Caving in Chiang Mai, Thailand

Like I mentioned in my previous post, there is so much to do in Chiang Mai its unbelievable.  In addition to bike riding through the city, exploring wats and learning to cook some amazing food, we also went caving with Chiang Mai Climbing Adventures (www.thailandclimbing.com/tripadvisor) at Crazy Horse Buttress!

Summer, Emily, Kelley and Liv - climb on!

Yeah, it was ridiculous, in the most awesome sense of the word.  The girls and I harnessed up with our guides Ooan and EQ.  We scaled up a 30-foot wall with a combination of ascension and rock climbing, then scrambled along the rocks laterally. 

 

 

 

 

After weaving through 100 foot drop offs of limestone and hopping over a threshold, we finally got to our repelling spot, which was 90 feet!  

Yeah, that's a 150-foot drop between my legs

 

It was a straight drop down.  No footholds, no cushions….just a rope, gloves, a flashlight on our helmets and a harness.

Putting on my repelling gloves

Summer's ready to drop!

It was pitch black in the cave. Liv was only lit by my flashlight in this photo!

When we got to the bottom of the cave, we enjoyed some lunches that we had pre-packed and went searching through the pitch-black cave for adventure. It smelled musty of moisture and bat shit.  There were crystallized stalagmites and stalactites made up of salt, quartz and other minerals.

Safely dropped to the bottom…twinsies!

Quartz stalagmite

Summer and Kelley chill in the cave

 Kelley's favorite part was seeing all of the glistening spots on the cave walls…which were spiders' eyes!  They were everywhere and so were the bats.  Summer and Ooan ventured through the water to the end of the cave while Liv and I exercised our outdoor cave peeing skills…Which were successful.

Giant spiders' eyes glistened in the dark when our headlamps hit them

The ascent back up the 90-foot drop was exhausting.  If there were no foot or handholds going down, there also weren't any going up.  We just had a rope, harness and a contraption that locked the rope in place as we were yanking ourselves up.

What you did was you had a 1-meter long lead with a foothold on the bottom that was attached to your harness.  You had to lift your foot up to create slack on the rope, then propel yourself upward with the force of your thighs and then pull the locking contraption up to a neutral location.

I had assumed since my inseam is about 34-inches, I would propel up at least 2 feet per pull - boy was I wrong.  when you bend your leg up to meet your chest, it only pulls you up about a foot. It was a grueling 90 pulls of my full body weight up that drop off.

We all did it with amazing success.  Special kudos to Kelley who did it with a chest cold.  I can't imagine pulling myself up that threshold with limited lung capacity.  Summer, you are a giant and a million feet tall, I bet it only took you 45-50 pulls up with your 50 inch inseam, LOL!  And Liv, well you're a spider monkey and only weigh like 90-lbs, so you get no props…no props at all!  :)

This hike was challenging but doable and our guides were knowledgeable about the caves and the sport.  They were helpful, considerate, concerned and funny.  I would highly recommend a tour with them any day!

Ooan made this amazing video for us!  I'm pretty sure we were his favorite group ever….we were for sure the most fun group he has ever had.