We went to Jenolan Caves

A couple of weeks back, we took a trip out to Jenolan Caves, about an hour and a half west of Lawson by car.

For me it was a bit of a nostalgia trip, like so many things we've been doing since we arrived in Oz. I remember the Caves quite vividly from my childhood. I spent a week at Caves House with the family when I was about ten, and then another few days with my school.

I remember this school trip well, mainly because of the crazy stuff that we all got up to while our teacher was taking an afternoon nap. About forty of us, all around twelve years old, took it upon ourselves to explore the caves. On our own.

Not the caves marked out and made safe for tourists, but the other caves, the ones which may have been explored by speliologists, but which are considered too dangerous for the public to go into.

Jenolan Caves is a limestone system which is only three hundred metres wide, but which runs for twelve kilometres underground. You can see small cave entrances everywhere you go. We were like ants, crawling up the sides of the Devil's Coachhouse, in and out of these little caves with our torches. Well, they start out little. We found out later that some of these passgages have bottomless pits in them. Nice.

This time round, we settled for a guided tour of the Chifley Cave, an unguided tour of the Nettle Cave, and a walk down by the lake.

The top photo in this entry is a view of the Devil's Coachhouse from the Nettle Cave. The strange 'lobster' formations you can see on the right are called stromatolites, or craybacks - colonies of live cyanobacteria. You can find out more about this unusual life form here:

http://www.jenolancaves.org.au/index.asp?pageID=24

Ant.