Wednesday, April 01, 2009

There And Back Again. Chapter Seven. Same Journey In The Dark.

*please note this version of the story includes addendum number one and appendix A*

Ok, that joke is probably worn out by now...

Today you get to see the pics that WP (Wifey-Poo) took, along with a couple more of mine. You still be down in The Alexandra Cave so you haven't missed the fossil centre, no worries.

Why am I showing you WP's pics even though they're from the same cave as the ones you saw yesterday? Cus not only is WP's camera different from the one YT was using, but we both have a different photographers eye. You'll see what I mean when you compare this slideshow to mine from Chapter Six.

Before you get to see the pics, I have to say that I'm terribly disappointed with y'all. SOMEONE should have "got" the pi joke in Chapter four. Ah, wait a sec, my bad. The reference and joke were both so obvious you musta felt it beneath you to remark about.

Sorry, just woke up from a nap and my brain isn't working yet, gimme a sec while the caffeine kicks in.

A
H
H
H
... I feel better now.

Just remembered: I have a PSA for you!

Do not look at pictures of drippy cave things if you are susceptable to motion sickness or have not had enough to drink yet.

There, you've been warned.

And I have some info for those of you who would like to do your own crayon scrawling on your owns maps. There's a wonderful little, FREE, program available on the system of tubes. It's called Irfanview. It's made by a bloke from Bosnia who graduated from The Vienna Institute of Technology and he's had this program available for a decade now (it's updated regularly). I love the batch conversion feature, and the algorithms for resizing/resampling are darned fine. He's just recently added a simple paint dialog so you can colour to your hearts content.

It's free. It lives at www.irfanview.com

Don't be fooled by how small the program is; when you start messing about with it you'll find it does a great many things. Did I mention it's free?

And now for the slideshow of WP's pictures from The Alexandra Cave. Remember you can view it full screen by clicking on the little box with the arrows in the lower right hand corner of the slideshow.



You will note that we take different kinds of shots.

Here's the link through to the flickr set of WP's Alexandra cave pics. There's a whole page of thumbnails and you can view to your hearts' content, no worries.


This cave descended to a depth of 18 metres. I'll save you the trouble of multipying 18 by 3.3 and tell you that we were 60 feet underground. Fortunately, there's been a lot of excavation between the chambers so that tourists can walk through. However, the passageways between each chamber used to be (and a lot still are) very tight squeezes.

I want you to have a look at this picture:
alexandracaveWP055
You see the light up at the top of the photo? That light is on top of the original dirt that had filled this section. The people who went through here over a hundred years ago had NO idea what was down there and were doing it using oil lamplights all while squeezing through a passageway 18 inches high. Wee, FUN!

Isn't limestone and Karst terrain neat?

In one chamber there's a reflecting pool. The rangers and staff do not add any water to it. If it dries out, so be it. Ummmmmm, constant 98% humidity. Do you think it'll dry out? The pool is only a couple of centimetres deep and there's some stalactites that are forming above it.

This makes for some great reflections! We both tried as best we could both with and without flash to get decent shots of this. I'll let you decide if we succeeded.

alexandracave056
I know it's blurry, but I didn't have a tripod.

This next one is a shot of the pool. I was very pleased to get this.
alexandracave058


Same shot but with the flash on, you can definitely tell how shallow the pool is:
alexandracave060


WP's camera has a stronger flash and a longer zoom so she could get some great shots from farther away. She got some great colours here:
alexandracaveWP094


This one from her is even better:
alexandracaveWP092


When you take a passage around the left side you have a good view of the formation above the pool:
alexandracaveWP099


After Alexandra we had a quick cuppa, then went into the fossil centre. That'll be covered in the next chapter, but feel free to page ahead if you'd like. Oh wait, this isn't a book... Guess you'll just have to wait.

3 comments:

Fizzgig said...

those are amazing pictures! I get panicked looking at those and feel trapped. Im not claustrophobic but i think its the thought of being so enclosed, i dunno....like that movie with the monsters in the cave, 'descent' i felt stressed out the whole time!

Anonymous said...

Great shots. Don't worry, the joke is still running fine. However, at the beginning, you made a reference to Chris Tolkien. You're going to have to elaborate on that one.

LoveANewIdea said...

Thanks for the PSA - much appreciated!