We started our day off today with a trip to a local cave. I've been to a number of caves and wasn't sure how impressive this one would be, but it was quite beautiful. It was not very deep underground, in fact we climbed a 1/2 km up a hill before getting to the entrance. The cave was pretty dry so I wasn't sure if it was still "live" (ie still had growing formations) or if the dry winter weather meant the cave dried out during this season. We had a local escort, but he spoke no English, so the local university students who have been chaperoning us were given a descriptive sheet to translate for us. This kind of technical translation is always so hard. I wanted to ask some questions about when the cave had been discovered, etc (It was in pretty good condition, which suggests recent discovery, or private preservation for some time because the formations in older caves are often pillaged.) However, the students were kind of stressed with the translation, so I just kept my questions to myself.
We started with a beautiful hike through the forest with a dusting of snow. The group from a Florida school was with us and had snowball fights the entire way. They had never seen snow.
Entrance to the cave. They don't normally open in the winter, but opened for our group of 200.
We saw a good portion of the discovered cave, about 400 m of 600 m. It was not extensive, but quite pretty. The picture on the right is a formation that was sliced in half so you could see the layered build up of deposits inside over time.
We saw a number of small bats. They are myotis myotis, which google says is the Greater Mouse Eared bat. Weighing about 1.5 oz, it is one of the larger species of bats in Europe. In the summer they roost in church steeples and eat beetles and other bugs that they locate on the ground (they do not hunt by echolocation). In the winter they hibernate in caves like the one we were in.
Beautiful cave "bacon".
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