I met up with Chris Nicola, the leader of the UAYCEF-sponsored trip, at the Budget rental office in San Juan. (UAYCEF stands for the Ukrainian American Youth Cave Exchange Foundation. This was a Puerto Rico trip with no exchange students, and no one under 30. How this qualifies as UAYCEF, I don�t know.) Chris was on the same flight as the other two trip members, Adrian and Mary, who I had never met before. They were around my age - I was afraid they might be one of the near geriatric couples that visit Met Grotto meetings once a decade. It was good to see they wouldn�t be the anchors on any trip.
That honor would be reserved for me, I figured, since I had laryngitis. I suppose I could have cancelled, but I didn�t want to let a constant mucusy cough slow me down. Bob Cohen had to cancel his spot on the trip last-minute, since he threw his back out. I was determined to Doc Holliday my way through this, though, entering lots of remote ridiculous places while hacking up a lung.
Adrian and Mary took what would become their designated spots in the middle row of the minivan, while I got the front seat. The back seat was perpetually down, for gear. I was stuck navigating the trip, even though it was hard for anyone to hear me over the radio. The radio soon died, which made things a tad easier: I now only had to shout over Chris. The radio conking out would be the first of many passive-aggressive ways the van would have to protest our existence.
We made a beeline from San Juan to Arecibo - minus an hour for Chris to get a fish sandwich at Burger King, and another hour for my navigation to get us lost eight times while trying to find Route 22. There was a Denny�s on the Arecibo shore Chris really wanted to go to, mostly because of the well-maintained bathrooms. We went inside, saw the Out of Order sign on the bathrooms, and walked straight out.
We�d be staying at the Casita, a colorfully painted cabin up in the hills with no electricity or running water. There were little lizards scurrying along its outside, and a huge frog trying to hide along the side of a sheer rock cliff. There were assuredly also giant cockroaches, although they scurried as soon as you got within stomping distance.
I thought the heat would bake me out of the Casita two minutes after sunrise, but I picked one of the bunks nonetheless. I slept like a baby; the thick concrete walls kept the Casita cool. Adrian and Mary pitched their tent out back, and got baked out of it two minutes after sunrise. Chris slept in the van (it had nary an odor at that time), and also got baked out two minutes after sunrise.
We would start things off slow on Saturday, with a visit to the Arecibo observatory. It�s the biggest radio telescope on earth. It�s built into one of Puerto Rico�s huge sinkholes, to save construction costs. It was featured pretty prominently in Contact, and James Bond killed a bunch of people in it in Goldeneye. Since those movies were filmed, the dish had added another array of mirrors to the infrastructure tethered above the big dish, in a structure that looks like a five-story igloo with no floor. Since it�s a radio telescope, it can operate on cloudy days as well as sunny, which meant that it was working throughout most of our overcast trip.
We were in the touristy mood, and we were real close to the commercial cave at Rio Camuy (which Chris had never done), so we took that trip. Shut up, it�s vacation. Tours were broken into English and Spanish groups, each in their own little train. The train puttered down a steep slope inside the second-biggest sinkhole I had ever seen in my life (someone put a big dish in the first biggest).
There were plants growing off the thick stalactites near the entrance. Not moss either, but thick healthy vines and big leaves. Inside was the biggest cave room I�d ever seen. I didn�t bother taking any pictures: my flash was no match for a ceiling 200 feet away. Much of what I saw was unphotographable, unless you had an army of guy sholding slave units to float to the ceiling.
On the way out we stopped by the Tres Pueblos [Three Towns] sinkhole, a 600-foot pit which forced me to rearrange the biggest-sinkhole-I�ve-ever-seen order again. This was at the junction of three towns, which explains the name. The Rio Camuy ran through it, and you could cave your way to the bottom, so long as you had 400 + feet of rope and were prepared to sneak out of a sinkhole that had several hundred tourists peering down it every day. I had my vertical gear all set, but the gear ended up going unused.
There was time for a wild cave before dinner, so we parked at a gas station, hiked a quarter mile, and entered a massive cave. It�s just that easy to get to big cave in Puerto Rico. This was Cueva Ventana [Window Cave], which has an enormous tree growing at its entrance. The roots � if you can call 500-foot-long stalks as thick as my thigh by the word "roots" � stretched along the ceiling of the huge room inside. it made for a dandy handhold for dropping down to the lower level.
The far end of Ventana opened on a cliff face, looking out over a valley with a big muddy river. That river shouldn�t be nearly that muddy, or nearly that big. Recent rains had made it surge. We had all brought PFDs in our gear, for a proposed day of floating down the Rio Tanama and letting the current carry us through three different caves. But with that much ferocious water powering through, it�d be our mangled corpses floating through those caves.
Huge, three-inch cockroaches crawled underneath the bat clusters in Ventana, feasting on the guano. I had brought a big tube of bug repellant, afraid that I�d be eaten alive in the jungle hikes. But there really weren�t any flying bugs at all. In-cave cockroaches, sure, but the bats must eat the rest of the stock.
Ventana had several petroglyphs near its entrances: carved faces from when the Taino Indians were the only people here. They looked like eroded smiley faces. Some of them were highlighted by chalk filling in their crevices: others had to be detected by their placement. They all were on the same side of walls: probably to get the setting sun.
Dinner Saturday night wasn�t at some garish American chain restaurant like Denny�s. It was at Ponderosa, which is much less garish. I was hoping for some adventurous food like mofongo (mashed fried plantains) but the convenience and known commodity values of Ponderosa and Burger King (which we visited three time) have some security value. The Ponderosa entries have their pictures on the wall, so you can see the two Spanish words you need to pronounce to get your food. "Alitos BBQ. Gracias." Warning: don�t do this around Chris Nicola, because he will always jump in and offer to translate into English for the counter person.
Adrian had never seen the ocean before, so we drove the 200 feet from Ponderosa to the Arecibo shoreline. There were no hotels or resorts in sight, possibly because the undertow can kill you within seconds here. "I promised you a place to bathe," Chris said, "and here it is!" Various pathetic attempts were made to wash the stink off of us, but the surf and undertow prevented us from wading more than ankle-deep in the water and then rubbing our armpits with salt water. I didn�t mind any of this, because I found a coconut on the beach. I got a coconut! They�re like driftwood, apparently; I had my choice of four.
Saturday night was another comfy sleep in the Casita for me, another blistering wakeup for Adrian and Mary, and another night in the car for Chris (who almost never intended to sleep in the car, but would retreat there when bugs or heat or whatnot got him out of his original sleeping arrangements). I didn�t like giant roaches, but living in Jersey City I�ve come to accept their existence so long as I don�t see them.
The lack of water was a real sticking point. We were all living off bottled water and Powerades from local stores, but to not be able to take a shower or wash your hands was fast becoming a nuisance. Adrian and Mary had a package of Wet Ones, which was mostly for washing ocean brine off us. But there�s only so much substitution a Wet One can do for a real shower.
Sunday�s trip was Cueva La Chuca [Lettuce Cave], at the foot of a farm. There were a dozen local cavers here, at a big concrete structure rigged with ropes. This was a practice for the weeklong NCRC, which would be here the week after us. I had debated about attending both Chris�s trip and the NCRC, but I couldn�t take two weeks straight off work. No else could, either, since there was no shared attendance between the two.
La Chuca was a big unmapped cave with a high stream running through it. There was also the danger of bad air. Carbon dioxide accumulated in the cave, we had heard from earlier trips, so be aware if we started feeling faint. I found this a little hard to swallow, since bad air caves tend to not having huge oxygen-rich streams running through them. Maybe the bad air section was at an area beyond the stream passage. I kept the bad air idea in mind nonetheless.
This would be the in-cave test of our PFDs. I was afraid mine was bulky, but they�re all bulky. It doesn�t matter with Puerto Rican caves, though. There really aren�t many tight little passages. The geology makes huge passages, and nothing else. I had heard that Puerto Rican caves had huge passages; I was surprised to see that it�s an all or nothing deal.
Our guide through this was Johnsy, a local who was going to grad school for biology. He spoke English near-fluently, knew a lot of caves in the area, but had never been in La Chuca before. Directions were simple: follow the water upstream.
We crawled through a bit of mud (the only crawling we�d do the entire week) and soon came to an overflowing wooden dam. It was designed to trap some water for the farm�s purposes, but the storm surge sent gallons of water pouring over it every minute. The water was chest-high on the other side, and warm, so we all splashed in and figured out when it was easier to walk and when it was easier to swim. Anything past waist depth seemed time to start kicking.
The water got shallow for several sections. We came to a duck under, which no one told us about. This cave wasn�t that traveled during high water, so we might be the first people to know there was a near-sump at high water. Adrian, Mary and Johnsy tried not to make waves while they limboed under it. From experience with much colder water, I found it�s easier and quicker to just hold your breath and dive under.
Beyond the duck under were huge passages, reaching up a hundred feet easy. Tons and tons of flowstone glistened on the walls: formations the size of cars hung down from the ceiling. The cave went on and on and on. We reached a turnaround point because of a common problem with northeastern caves: hypothermia. I was feeling just fine in the water, and Adrian and Mary were downright sweating with their PFDs insulating them, but Johnsy wasn�t used to a cave trip like a dunk booth. This was warmer than average for us, but colder than average for him. So we hiked/swam back out to the sunshine. No dead air encounters.
Chris stuck at the farm trying out the rope courses while we did La Chuca. Everyone was going to pack up their ropes and go home soon, but we were welcome to stay the rest of the week here. The farm had no electricity, but there was running water, and a roof big enough so no one would have to worry about their tent getting soaked in the rain. We accepted.
We drove back to the Casita and threw all our things in the van. Johnsy showed me how to hack away at the thick husk on the outside of my coconut, peeling it away in portions to reveal a moist, hard ball that looked like a baby orangutan head.
We also did a nice jungle hike around Arecibo, a warmed-up Johnsy patiently waiting every couple hundred feet for the rest of us to catch up. Orange trees were growing wild, with big fruit so acidic you couldn�t eat it.
Back at the farm, we poped our tents on the second floor, accessible only by ladder. That was the sole place to get refuse from a local puppy, which was cute as could be but thought every shoe and hand and spare piece of gear was a chew toy. A plaster-spattered length of chain was hooked around the ladder, leading to the illusion of security while climbing. I had a little song I sang every time I climbed it: "Sketchy� sketchy � this � is � sketchy �"
To make room for a PFD in my duffel, I left my mat at home. After two nights on real beds in the Casita, I had "upgraded" to a concrete floor. A few bundled T-shirts under the small of my back, though, and I made it doable. Plus being real tired every night helped.
Monday we set off with Abraham, another local guide, for two big caves. He�s a very accomplished marathon runner, so we�d prepared to spend the whole day chasing after him as he annoyingly never sweats or gets out of breath. We were accompanied by Abraham�s brother Jesus, which was helpful since Abraham didn�t speak any English. The hike was through what looked like old-growth jungle, but wasn�t. Much of Puerto Rican jungle was slashed away in the old days, and got a chance to grow back within the past 90 years or so. A lack of enormous trees and a few rotting house foundations are proof.
Cueva Balcone [Balcony Cave]started with some big bat clusters in round ceiling holes. The holes are believed to be made by the bats, inadvertently. The limestone is so soft that the ammonia from the bats� urine is enough to eat away a bit of the ceiling. As an area becomes more populated, the ammonia deposits eat more ceiling away, until the bats have a tunnel several feet high to roost in.
One of the giant flowstone domes in Balcone had the unbelievable ability to glow in the dark. Shine a bright light on it for 30 seconds, then kill all the light from your aprty, and that spot where the light was focused glows. The scientific explanation for this that I heard was the crystal structure of the formation bounces light off its angles so often that it takes upwards of a minute for it to work through and flash out. Maybe this is what they chop up to make those glow-in-the-dark stars on dorm room ceilings.
After a second jungle hike, during which Abraham drinks nothing and the rest of us pound water, we arrive at Cueva Conviento [Fake-Spanish-Word Cave]. This name might be Cueva Convidado [Guest Cave], Cueva Convivencia [Coexistence Cave], or Cueva Conveniencia [Agreeable Cave]. It�s actually two caves, with a big middle room that collapsed and turned into our dual entrance point. So much light came into these twin openings that saplings were sprouting in the bat guano, hundreds of feet inside the entrance.
Abraham found us a creature we weren�t expecting to see in a cave, a crab. This wasn�t a little gummi bear-sized crab either, but a giant entr�e-sized guy. After a minute of trying to observe it while it was hiding in a murky puddle, Abraham just reached in the puddle, pulled out the whole crab and held him up for the cameras. What exactly did that guy eat to get so big? And how many other giant creatures did this ecosystem support?
We met back up with Jonhsy and his brother Fabio at a local pizza place Monday afternoon. We had a treat; Cueva Culebra [Snake Cave], where the boa constrictors went to feed. It was a huge bat habitat, with about 10,000 roosting there every day. As they flew out of the entrance at sunset, boas would hang limp off of tree branches overhead. When a bat got close enough, WHAM!
We got to the cave just before sunset, with only single bats flapping out. Chris set up his video camera with the night vision on, and left it parked on a rock. Then the barrage began. The volume of bats leaving didn�t seem to be a lot visually, but sonically it was a deep humming noise, like a whirring jet engine. All that echolocation at once brings their sounds somewhat into detectable ranges. We didn�t see any snakes, but we sat and listened to the rush as the first couple thousand left.
After an hour of progressive darkening, we flicked on my LED�s red light (which we figured wouldn�t disturb the animals as much as white light would). We couldn�t see any snakes, but then we foudn one - right over our heads. He was about six feet long, thick as a bratwurst. I was a little disappointed they weren�t the 300-pound monstrosities that can eat a Kia, but Puerto Rican boas don�t get that big. Another boa was behind this guy, and a third was off in the back. Chris pointed the camera toward the nearest snake, which started leaning its head toward the camera. Either the night vision light or the sound was drawing his attention. The bats flew all around the snakes, not even noticing he wanted them for dinner.
The video camera got passed around, since holding it in one position can make your arm fall off. The bats kept flying. The snakes would slowly bring their heads up on their branch for a minute, but no one was lunging at a bat. What�s wrong with these guys; shouldn�t they be lunging around like a Whack-a-Mole mallet? We found a fourth boa, wedged in the limestone of the exposed rock on the far side of the entrance. We only could get a good focus on the nearest boa, so we kept the camcorder on him while rotating the red lights amongst the rest.
WHAM! The boa on the rocks got one! We put all lights, red and white, on him as he sat with his live pray wrapped in his neck. A bat flew too close, the boa lunged out and bit him, and quickly wrapped a coil around the bat�s body. They stayed still for a few minutes, as the bat was crushed to death. All the other bats stopped coming out of the cave. The bats must have some squeak for Danger, and it was going off strong. So this was why the boas were being stealthy.
Adrian took the camera, climbed on an overhanging trees, and got the camera within three or four feet of the victorious boa. He held the video camera in one hand, and was burning through the memory card of a digital camera in the other. The snake slowly slithered into a sort of knot, which was its way of swallowing the bat while still hanging in midair. It wasn�t visually dramatic, but at the end of it was a snake with a big bump in the middle. And after half an hour, he hung his head down again, ready for seconds.
Chris decided to take the temporary lack of traffic as an opportunity to explore the cave with Johnsy and Fabio. Adrian, Mary and I were staying behind. This cave had a legendary amount of guano in it, a lake of the stuff. This hasn�t been explored scientifically, so no one knew what sort of unidentified albino species might be living under a rock in the rear of the cave? Our three caballeros were going to find out, by flipping over those rocks.
If anyone was looking to intentionally get histoplasmosis, here was a great way to do it. I didn�t want to risk it with my weakened throat. Chris had already had one minor histo case, but visited here every year and hadn�t picked up anything else. I felt like a wimp, but a wimp that wouldn�t be covered in guano and getting a fungal infection.
Chris, Johnsy and Fabio (in Fabio�s first cave trip in eight years: how did Johnsy talk his brother into caving HERE of all places?) climbed down into Cueva Culebra. Ten minutes later, Chris came back, spitting and cursing and sweating.
The guano was ankle deep at some points, shin deep at others, and the rains had swept enough water down to give it a boot-sucking consistency. The rate of decomposition in here rose the temperature ten degrees. Cockroaches were swarming over everything. There was at least one boa down on the ground, slithering around for whatever easy meals had dropped from the ceiling. There was no place for a handhold aside from a few formations, and those were so covered with cockroaches the trio was afraid they�d start running up their arms. If they stopped moving, the cockroaches would most definitely start swarming up their legs.
The only way to hit the back of the cave was to slog through hundreds of feet of deepening guano, with the tide of cockroaches on it. There was probably no rock in the back to flip over, because this cave didn�t have rocks, just a giant mound of guano. The ammonia in the cave was making everyone�s eyes water, and the hopelessness of the task made all three of them escape within a few minutes of each other.
Needless to say, this was the highlight of Chris� trip. In the 36 hours we had left together, he recounted his guano-filled experience in Culebra no less than five times. He also left a whole lot of dirty gear in the car, which was beginning to smell like Cueva Culebra. We should have checked the roof rack for drooling boas.
Back at the far, the puppy was chewing up everything. Our clothes were spread above the puppy�s reach to dry out, but the wind knocked a few of them off the line, and everything within his sharp little mouth became fair game. And I mean everything. If he�s chewing the crotch out of Chris�s underwear, there�s no limit to what he�ll pass up.
The garbage can was already heaped to overflowing from the rope crew, so everything we added had to be balanced very carefully or it became a chew toy. We weren�t good at this garbage-Jenga game, so we began bagging whatever trash we could and tossing it in unguarded trash cans. A dumpster would be ideal for this, but we couldn�t find any unattended dumpsters, so we had to go one plastic-grocery-bag at a time, usually at Burger King.
Tuesday�s cave was Cueva Sorbato [Soda Straw Cave]. It was on the far side of the Rio Tanama, which was still higher and muddier than anyone wanted it to be. We�d be crossing it - somehow.
The path to the cave was the maintenance route for a disused water station on the opposite side of the river. A concrete building is on the shore at one point, next to a slanted concrete wall that had a torrent of brown water coursing over it. Following a bushwhacked trail upstream a little farther takes you to the cave entrance � on the other side of raging rapids.
At low water, you just hop across your choice of boulders, or wade in thigh-deep water. But half of the boulders were submerged now, the other half were wet and slick, and the current would carry you so fast that you�d be bashed to death long before that big concrete wall got to you.
My webbing got put into play here as a tether, as well as a return performance by a mud-spattered PFD. I waded out at what looked like the choicest spot for crossing. Rocks acted as a dam for half of my walk, diverting most of the current across one ten-foot section. If I could fight the current across there, we could just walk over one at a time.
I was clinging a rock for dear life by the time I got to the ten-foot section. The current really wanted to suck me along, and the slanted rock by my feet was a terrible foothold. I gripped the rock harder, as my feet were slowly pulled out rom under me, tilted diaganolly, and then full-on horizontally. OK, this was a strong current. I got hauled back to shore.
Chris made us all acknowledge that the UAYCEF portion of the trip officially ended here: any actions to cross the river were not condoned by UAYCEF, although Chris did help to think them up.
Adrian and Chris came up with a more plausible way to get across: go upstream a bit to where the current is mild, swim the short distance to the opposite side, and then haul ass to the bank before the water flows to that nasty spot. You could do the whole thing with the tether on, and then take it off to do the cave.
It worked fine. Once safely across, Adrian gave himself 20 minutes in the cave solo. It�s never good to cave solo, but with a four-person crew you needed a staff to pull the other end of the tether. Plus, either side of this tether might be lost to the current: there was no way to rig it out of the water, and the current was pulling the middle section downstream like an archer pulling back a bow.
We had scattered rain and more than our share of overcast weather, but this was the first time we were full-on sitting under the sun. Mary�s shoulders started to burn, with two white vertical striped in the red under her shirt straps. You never think to bring sunscreen to a cave trip.
Adrian came back after 19 minutes, afraid that we�d mount some disastrous rescue attempt if he was the slightest bit late. I was a little hesitant to go - solo caving, after all - but Chris didn�t want to abandon the tether, and Mary didnt want to dare the river, so it was me going or we�d all go home. So I went.
Back in the tether. The swim was real easy, 30 seconds with no current to speak of. Then the drifting downstream began, and like Adrian I scrambled for the closest port I could. Never mind that it was filled with little crabs, it was better than being pulled in the narrows. I tied off the tether, turned on my light, and entered Cueva Sorbato, solo. I had 20 minutes before people would get worried.
The cave starts with a huge breakdown pile, which ate up a lot of time to navigate. I had been working off the same crummy batteries all week, and now I didn�t get the benefit of three or four other lights moving around. I fiddled my way to the ground and found the left wall. Arian had told me I wanted to find that left wall.
Here was why. Thousands and thousands of soda straws. Feet long, yard long, the whole slanted left wall was covered with the fragile bone-white formations. I walked to the side, and the soda straws only got longer. They kept going and going, an army of them. After several minutes of the quickest walking I could make, I came to where the ceiling dropped down, and the entire passage ceiling was soda straws. There were some shattered ones where previous visitors (not Adrian) had whipped their heads up and shattered a few dozen. I wasn�t going to do that. I slowly duckwalked down this path, the straws three feet above my helmet but me not taking any chances. It never hurt to be overcautious.
Speaking of overcautious, I was just past my halfway point time-wise. I could spend hours looking at these, but I had three compadres to reassure that I wasn�t dead, and a river to cross back over. There was a coconut to somehow crack open (toss it over the concrete floor) and then the problem of what to do with a pound of coconut meat (puppy food). There was one last night of getting bitten by the puppy, and sleeping on a concrete floor. And one last day in the van, which had the collective smell of every malodorious thing we had encounted this week. Guano, sweat, mildew, damp polypropalene clothing, bags of garbage that should have been thrown out but are instead working like reverse air fresheners.
Maybe I shouldn�t think about having to go back in that van. too many thoughts like that, and I might just stay here in Sorbato forever.