Despite the white-knuckle drive towards it the Jenolan Caves are one of Australia's most visited attractions. So feeling very refreshed after our warm, comfy bed we set off to explore a couple of the 320 caves. The first tour was of the specacular Temple of Baal (there is a story behind it's name but it's a long one). Once inside the cave there was a neverending supply of amazing sights to see. You could easily spend hours down there and not run out of things to look at (although,it is quite possible that you might run out of air!) I surprised myself with a new found interest in geology that high school geography could never inspire. Now that I've seen stalagtites and stalagmites for myself I don't think I'll be forgetting which is which for a while. And they were just for starters, we also saw columns (when stalagtites and stalagmites join), a huge shawl shaped like an angel's wing, flow rocks, which look like waterfalls frozen in midstream and a whole host of other wonderful things that I can't remember the names for. Si was impressed as his 160 photos will testify! Anyway it's simply wonderful what a bit of water and a few hundred millilon years can produce.
We also went on a tour of the Lucas cave, one of the first caves to be shown to the public. It has been a show cave since the 1800s and as you can imagine the tour would have been a little different back then. Hearing about the first tours being conducted by candlelight and the visitors being given hessian sacks to slide down into the next chamber of the cave (wearing their Sunday best of course and holding their candles in their mouths!) we were grateful for electric lighting, concrete stairs and steel handrails. Sadly you can see the damage done by these early cave explorers who left their initials, pilfered the crystals and left the waxy stalagtites and mites with a dirty black hue due to being touched. Despite this there was still plenty of magical things to see (especially with the beauty of coloured lighting) such as the broken collumn you can see in the picture.
So all in all it was a grand day out and worth the trecherous journey to get there.