..:. Cracking My Vainpot .:..

Sometimes, awesomeness can only be described in pictures. Such is the case for our underground adventure into the wild cave of Devil's Icebox.

There aren't that many places in the world, where you can canoe in underground rivers and navigate through low-ceiling passages with your fingers.

Icebox: as in a constant temperature of around 54F (12C') around the year.

Given the thrill and joy we got for a mere admission fee of $25, I give this wild tour a 5***** Star rating :)

Suddenly, Missouri rocks!

(tour 5-6 hours; 1st-come-1st-serve one-month-advance booking, limited to ~300 visitors per year)

http://www.mostateparks.com/rockbridge/cave.htm

For earlier post: Teaser videos

He made me put on the legs of my hiking pants, despite the fact that I HAVE covered myself in vasaline..

Making Gold's Gym worthy

The hardest part of this trip: carrying our canoes through the woods and down to the mouth of the cave.

Down into the entrance of Devil's Icebox.

Here we go boys! Start paddling! People gave us disapproving stares when they see us strapping glow sticks onto our oar :P

On our way back, we had the privilege to go first. Venturing onto undisturbed water was an unbelievable experience, as the archway form a perfect reflection on the water surface, giving an illusion that the whole area was crystal clear transparent ~

Looking up at some roots from trees growing above us

Fluffy

Stuck at a particularly tight spot. What else to do? Click*

Oops. Wrong hole. Back it up! Back it up!

Into the right hole this time :)

This formation is called "Mother Nature"

Our guide got eaten alive bby a huge cave droll

The amazing chocolate vanilla room

Lovely luncheon. We had to honor of being ths first to use chopsticks in this cave.

The dismal failure of disposable ISO800 extra-flash film camera.

Finally, light at the end of the tunnel...! We surprised some baby twins when we got out. They kept screaming "Where you get the boat?" lol

Mighty proud of my boys!!

This wild cave is inside the Rockbridge State Park near Columbia, MO.

http://www.mostateparks.com/rockbridge/cave.htm

This is the best kept secret of Missouri...

How we started the day...

For the full post:

Devil's Icebox: Missouri's Best Kept Secret

I needed a break, so I did. lol

After running around wet and naked for 5 days, I'm 110% recharged!

Every single one of my muscles is sore now. But, boy, I was in a heaven that's hot as hell!

We jet skiied at 40mph, kayaked with dolphins, swam with lobsters, even saw a snout with 2 nostrils poking out of the water... alligator???

Oh oh, and have I mentioned frisbee on the beach wearing nothing but 5 pairs of adonis belts?

Or outside shower underneath a coconut tree?

Hohoho.

My heart is still fluttering a bit :P

Devil's Pool, Victoria Waterfall, Zimbabwe

[Road to Nowhere]

I still can't think of why anyone would want to go to Wichita.

But anyway. I did learn something new on the way there... the smell of skunk!

As expected, our drive into the heart of Kansas was flat and uneventful.

I was almost glad to see those hideous roadside billboards screaming "Abortions are painful", "Accept Jesus Christ into your life or regret forever" or "blah blah blah righteousness, blah blah blah sin".

Then there were of course adverts for various gun shows and local churches.

One community church had a 9am "mild" service and a 11am "wild" service. Wonder if that's PG vs NC-17...

For a split second, I had the idea of kissing the ground when we passed through El Dorado, the hometown of Obama's grandparents.

(Oh and did I mention that I finally saw a trailer park for real? They even have satellite dishes. So swell.)

As soon as we arrived at my friend's house, I got out of the car and a sense of terror went down my spine. Welcome to suburbia.

All the houses look identical. The perfectly manicured lawns, the flawless driveways, the shiny pickup trucks. So errie. It was just like a horror movie.

[Wichita moment]

For the following two days, we went around town seeing shit like the first Pizza hut in the world and partying at this gigantic gay club/ranch "Fantasy" that has it's own swimming pool, beach volley ball court. But honestly, who cares.

My friend had to have his pants hemmed, so I was fortunate enough to visit this dodgy laundromat that got stuck in the 70s. Bright orange plastic chairs, fake walnut wallpaper, aging white trash airing his nuts, 17'' TV set showing football, a fridge selling imaginary soda, army leaflets offering to pay for your college, this place *is* a time capsule.

But that's not it. The whole "Midway Plaza" is an installation of extreme surrealism. To the right of the laundromat is a local church for immigrants. To the left stand two strip joints. On the opposite side of the plaza, you'll find a gun shop and an Asian grocery market. All these just one block away from an elementary school down the road.

That was my "Wichita moment".

[It's not about the farm boys]

As part of the aftermath of the Vietnam war, thousands of refugees from the indochine region were settled in the midwest in the 70s and 80s, giving Wichita one of the largest populations of Vietnamese and Laotians in the US. Within one generation, they managed to work their way up, moving from sheds by the railroad into big houses with huge plasma in every room, sending their kids to college to become engineers, IT specialists and doctors.

I think I know why people go to Wichita now.

Why would ANYone want to go to Wichita? That obscure space sandwiching between the prints "United" and "States" on a world map.

I went on a road trip right into the heart of Kansas just to find out.



[Seven nation army, The White Stripes]

I'm going to Wichita
Far from this opera for evermore
I'm gonna work the straw
Make the sweat drip out of every pore
And I'm bleeding, and I'm bleeding, and I'm bleeding
Right before the lord

Once we were inside the Rio Camuy Cave system, all we could really see was a snake of our headlights. It wasn't long before we got a cold welcome from above - a refreshing shower of natural mineral water dripping down from the ceiling. Fabulous~

Remember the Mines of Moria in Lord of the Ring, where Gandolf sorta "died"? It was rocky like that, except there were no steps, and it was full of spiders, bats and... big cockroaches.

Wherever we turned, there were strange columns of mineral deposits and even stranger coral fossils. You know those gigantic stalactites, stalagmites and geological formations that are usually elaborately lite up in national parks and one can only take pictures with?

We had to climb them!

Both up and down, and use them as anchors. Would've thought it'd be tricky, with water running down their surface, but it was surprisingly easy. Those intricate grooves and patterns on their surface actually turned us into spidermen!



Deep inside the cave, things got muddier and muddier, and the sound of flowing water got louder and louder. Soon enough we came to this cliff over this sizable subterranean river and had to jump into it. LOL I really wanted to climb back up and to do it again!! The water was so deep we couldn't touch the ground at all. At times, it felt like I was swimming in a flooded London Underground. At times, I felt I was in the sinking Titanic, with water creeping up to the ceiling and we had to tilt our head to keep breathing.



Finally, we got to in this massive chamber with the size and acoustics of a concert hall. Our Adventuras tour guides, being attentive in every aspects, now reached into their huge backpacks and whipped out seat pads, candles and a ziplocked waterproof boombox. So we had a very memorable and bizarre candle-light meal in the middle of a cave, with jazz playing in the background! Fantastic.



Things got a lot rougher after that. First, we had to jump back into the river, this time in pitch dark. Then, we had to sprint through mud. My shoes were perfect for swimming, but they got stuck when it's muddy. The more I struggled, the more my feet sank into the Nutella and the tighter the vacuum became. It got to a point where them mud was up to my knees and I could no longer free my legs without losing both of my shoes. So I put my arms into the mud, fished for the shoes and ran bare foot for the rest of that dried-up river bank. Some people did lost their shoes though, I was lucky to lose only a sock, and even luckier NOT to have stepped on any of the mud crabs that we spotted only afterwards.



By the time we saw daylight again, we were met with a tropical rainstorm outside the cave. My headlight stopped working halfway through so I was covered in cuts and bruises, even underneath my knee pads. There was sand between my toes, mud on my heels, one of my contact lenses has gone funny. My whole body was visibly shaking and I had to chow down a whole protein bar in the rain to snap out of it. Nonetheless, I didn't want to leave. I didn't want the adventure to end at all. Adventuras you guys ROCK!!! I totally recommend caving at Puerto Rico's Rio Camuy Angeles Cave to anyone dying for adventures.

After this trip, lying on the beach just seems SO lame~

*Special thanks to Jennifer who translated everything for me and took all these wonderful pictures! I'm so glad that her 5-time ziplocked digital camera survived the swim!

My natural high has subsided now. I'm starting to feel the dozens of cuts and bruises that cover my arms and legs. But boy I tell you, it was totally worthy. Cave Angeles, Puerto Rico - by far my best adventure ever!!




5.30am. San Juan. As soon as I boarded that Adventuras bus, I knew it's gonna be quite a trip, for I was the only foreigner and the only non-Spanish speaker in the whole tour.

Luckily, Rosanno, our guide-entertainer-DJ-captain, didn't mind repeating everything in English for my sole benefit. I sat next to this girl Jennifer, and we both thought we were going to die that day lol

Heading southwest into the heart of the island's, we left behind all things civil, donning only helmut, harness, knew pads, lifejacket and the spirit of an explorer.




We got to our first challenge after a short hike through the untamed jungle. Rosanno started playing the theme tune from Indiana Jones from his ziplocked waterproof boom box.

It was a dream came true - we had to zip-line over to the other side of the valley. Yeehah!







If that looked crazy, guess what, it was the easiest thing we did that day~

After a 5-minute crash course, we rappelled down a 250-feet sheer drop into the cave. Supposedly, we just have to trust the rope system, lean back, relax, spread the legs, and go down that cliff in a controlled manner.

As soon as I went pass the point of no return, I realized that my gear was funky. Instead of having 4 interlocking metal bars restraining my rope, only 3 were in place.

I couldn't control my speed at all. I'd just fall if I didn't physically hang on to that bloody rope. One wrong move, I'd be dead in the jungle.



THAT was the biggest challenge EVER in my life - how to get out of that half-dangling, half-free falling situation, alive!

With all the strength I could muster, frantically squeezing and feeding the rope at the same time, I somehow got to the mid-section.

So there I was, my arms trembling, my feet tiptoeing on some mouldy rocks, my numb fingers holding onto dear life, and then, guess what. This guide Johnny who stationed there saw me, started flexing his muscles and wanted me to feel his biceps.

No shit! I fucking swear!!

After some panicky primal yelling, pointing and signing, that bastard finally turned his attention to my gear and fixed it. I couldn't believe how easy everything just became!!

Slowly, I descended into the mouth of this ginormous cave and IT WAS MAGNIFICENT!

Not even a hurricane can stop me now. Puerto Rico I'm coming!!






Aventuras Tierra Adentro

No smoke at Yosemite. Just a lot of heat :P



We slept under the stars and watched satellites gliding across the clear night sky.



Hiked 6 hours to see the Bridalveil falls, which gets a bit misty in the wind.