Caving in Kalk Bay

Since being back in cape town I’ve had this really unexplainable desire to be outdoors, well maybe not entirely unexplainable, I’ve put it down to living in one of this worlds biggest cities for a year and not seeing much of nature, or anything other than towering city blocks and the odd man made park. London was amazing but it doesn’t offer much more than loads of money and one big party.

So after my abseiling adventure a few weeks ago, I decided that caving, cave crawling, whatever you want to call it, was the next exploit I wanted to explore. So once again with Max at my side (no one better to have with you when outdoors… maybe except Steve Irwin) we started climbing Kalk bay mountains to get to these infamous caves. Once at the top it took a bit of scouting around as there aren’t exactly huge billboards pointing you in the right direction, the cave entrances are normally no bigger than the size of a toilet bowl.

10 or 20 minutes later and we’re in the first cave; Max advises that we should crawl down this tunnel that to me didn’t look very inviting. Max went ahead and left me contemplating this, another 5 or 10 minutes later and I followed; scary stuff. The diameter of the tunnel is just big enough to fit my waist through, so picture me getting to a point where its so tight that my arms cant really move and I’m forced to push myself with my legs… hmmm fun. Anyways the point is that I did it, it was one of the scariest and most trying times of my life but I figured if max can do it so can I.

After that rather testing experience, we ventured towards another far friendlier cave where there was still much crawling but far less than the first cave. And this time the crawling resulted in huge bat caves, much to my disappointment though I couldn’t find the batmobile, maybe the cave was still being rebuilt after the Wayne mansion burned down. We did however see bats, standing dead still, paying no attention to the dripping water all over the cave, I pointed my flashlight upwards and waited for the bats to ‘flit’ from one wall to the other. It was an awesome experience and one that I would like to do again sometime, maybe in winter when half the caves are filled with water, that could be interesting.

Photos to follow.