The Bat Cave

One day Rita (the dutch owner of Nuts Huts) who was by the way a health freak told us that we should take a short and pleasant hike up a hill to see a cave with a few bats in it. We thought, wow what a great idea a bit of exercise after breakfast would be wonderful. We were SO wrong. The pleasant hike turned out to be the trek from hell vertically upwards for two hours in boiling hot weather...(I might be exaggerating a tiny bit). We were accompanied by a guide who carried a sword on his back (this bit is no exaggeration) but we were to scared to ask him why, I assume it was to stop killer snakes or something.

Walking up

When we got to the top of what turned out to be a mountain, we continued down a small path to what turned out to be a rather large open cave lit by daylight, with a few bats high up in the ceiling. Julia and I were quite impressed and I was quite relieved that there weren't loads of bats seeing as I think they look like flying rats. The guide tells us to put our bags down and tells us that we should get going, in a moment of confusion we wondered why we would leave our bags at the top of the mountain and how we would get to them when we were at the bottom. Julia and I start walking back towards the entrance of the cave when the guide tells us that we're going the wrong way. He points smilingly at what looks like a small crack in the cave wall, we hesitate. Surely he couldn't mean that we were going through the crack, it didn't look like it was possible to fit through there at all unless you had the physique of a leprechaun (of course).

The first cave and our guide

Bats with their shiny eyes

Through the crack we went anyway and with much scuffling and squeezing we emerged into a pitch black cave, luckily we had our trusty headtorches with us. The cave was extremely humid, the silence broken only by the stories our guide was telling us of Japanese treasure and of course, bats. The cave was full of them, they were squeaking and flying everywhere. If worrying about being hit smack in the face by a bat wasn't enough the guide had found a spider the size of my hand...(but I swear it was bigger really). People who know me well know that I have serious problems with spiders, I have nightmares about them where I wake up literally screaming. So having to face my biggest phobia in a cave, under a mountain, in the dark, with flying bats was the most terrifying experience of my life. Someone asked the guide whether the spider was poisonous, the reply was "Well they are called scorpion spiders but I don't really know...We could try and see" whereupon he proceeds to poke the spider with a stick so that it runs towards us in that creepy eight legged way.

Scorpion Spider

I was all for getting out but the guide keeps walking deeper into the cave. We get to the end and someone asks how deep the cave is. The guide responds "Oh about 600m deep" we're all taken aback but he assures us that we're only going in 50m whilst pointing at yet another crack in the cave wall. Julia has serious clostrophobia issues, but she managed to crawl on her stomach through the crack without having a panic attack. We emerged into another cave, this one was alot smaller and you couldn't really stand upright. Not only were there bats and killer spiders in this one but now also massive beetles that made me think of the scarabs in the film "The Mummy".

Shvetty

The experience was horrible whilst it was happening but afterwards it was awsome. I would never do it again.