Thursday, December 31, 2009

Jenolan Caves

In the middle of our day trip to the Blue Mountains, we visited the Jenolan Caves. I couldn't help comparing them to the awesome Dan yr Ogof cave in South Wales. the Jenolan Caves are the oldest known caves in the world, having been formed about a gazillion years ago.

Even the entrance to the cave looked impressive.


A short way in, we entered the "cathedral," which was a larger cavern It seems like every system of caves worth its salt has to have a cathedral but, in this case, the name was fitting because it used to be used as a place of worship.



Throughout the cave, there were beautiful rock formations.



A short distance after the cathedral, we came upon a sharp descent. When the cave was first discovered, it was necessary to climb down the nearly vertical drop using a rope. Thankfully, some steps have now been built to bypass it.


A little later on, we passed a deep chasm with water at the bottom. This, it was explained to us, is the river that slowly dug out the caves over the years. It has been named the River Styx, after the river between Earth and the underworld in Greek mythology. We were warned not to drop anything in the river, as it was far too cold to go in and get anything out. By "far too cold," our guide meant about 6 degrees or so. This didn't seem very cold to us but we still didn't drop anything in.


Later, we passed some animal bones. I'm not sure if these particular bones were deliberately placed where we found them but we were told that the original explorers of the caves found the remains of dead animals as they explored.


We also saw some older animal remains. This next picture does not show a fossil but, rather, the calcified remains of an animal. I'm not sure quite how this differs from a fossil but there you go.



Our tour of Lucas Cave was over all too quickly but we couldn't stay as we had to get back to Sydney in a hurry; it was nearly time to celebrate New Year's Eve.

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