In the Dark

(June 2nd) Baofeng Lake was exciting, but the cool morning quickly vanished into a sunny sweltering afternoon. What better time to head into Asia's largest cave system? Yellow Dragon Cave is huge! You go on a tour spanning several kilometers - some on foot and some on a boat through an underground river, but you only cover a small fraction of the cave. This kind of place can really blow you away with its grandeur.

Taking pictures in the cave was a huge challenge. First there was the exposure - it's a lot of black in the image balanced by some very, very bright spots created by the lighting. You want to expose creatively, but you still want to make it feel like a cave. The biggest challenge though was the tour group you are forced to stay with. It moves at a blistering pace - people would never do this in the US. So usually I was taking a single shot of a scene and then literally running to catch up with the group. Miss the group, and you miss your boat through the river... Most of what you see in the cave are stalactites and stalagmites, but there also large chambers, water in various forms, and other structures. I am developing a liking for unusual textures, so some of the patterns on the floor really caught my attention.

The Chinese have taken a different sort of view to lighting the cave. I am not sure how caves are normally lit, but in many ways it felt like a disco club inside the cave with brightly colored lights continiously changing intesity, hue, and sometimes direction. The most humorous example I saw was this rock that just screams out Pac-Man to me. With the light coming out of the top, I had to stifly a laugh (the light through the top is intented to illuminate the water that is flowing from the ceiling into a hole in the structure).

The stalagmites were truly impressive. Kilometer after kilometer and they all looked different. Some short, some tall. Some wide, some narrow. Some sharp, some smooth. Impossible to describe all the variations. Sometimes they would come in especially nice groups like this one.

The highlight of the tour is this stalagmite - famous all over China. This spire extends nearly 100 meters high, and it is the tallest in the world. Legend has it that the Monkey King slept atop its pinnacle for centuries. Strange sleeping habits indeed...

On the way out we took a "special tour". "Special" in China usually means you pay extra. But for a couple of dollars I got to see an area of the cave just discovered and opened. It is still in active formation (most of the cave is not), so that means it's wet. I also walked into it knowing I was going to bump my head and tried hard not to, but it is so densely packed with stalactites and stalagmites that you can barely walk in many places. So of course the bumb came and it was a particularly hard, sharp one causing a bit of bleeding. But the chamber was lit with normal light and there was no rush tour, so I got to take some nice shots of geology at work.