19 OCTOBER 2006

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Chang Chao

Harvey was feeling tirred and had no great urge to go underground but went anyway. He went with Tony Penny to Chang Chao village and the three entrances above it. After the first 4 stations measured they got into the swing of surveying once again. They surveyed down to a junction from the middle entrance to an aven. There was lots of neat climbing (good juggy holds) in a high rift passage. They returned to the junction and had lunch where Niu and Deng made an appearance. They surveyed out to the middle entrance and then retuned to the junction seen further into the cave which they assumed would lead to another entrance along the cliff face. They found a nest of leaves from which a large black rodent-like creature scurried away. The surface was reached here via a crawl. From here they surveyed back to their start point to end the day.

Teng Long Dong fossil passage

The others, including Ged, Bruce, Mr. Hou, Zhanghai, Du Jiao from the hotel and cameramen from the local TV station went into Teng Long Dong showcave to look for possible leads off the main passage. Once the showcave lights were left behind, the route was marked by an older path that had been built with many steps several decades before as part of the original showcave. Occassional electricity poles with insulators were seen en route that had long been de-wired. A couple of old Belgian survey stations were spotted that were painted on the path and on a boulder. No significant leads were found despite travelling about 5kms from the entrance. The largest side passage was found off the passage to Mao Jia Xia (Mao Canyon) entrance but was only 130m or so long. Also near this entrance we were shown a very small draughting hole by Mr. Hou that you could just get your hand into. It looked like it might be larger beyond and an explosive team was talked of to enlarge it. At the far end of our travels, we left a cairn and note for a future team that would search from the other direction, entering at Bai Dong (White Cave) entrance on another day. Near this point Mr. Hou scaled a tricky climb to investigate the source of dripping water on a sidewall. On our return, we climbed up many steps into the "Stone Forest" area whose location was labelled incorrectly on the Belgian survey. It wasn't as impressive as we might have imagined. Bruce descended the rubble slope at the far end which appeared to funnel onto steep flowstone slopes below and a conceivable continuation. Bruce had trouble with his electrics and had no luck with his replacement batteries. Fortunately some could be borrowed.


Du Jiao and Mr. Hou accompany us through Teng Long Dong


Zhanghai on old showcave steps -Teng Long Dong


Team 2 Fly Out

Emma, Dave, Mike, John and Graham fly out from Manchester on the 2.05pm flight to Dubai.