Thinking Allowed: The underworld

When we envisioned living in Canberra we envisioned lots of weekend trips to the snow. But as life would have it our main ski teacher can't ski and skiing is a crazy expensive sport. Especially in Australia, as it is a scarce commodity, the cost of enjoying it is much higher than in Canada. And really we are in Australia so we figure we can do other things that involve sand and water and earth. And so we went caving.

Well, you can't really call it caving as we went on a tour in a docile but beautiful little cave. But, it was an experience nonetheless, because we got to drive through the bright green hilly pastures (a result of the unusually wet winter - apparently the wettest ever been recorded) and we got to see the Wee Jasper area. It was also an experience because unlike most cave tours, ours was done by a very engaging man who despite still recovering from a heart attack, a few major infection and hospitalization has a remarkable sense of humour. Although he has been leading the tours for 20 years he doesn't seem to have tired of the process and our one hour tour stretched into a leisurely two hour chat through the caves. We spent at least 20 minutes playing a game called 'just by looking at the cave wall guess how many candles are lit'.

The older girls were fascinated by the stalactites, stalagmites, cave popcorn, pillars and the table full of geology and cave samples. Tova was pretty unimpressed with all of it except for the plates set up to catch the dripping water. We all left feeling pretty pleased about the abilities of limestone.

And then we went to look for a playground at the reserve nearby and instead ended up in a parking lot at the entrance of a real cave. Real in the sense of it being completely undeveloped unless you count the skull on a post at the entrance. A group of ragged looking youth were just emerging from the underworld after spending 7 hours exploring its depths. According to their leader the cave consists of five parallel caves that are each a hundred meters long and connect via secret pathways. Jakob and I both perked up an this prospect of real adventure. Armed with two children and and iphone flashlight Jakob headed in first. Five minutes later they came back covered in mud. I thought perhaps I would be braver and truly test the limits of the iphone flashlight but I didn't even get down the muddy slippy steep slope that leads to the cave mouth before I turned back in shame. We felt a bit old and disappointed but determined to maybe one day come back better equipped with real lights and less children because it really looked like a fun cave to explore.