Tag:clearwater cave
The shot below is perhaps the classic Deer Cave shot. Mine is actually a seven-shot HDR – seven slides scanned and merged in Photomatix Pro.
To the right you can see examples of the limestone cliffs that feature in this area. Up in the hills in the top left corner you can see a collapsed surface. These highlight some of the challenges of hiking in this area. The terrain makes it extremely difficult but you could be hiking along and find yourself on the edge of a cliff. Being so far from help, that’s why you stay on the trails.
The reason that sprang to mind was the skull-like shape just up and right of the center of this photo. It’s actually just the way the sun in breaking through the jungle canopy to illuminate that one spot on this cave exit, but it does look like a disembodied head!
Quite why these three bats chose this spot I’ve no idea. But apparently, every evening they’d head out to feast in the jungle and then return here again at dawn. Home, sweet home!
In the photo below we’d progressed further into the cave and were about to lose sight of the mighty entrance we’d passed through. You can see a set of wooden stairs to the right of the frame. The movement of the torch held by the man behind the railing hints at the exposure length. Since I didn’t have a tripod I must have braced my camera against a rock formation or another railing.
It was here that I made a mistake I was to repeat several times in the caves – I stepped off the path. The material on the floor in front of me is tens of thousands of years accumulation of bat and swiftlet droppings – a big steaming pile of bat shit! I didn’t realize that till I stepped off the path and my foot started to sink into this soft, gooey material. As I said, I made that same mistake several times!
