As a little catch up before I take you back in time, this past Wednesday was the big move out of the apartment and into the top floor of Woodland (Tom's parents house). I have lots of pictures since Katoomba but I think I'd better finish up that trip first.
To the caves!
Here's what the trip looked like, blue skies and huge hills.
This is part of a softwood lumber farm. It was very strange because the view went from the usual eucalyptus trees everywhere and then very suddenly bald spots with baby trees surrounded by huge pines. It was strangely North American looking.
The Jenolan caves are in a limestone deposit in the Blue Mountains, the cave system is so big that it's still being explored, and to get into the caves you have to travel through one. Our big tour bus just barely between the walls on the other side.
This is the ladies washroom in that big entrance cave. I loved the door frame in the stone quite a bit.
The first cave on our tour was the Lucas Cave, it has some of the biggest chambers and one of the first to be discovered by the Europeans. I thought these formations looked like eels.
This is a good example of the two appearances of the crystals. Wet: growing with a waxy look and dry : you can see the edges of the crystals and therefore they look glittery.
Drip, Drip, Drip.
This is a skeleton of a cave wombat. The exit chamber was filled up to the waist with bones from millions of years of kangaroos and wombats that fell in. It became something of a gift shop when the 19th Century explorers started to take bits of bones home.
This is the ladder used to change the light bulbs.
I'm not sure which cave the left one is, but quite a few have stairs like that to begin the tour. The Lucas cave tour had a total of 900 steps. Not all at once though so it wasn't really that bad.
The Cave House and fancy hotel. They must have had some wood fires burning because I could smell them all day.
Our second cave was the Orient Cave, it's entered through a 400 foot man made tunnel that was not so carefully blasted into existence.
The Orient cave is one of the most decorated with formations, this little one was right at the beginning and gave a pretty good idea of what we could expect inside.
This is one of the first chambers, they were fantastic! One thing that I was frustrated with was how hard it was to capture the height and depth of these chambers on camera. Even with the lighting as help it tends to flatten out a bit. As scale reference, we are about half way up a 37 meter tall chamber.
Lots of frozen water falls.
This cave had lots and lots of tiny little crystals that were given fairy related names from the first explorers.
This was a little nook in some rocks and is called the fairy's skating rink.
A close up of a huge stalactite called Granny's shawl. Many of the formations had a fabric look to them because the water tension causes folds as the minerals are deposited.
Here are the stairs that Tom and I tip toed down.I have never concentrated so hard on not slipping before. (I didn't by the way).
As we were leaving the cave I saw this door off the side of the huge tunnel. I would guess that you can't slam it because when the not so massive doors were shut nicely they could be heard all the way at the other end of the cave. I had some mental images of cartoons were stalactites are falling from the ceiling, though I doubt that would happen since the tunnel was blasted out and the cave still exists.
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