Jenolan Caves

Ok this place was a-fucking-mazing. It is beyond anything I can put into words, so I won’t try. The pictures don’t even come close to capturing the size and spectacle of the place. What was really cool is that I hung around the back of the group so I could always see them turn off the lights in the area we just left. Watching the amazing formations that have taken 300+ million years to form slowly fade away into the conditions they have developed in for the past Three Hundred Thirty-nine million, Nine hundred and Ninety Nine thousand, Eight Hundred and Twenty Six years was pretty incredible.

(this is me explaining to kat that the thing in front of us is a less than 1 meter deep pool of water, not a 50 meter drop of onto spiky rocks. The water is so still it looks like glass and it freaked me out until somone took a picture and I saw that it was just water)

After the caves we walked down to a little swimming hole on a river coming out from under the caves. Robin, Keith, Katie, Annie and I all jumped in the water. And I mean jumped. There was a cliff face that was across the stream from us, and Howard said that we should go in from the short cliff face first, judge the height, and then jump from the taller one if we wanted to. Robin of course was the first to do both. While I was changing into my swimsuit Katie and Annie jumped in from the high ledge, and Katie cut/bruised her knee pretty good. I decided to jump from the shorter one, and laughed to myself as I climbed up at the look on my mother’s face if she could see what I was doing. I jumped off and I crashed into the water, and my feet hit the slit pretty much immediately. I jumped in at a squatting angle though so it was a good landing. I was not going to jump off the tall one.

Oh, and we also saw a red bellied black snake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-bellied_Black_Snake) on the path hunting insects. We waited for it to pass and then continued on slowly. Howard said at that point that it was a 200 percent increase in the snakes that Lewis and Clark has seen in the past five years (or however long he has been working there). We are up to 400 percent now. More on that later.

(Insert picture from Howard's camera)