A plaque makes it official
As you might remember, my first encounter with Honduran caves was the day I realized that you can, in fact, wear high heels at any time or place here in Honduras. I got really familiar with the caves of Talgua, Olancho. Low and behold, I now live only kilometers away from the only other set of excavated and touristic caves in Honduras. And they were recently named one of the 30 Most Marvelous Natural Wonders of Honduras (and we have a plaque to prove it).
My sitemate Leticia and I took our friend Sean to check ‘em out yesterday. It was actually my second time going, and her third, but this time I remembered to bring my good camera. Unfortunately, pictures still didn’t turn out very well due to the obvious low-light conditions and silly me I forgot my tripod. But if you squint, they look really good…
But first, some obligatory background info brought to you by Wikipedia: The caves were discovered in 1969 when construction workers were working on the Teguz-SPS highway. However plans to develop the caves for tourism didn’t begin until 1980, and never fully finished until 2003, or so we were told.
The interesting thing about this particular cave is that excavators have yet to find the end. You can pay a lot of money to go with a spelunking teammuch deeper in, but they stop around 12 kilometers, supposedly because it gets either too narrow or too dangerous to continue. The locals claim the cave reaches all the way to China, though I’m skeptical. It’s more likely that they open up again somewhere around Lago Yojoa or the Santa Barbara mountains, anywhere between 20 and 200 kilometers away.
Leticia and Sean and I went sans tourgiude, so it was a pretty quick in-and-out. But we managed to snap some interesting shots.
Okay, full disclosure: one of the main reasons Leticia and I wanted to go was so we could take our picture in there with a Glamour magazine. Because, if you are a frequent reader like we are, then you would know that there is a segment in the magazine for readers who travel to submit pictures of them in different parts of the world with the magazine and they publish one in each issue. So we thought we’d give it a try. But I am not going to post the picture we are submitting to Glamour because you will laugh at us beacuse you have to wait till we are published to see it. But here is the rest of our Cuevas de Taulave photo shoot.
Entrance to the cave
Descending (ascending?) into the abyss…
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The ceiling of the cave looks like rocks hanging above our heads liable to fall any minute…
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One shot with the flash just for good measure
Crystal formations on the walls of the cave
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Some other tourists hanging out
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A few more millenia and those little water drops will be a whole new stalactite
From what I could tell, this cave was slightly more damaged than the one I saw in Olancho. There was a good bit of graffiti on the walls and many, if not most, of the stalactites had been broken off. I imagine the rock formations would be a lot more stunning in their original un-screwed-up form. However the lighting there was pretty cool. There are lots of rocks and formations that are backlit with colored lights and illuminates a lot of things that someone wouldn’t have noticed otherwise.
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Group shot! Not my best hair day, but in my defense it was pretty damn humid in that cave.
On the way home we saw some guys selling fruit on the side of the road so we decided to get one and try it just for kicks. Leticia says it’s a zancullo (sancuyo? zanculla? jack fruit?) and tastes like a really stringy peach. It would make a pretty good smoothie if you could figure out how to seperate the pulp from the almond-sized seeds that get in the way.
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We’re still figuring out what to do with it…
