sea level to nearly 3,000 feet where the rock began.
Once close, we found the rock was not an unbroken climb, but a brutal ridge where vertical sandstone rock was interspersed with knife-edged ridgeline covered in vegetation.
At this altitude, the ecosystem becomes a moss forest with every 魔发奇缘 树 root and vine swathed in thick, green, felt moss duvets. It turns every glade into a Tolkienesque cavern and 你 half expect a giant 蜘蛛 或者 orc to emerge from the darkness any 秒 to steal your noodles.
The moss soaks up the endless rain like a green sponge, meaning every step 或者 squeeze soaks 你 to the bone. The thousands of pitcher plants — some of them holding two and a half liters (approximately 2.7 quarts) of water and able to capture rats and birds — tip acidic sludge down the back of your neck as 你 machete through the undergrowth where the rattan and grasses turn the slashing into death 由 paper cut.
The vegetation was so thick that we proceeded at about 10 to 20 yards an hour. It was a great relief every time we broke out onto rock — at least it didn't feel like we were crawling through a sewer.
We had several very close calls on the ridge. Johnny was coming up toward me on a very steep incline (unroped) where he grabbed a root to haul himself up. The root came clean off in his hand and all I saw was him pitching back into 太空 with spiky treetops like spears far below aimed at his bottom.
Time went into slow motion — I saw his face open in horror, his hands flailing. In my mind I even saw myself telling his widow and small child the news and a lifetime of guilt ahead of me — all in less than a second.
Luckily, he stepped back onto a tiny ledge and just managed to halt himself. Then he looked behind him at the empty 太空 and just laughed maniacally for about half an hour. Ten 分钟 later, I repeated his mistake exactly and sat afterward hugging my knees and gibbering like a pestered chimp.
The rock climbing will never be mentioned in any coffee 表 book called Great Climbs of the World — it was horrible. The surface was a crumbly sandstone overgrown with vegetation and impossibly brittle. It was like climbing in shrubbery with the added bonus that your handhold would probably just come off in your hand.
On the hardest section of the climb very near the summit I reached for a hold and a slab of rock the size of a fridge freezer slid right off the face, skidded past my feet and over the 最佳, 返回页首 of my ropes, and narrowly missed taking Tim out completely beneath me. Another gibbering chimp moment.
Generally speaking, I 爱情 all of my expeditions — the hardship just accentuates the pleasure. This, however, was hell from start to finish.
It never stopped raining, was alternately fiercely hot 或者 waterlogged cold, but as I pushed my way up through the final rock pitch and ripped my tattered and slashed hands through the last few razor-sharp bushes to the summit, the joy of achievement finally kicked in.
We had made it, completing the first ascent of one of the few remaining unclimbed peaks in the world. Johnny and Tim ascended my ropes and we strode together up to the summit, grinning like morons.
The climax of our leviathan trip was one of the most dangerous and dramatic expeditions I've been lucky enough to partake in.
Half of the team had headed to Indonesian Borneo and were following my course up the Segah River, searching for the fabled black orangutans and exciting invertebrates. Hopefully, they would not suffer as I did with the 船, 小船 disaster I described at the start of this blog.
My half of the team was heading to the extraordinary Mulu Mountains in Sarawak in 搜索 of caves and cliffs, of which we found plenty.
The only real way to get around the Mulu National Park is 由 helicopter. The pointy mountains are constructed of rocks so sharp 你 could shave an orangutan with them, and anything less than vertical is encased in spiny, spiky, just plain awkward jungle.
Up in the whirlybird, though, 你 can get a big picture of the place and it'll take your breath away. About an 小时 into our 秒 flight we hovered over one of the park's larger peaks, and all of a sudden, became aware of a dark hole in the forest summit. It was as if someone had tossed a black M&M down onto a green carpet.
As we got closer it became evident that the hole was probably wider than a football field is long and dropped many hundreds of feet into the bowels of the mountain. Even better, a vast white stalactite, possibly six stories high, hung from its lip, pointing down into a cauldron that was green with vegetation.
A miniature ecosystem shut off from the outside world for a million years — we knew instantly that to explore its depths would be the finale we were searching for.
The team hacked a path up a vertical mountainside to the lip of the sinkhole — what's known as a doline — where a humongous underground cavern's roof had collapsed, opening the hole to the world above.
This area of startling limestone mountain systems in eastern Sarawak is peppered with unexplored cave systems due to its karst construction and contains the largest caves in the world. One of the caves is so big 你 could fit five St. Paul's Cathedrals inside 或者 40 jumbo jets wingtip to wingtip.
Our own sinkhole was 更多 modest at approximately 1,000 feet deep from lip to bottom and spacious enough for only one decent football stadium. That said, it was one of the most impressive places any of us had ever been and we were the first to ever venture into its deepest caverns.
I spend a good deal of my life hanging off ropes and no one would ever accuse me of being nervous around heights, but when I stepped off into 太空 with that unimaginable void beneath my feet, the world started to spin and the nauseous whirl of vertigo leapt right into the roof of my mouth. The camera clearly records me stating my reaction for posterity — "I want my mum."
Beside me, the vast white stalactite hung like the bony finger of a giant Grim Reaper, bright yellow orchids glimmering at its base. I was just trying to do anything other than look down. At one point, my rope slipped slightly from the 树 it was fixed to above me and I emitted an involuntary squeal, which warbled around the cavern like Mariah Carey in a blender.
There was a genuine tremor in my chest as my boots touched ground deep inside that majestic cavern, stepping into a startling 迷失 world that had been sealed off from the outside jungles since the roof above collapsed a million years ago.
And WHAT an ecosystem it was, vastly different from the forest above with prehistoric ferns and snake-like, spindly trees sprouting from lethal razor spears on the limestone floor. Single-leafed palms followed the sun's brief progress around the floor like radar dishes and vines hung like dreadlocks from the rock walls.
We made our base in a sandy-floored cave protected from the endless rain 由 a stalactite-decorated ceiling, which seemed to be aiming those giant rock harpoons down at our heads.
In the dark cave systems beyond I caught an albino gecko, which sat on my hand licking grit from its eyeballs as I watched blood pulse from its 心 through its translucent skin. A flighty stick insect spread its colorful wings in a threat display, then dropped its head like a pawing 公牛 only to reveal a luminous yellow dog 领, 衣领 around its neck.
We also saw creatures from any bug hater's nightmare: venomous centipedes with immense, long spindly legs (Scutigera) scuttled around the walls at a horrifying pace, and grotesque cave crickets with antenna as long as my arm and wicked sickle-shaped ovipositors protruding like scimitars from their rear ends invaded our camp.
We spent three nights on a sandy-floored 床, 床上 at the base of the sinkhole — our 下一个 objective was to find a way out. In one corner, the hole funneled downward into a jumble of vast boulders, and unbelievably, the whole gigantic feature was exited in the bottom 由 a tiny hole barely bigger than my shoulders, which led us down ropes into a succession of tight squeezes into the darkness.
I am not a big 粉丝 of caving. Blue skies and big 查看 are my potion, not squeezes through tunnels 你 may never be able to exit, heading deeper and deeper into the bowels of a mountain. One particular squeeze was so tight it could only be achieved 由 Yogic contortion, whilst breathing out — it was terrifying. That night I woke in a cold sweat, dreaming of being stuck fast in a pipe-like hole while cave crickets and Scutigera chewed out my eyeballs.
Every new tunnel was illuminated for the first time EVER 由 our torches (flashlights) — we had to 移动 painstakingly slowly to avoid snapping brittle and perfect stalactites. There would really have been no hope and no motivation to push on, except for one thing — wind. A dry, warm breeze howled up from the giant caverns below, leading us irresistibly on like Frodo into the depths of the dwarfish mines.
Oddly enough, Tim Fogg (my caving partner and not a bad person to have along as he was pretty much solely responsible for charting and exploring the caves of the region) exacerbated the Tolkienesque illusion as he bounded along on all fours, his big, icy eyes cursing the dreaded sunlight we left behind and drawing us on into the darkness, "Come, hobbitses, come, we shows 你 the way, we does."
On the 秒 日 of exploration in the deep, Johnny the cameraman took a slip in the cave, plummeting 前锋, 期待 and twisting his ankle. My (ridiculous) reaction was to run quickly to his aid, slipping even worse and disappearing straight over the edge of a 12-foot drop, bouncing flat on my back halfway down and landing in a pile of sand.
Anywhere else in this brutal scenery of rock harpoons and razor edges and the result would have been ...well, let's not even go there. Johnny was evacuated — hoisted out of the hole on pulley systems. Tim decided we would give the cave one 更多 日 to pop through then turn back.
At about 4 in the afternoon, a narrow tube with air roaring through it like a wind tunnel opened out into a series of breathtaking underground cathedrals. The first was separated in the center 由 two vast towers — each cavern could have contained a passenger ferry. Ours were the first eyes ever to pierce the darkness.
We wandered awestruck for an 小时 或者 so, but the wind had vanished. It would have taken months to explore every side tunnel and hole. We turned back, hearts heavy, yet at the same time profoundly moved 由 what we'd seen.
A week later, sitting in a local hut (knocking back 白饭, 大米 wine and doing our best to emulate the vibrant native dances to please our hosts), shimmying up our ropes was a forgotten irrelevance. All we could see in our memories was one of the most beautiful places in the world — and we were the first to explore it! It was a privilege not many experience in this shrinking modern world, and something we will all treasure for the rest of our days.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
« back
Borneo Calls
由 Steve Backshall
type size: [A] [A] [A]
As we dragged the heavy dugout 独木舟 over thundering rapids, waist-deep foaming waters raged around us, threatening to wrench us downstream. Two days before, our guide had proclaimed, "You are the first outsiders ever to see this place."
We looked around us in awe at a steep rock-sided canyon with pristine fine jade velvet drapes hanging over glass-clear water. Two further days of dragging heavily laden boats through the rainforest torrent and I was starting to appreciate why no one had ever been here before.
Suddenly, and with a sickening crack, the dugout we were dragging over the rocks was overcome 由 the waves, filled instantly with water, and snapped in two, causing all hell to break loose.
The supplies, stacked 2 feet deep in the boat's hull, were pitched into the river. The outboard motor was ripped off the back of the 船, 小船 and went floating downstream, a hardy boatman gamely clinging to it like a big, metal lifebuoy. We were in trouble …
The island of Borneo, divided between Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, is the third largest in the world and until very recently was covered in dazzling rain forest. In the last 20 years, about 60 percent of that forest has disappeared and may never return.
The purpose of Expedition Borneo was to attempt to get into some of the most remote, untrammeled hinterlands of this astoundingly rich and diverse island to discover new species and find, film and assess the well-being of the 动物 living there.
The expedition took our team up unscaled peaks, along rivers that had never been seen 由 the outside world, and into cave systems that had never seen light until we arrived.
The dugout disaster was the first of many harrowing adventures in which our mettle would be tested 由 an indifferent jungle. We managed to steer the gear to our carefully selected campsite in Imbak Canyon where we spent the night in hammocks 10 stories up in the crown of an emergent tree, where we played cards and drank whiskey in the lightning and downpour of a tropical night. Then we woke above the misty canopy to a chorus of gibbons 唱歌 for their breakfast.
A small crew trekked two days into the 心 of Imbak Canyon and climbed a magical seven-tiered waterfall to catch dancing jeweled frogs in coffee-colored pools. I festered (or just sat!) for four days and nights in an ancient burial ground that looked like something out of Raiders of the 迷失 Ark, where vine-entangled caves were surrounded 由 350-year-old ironwood coffins, to try and catch a huge 蟒蛇, python that lived there.
What we saw dazzled and delighted and convinced every one of us that it was a place well worth saving. I hope watching the programs will convince 你 as well.
Our crew of 24 people left from various places around the world and convened in a hotel in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, in the summer of 2006. Along with several of the finest natural history camera operators on the planet were 牛津, 牛津大学 professor of entomology Dr. George McGavin, 大学 of California, Berkeley, professor of herpetology Tyrone Hayes, ecologist and adviser to international agencies Tara Shine and ... er ... me.
In order for us to best work at finding new species, we invested much of our expedition budget on a rustic jungle base camp in a remote area of a Bornean forest reserve known as Imbak Canyon. An unknown forested valley between Borneo's largest national parks of Danum, Maliau and Tabin, it could prove to be an invaluable wildlife corridor if it could be properly protected.
Producer Steve Greenwood and I had flown 由 helicopter into the valley several months before the project began and decided it was the best place to build our base camp. I'd been on my own when locals took me to a stunning waterfall at the junction of two rivers with flattish ground nearby.
It had seemed a perfect spot to erect our base camp and I'd sung the location's praises wildly, so I looked on in hopeless embarrassment as a helicopter and a small platoon of porters struggled desperately to get 2.5 tons of film equipment into the camp down a narrow muddy trail and across a fast-flowing river, almost killing themselves doing it. It's only 日 1 and none of them are talking to me.
Other teething troubles included our ex-special forces support team failing to set up any kind of communication systems at all because the bottom of the canyon sucked up radio and satellite signals, and the scientists and crew gradually came to the perplexing discovery that we had chosen a site where 动物 were apparently in very short supply.
It was, however, a dazzling jungle where some of the world's tallest trees (some as high as 250 feet) grow and a tumultuous waterfall 下一个 to camp roared like Niagara one minute, and then two days later, dribbled like a small child who wants an ice lolly.
We were to spend nearly a 月 here, setting up temporary laboratories, editing suites and kit stores, all under the rattan roofs of our rustic jungle home.
On a helicopter recon of Imbak we discovered that the canyon's southern rim rose with vertical cliff walls to a summit of 5,000 feet called Gunung (Mount) Kuli. I contacted local rangers to get info on the peak, only to be told it had never been climbed and we would have to be fools to try.
由 now, in the full throes of explorer's red mist, I contacted the government and park's authorities only to be told the same thing. It was unreal — a virgin peak in the middle of the jungle — the kind of thing this expedition was created for.
With the summit of the peak and all the dazzling creatures that must live there in our sights, cameraman Johnny (Buck) Rogers, climbing supremo Tim Fogg and I set off with a few hundred feet of rope, 10 day's worth of noodles and one pair of pants each.
The Borneo jungle makes 你 feel like you’ve just had a mud fight in a Turkish steam bath. With no water on the ridge 或者 rock, one set of sodden clothes for the daytime and a dry set for the night, we were condemned to levels of squalor no human should ever sink to.
We spent the early evenings wandering around our camps au naturel as we didn't want to ruin our dry supplies. Every morning, we did impressions of gummy grandmas sucking on lemons as we squeezed into our soaking, stinking sewer suits. With no shelter other than the insides of our hammocks and no light, we'd retire straight to 床, 床上 just after dark and sit huddled up like swinging bananas while Tim played mournful Celtic tunes on his tin whistle (harmonica).
Our first challenge was to get close to the rock face. Over several days we hacked our way through the forest, ascending from sea level to nearly 3,000 feet where the rock began.
Once close, we found the rock was not an unbroken climb, but a brutal ridge where vertical sandstone rock was interspersed with knife-edged ridgeline covered in vegetation.
At this altitude, the ecosystem becomes a moss forest with every 魔发奇缘 树 root and vine swathed in thick, green, felt moss duvets. It turns every glade into a Tolkienesque cavern and 你 half expect a giant 蜘蛛 或者 orc to emerge from the darkness any 秒 to steal your noodles.
The moss soaks up the endless rain like a green sponge, meaning every step 或者 squeeze soaks 你 to the bone. The thousands of pitcher plants — some of them holding two and a half liters (approximately 2.7 quarts) of water and able to capture rats and birds — tip acidic sludge down the back of your neck as 你 machete through the undergrowth where the rattan and grasses turn the slashing into death 由 paper cut.
The vegetation was so thick that we proceeded at about 10 to 20 yards an hour. It was a great relief every time we broke out onto rock — at least it didn't feel like we were crawling through a sewer.
We had several very close calls on the ridge. Johnny was coming up toward me on a very steep incline (unroped) where he grabbed a root to haul himself up. The root came clean off in his hand and all I saw was him pitching back into 太空 with spiky treetops like spears far below aimed at his bottom.
Time went into slow motion — I saw his face open in horror, his hands flailing. In my mind I even saw myself telling his widow and small child the news and a lifetime of guilt ahead of me — all in less than a second.
Luckily, he stepped back onto a tiny ledge and just managed to halt himself. Then he looked behind him at the empty 太空 and just laughed maniacally for about half an hour. Ten 分钟 later, I repeated his mistake exactly and sat afterward hugging my knees and gibbering like a pestered chimp.
The rock climbing will never be mentioned in any coffee 表 book called Great Climbs of the World — it was horrible. The surface was a crumbly sandstone overgrown with vegetation and impossibly brittle. It was like climbing in shrubbery with the added bonus that your handhold would probably just come off in your hand.
On the hardest section of the climb very near the summit I reached for a hold and a slab of rock the size of a fridge freezer slid right off the face, skidded past my feet and over the 最佳, 返回页首 of my ropes, and narrowly missed taking Tim out completely beneath me. Another gibbering chimp moment.
Generally speaking, I 爱情 all of my expeditions — the hardship just accentuates the pleasure. This, however, was hell from start to finish.
It never stopped raining, was alternately fiercely hot 或者 waterlogged cold, but as I pushed my way up through the final rock pitch and ripped my tattered and slashed hands through the last few razor-sharp bushes to the summit, the joy of achievement finally kicked in.
We had made it, completing the first ascent of one of the few remaining unclimbed peaks in the world. Johnny and Tim ascended my ropes and we strode together up to the summit, grinning like morons.
The climax of our leviathan trip was one of the most dangerous and dramatic expeditions I've been lucky enough to partake in.
Half of the team had headed to Indonesian Borneo and were following my course up the Segah River, searching for the fabled black orangutans and exciting invertebrates. Hopefully, they would not suffer as I did with the 船, 小船 disaster I described at the start of this blog.
My half of the team was heading to the extraordinary Mulu Mountains in Sarawak in 搜索 of caves and cliffs, of which we found plenty.
The only real way to get around the Mulu National Park is 由 helicopter. The pointy mountains are constructed of rocks so sharp 你 could shave an orangutan with them, and anything less than vertical is encased in spiny, spiky, just plain awkward jungle.
Up in the whirlybird, though, 你 can get a big picture of the place and it'll take your breath away. About an 小时 into our 秒 flight we hovered over one of the park's larger peaks, and all of a sudden, became aware of a dark hole in the forest summit. It was as if someone had tossed a black M&M down onto a green carpet.
As we got closer it became evident that the hole was probably wider than a football field is long and dropped many hundreds of feet into the bowels of the mountain. Even better, a vast white stalactite, possibly six stories high, hung from its lip, pointing down into a cauldron that was green with vegetation.
A miniature ecosystem shut off from the outside world for a million years — we knew instantly that to explore its depths would be the finale we were searching for.
The team hacked a path up a vertical mountainside to the lip of the sinkhole — what's known as a doline — where a humongous underground cavern's roof had collapsed, opening the hole to the world above.
This area of startling limestone mountain systems in eastern Sarawak is peppered with unexplored cave systems due to its karst construction and contains the largest caves in the world. One of the caves is so big 你 could fit five St. Paul's Cathedrals inside 或者 40 jumbo jets wingtip to wingtip.
Our own sinkhole was 更多 modest at approximately 1,000 feet deep from lip to bottom and spacious enough for only one decent football stadium. That said, it was one of the most impressive places any of us had ever been and we were the first to ever venture into its deepest caverns.
I spend a good deal of my life hanging off ropes and no one would ever accuse me of being nervous around heights, but when I stepped off into 太空 with that unimaginable void beneath my feet, the world started to spin and the nauseous whirl of vertigo leapt right into the roof of my mouth. The camera clearly records me stating my reaction for posterity — "I want my mum."
Beside me, the vast white stalactite hung like the bony finger of a giant Grim Reaper, bright yellow orchids glimmering at its base. I was just trying to do anything other than look down. At one point, my rope slipped slightly from the 树 it was fixed to above me and I emitted an involuntary squeal, which warbled around the cavern like Mariah Carey in a blender.
There was a genuine tremor in my chest as my boots touched ground deep inside that majestic cavern, stepping into a startling 迷失 world that had been sealed off from the outside jungles since the roof above collapsed a million years ago.
And WHAT an ecosystem it was, vastly different from the forest above with prehistoric ferns and snake-like, spindly trees sprouting from lethal razor spears on the limestone floor. Single-leafed palms followed the sun's brief progress around the floor like radar dishes and vines hung like dreadlocks from the rock walls.
We made our base in a sandy-floored cave protected from the endless rain 由 a stalactite-decorated ceiling, which seemed to be aiming those giant rock harpoons down at our heads.
In the dark cave systems beyond I caught an albino gecko, which sat on my hand licking grit from its eyeballs as I watched blood pulse from its 心 through its translucent skin. A flighty stick insect spread its colorful wings in a threat display, then dropped its head like a pawing 公牛 only to reveal a luminous yellow dog 领, 衣领 around its neck.
We also saw creatures from any bug hater's nightmare: venomous centipedes with immense, long spindly legs (Scutigera) scuttled around the walls at a horrifying pace, and grotesque cave crickets with antenna as long as my arm and wicked sickle-shaped ovipositors protruding like scimitars from their rear ends invaded our camp.
We spent three nights on a sandy-floored 床, 床上 at the base of the sinkhole — our 下一个 objective was to find a way out. In one corner, the hole funneled downward into a jumble of vast boulders, and unbelievably, the whole gigantic feature was exited in the bottom 由 a tiny hole barely bigger than my shoulders, which led us down ropes into a succession of tight squeezes into the darkness.
I am not a big 粉丝 of caving. Blue skies and big 查看 are my potion, not squeezes through tunnels 你 may never be able to exit, heading deeper and deeper into the bowels of a mountain. One particular squeeze was so tight it could only be achieved 由 Yogic contortion, whilst breathing out — it was terrifying. That night I woke in a cold sweat, dreaming of being stuck fast in a pipe-like hole while cave crickets and Scutigera chewed out my eyeballs.
Every new tunnel was illuminated for the first time EVER 由 our torches (flashlights) — we had to 移动 painstakingly slowly to avoid snapping brittle and perfect stalactites. There would really have been no hope and no motivation to push on, except for one thing — wind. A dry, warm breeze howled up from the giant caverns below, leading us irresistibly on like Frodo into the depths of the dwarfish mines.
Oddly enough, Tim Fogg (my caving partner and not a bad person to have along as he was pretty much solely responsible for charting and exploring the caves of the region) exacerbated the Tolkienesque illusion as he bounded along on all fours, his big, icy eyes cursing the dreaded sunlight we left behind and drawing us on into the darkness, "Come, hobbitses, come, we shows 你 the way, we does."
On the 秒 日 of exploration in the deep, Johnny the cameraman took a slip in the cave, plummeting 前锋, 期待 and twisting his ankle. My (ridiculous) reaction was to run quickly to his aid, slipping even worse and disappearing straight over the edge of a 12-foot drop, bouncing flat on my back halfway down and landing in a pile of sand.
Anywhere else in this brutal scenery of rock harpoons and razor edges and the result would have been ...well, let's not even go there. Johnny was evacuated — hoisted out of the hole on pulley systems. Tim decided we would give the cave one 更多 日 to pop through then turn back.
At about 4 in the afternoon, a narrow tube with air roaring through it like a wind tunnel opened out into a series of breathtaking underground cathedrals. The first was separated in the center 由 two vast towers — each cavern could have contained a passenger ferry. Ours were the first eyes ever to pierce the darkness.
We wandered awestruck for an 小时 或者 so, but the wind had vanished. It would have taken months to explore every side tunnel and hole. We turned back, hearts heavy, yet at the same time profoundly moved 由 what we'd seen.
A week later, sitting in a local hut (knocking back 白饭, 大米 wine and doing our best to emulate the vibrant native dances to please our hosts), shimmying up our ropes was a forgotten irrelevance. All we could see in our memories was one of the most beautiful places in the world — and we were the first to explore it! It was a privilege not many experience in this shrinking modern world, and something we will all treasure for the rest of our days.
