Flippers go spelunking... for seven straight hours!
Burial Cave, Lumiang Cave, and Sumaging Cave, Sagada
May 1, 2009

(Second batch of photos)
You would think that a bunch of bookworms would rather have lounged around the hotel and read their books, but no, we had to sign up for some spelunking... We were really confident too, dismissing option 1 (just Sumaging Cave) because we thought that was wimpy, and going for broke with two supposedly adjacent caves, which the tour guides estimated would take us around four hours.

We entered the first cave at around 2pm...

rocks....
rocks....
rocks....

Four hours later, we had barely breached the intersection of the two caves.

rocks...
swimming hole...
rocks...
rocks...
some rock formations...
emergency exit button please...
guano...
bat piss...

Until we finally emerged into the chilly night at nearly 9 pm, drenched, totally exhausted, covered in guano, and who knows what else!

We would have taken more photos, but we were busy praying we would get out alive. So no photo of us slipping on the rocks, doing a crazy Tarzan swing from a rope (okay, so that was just me, and that was not my intention, believe me), jumping into chilly water and swimming to the opposite bank, edging crablike on a narrow ledge overlooking an abysmal chasm (a long and painful way to fall), and all the other bonkers stunts we had to pull to get out of that cave.

When we got near the exit, the guide offered us the option of seeing the different rock formations, and we unanimously vetoed it, just to get out. The guide ended up doing the (mostly lewd) rock formations tour with my camera, so there are pictures of those.

I wanted to kiss the ground when we finally got out but I was afraid that if I hit the ground they'd have to haul me bodily back to the hotel because I wouldn't be able to get up, hahaha...

Just remember, when you take this tour, when the guide tells you that once you start you can't back out... JUST BACK OUT! SAVE YOURSELF!

Hahaha. I'm glad we took this tour, and I'm glad I survived, but like most of us in this tour, if I had known exactly what was inside that cave, I wouldn't have done it.

Needless to say, we spent a good part of what was left of the night scrubbing off the guano.