Safe and boring tourist caves?

Have you ever been to Janolen caves in NSW, Aus? I went a long time ago, but what I remember was that they were very big (no chance of claustrophobia), light, reasonably dry, very pretty colours (no touching the formations!) and almost wheelchair accessible.

That's how my caving experience began today. A smooth, lighted path into a cave with lots of other people. At first it was quite boring and I was wondering if it was actually worth 800 yen ($8). There were people (a surprising number of small children) going both directions and we occasionally had to step aside and wait for a minute. But as it got slightly narrower it became more interesting - a bit more of a squeeze to get through, negotiating other people coming the opposite direction and ankle deep water to walk through. As were kept walking it became more tricky and definitely more wet until we were wading through knee deep and rather cold water, dodging rock formations and trying not to hit our heads! Then we got to where the lights were off! A number of people turned back at this stage, this could've been due to the complete darkness or because you had to crawl through water and low ceilings to continue. So, we felt our way through the cave and waded our way through water now coming up past our knees (which didn't really matter at this point).

Useful information when you start a walk is knowing where the walk finishes. As the spaces got narrower and more filled with water we began wondering if the cave went in a loop or formed a dead end. When most of our group decided that they didn't feel like swimming and turned back, we discovered that it was in actual fact a dead end! It was a rather wet walk back.

So our rather boring cave walk became very fun and interesting! But next time I might consider taking a torch!




By the way, no photos for this as my camera battery was flat from all those fireworks photos! But maybe this was a good thing considering how wet I got...