Cave Lodge Caving

Our main purpose in traveling far up north to the Cave Lodge was to get some caving in. I had high hopes that we'd meet some fellow cavers there and have a lot of fun exploring the area. The Australian owner, who had spent decades in the region and sounded like a very interesting person was unfortunately out of the country on vacation. As he promised though, his staff took good care of us.

Nov 10 - Nov 15

Our main purpose in traveling far up north to the Cave Lodge was to get some caving in. I had high hopes that we'd meet some fellow cavers there and have a lot of fun exploring the area. The Australian owner, who had spent decades in the region and sounded like a very interesting person was unfortunately out of the country on vacation. As he promised though, his staff took good care of us.

However, there were some things which didn't turn out the way I expected. My main disappointment was that there weren't really any other cavers there. The place seemed to be more of a backpacker rest stop on the Chiang Mai / Pai / Mae Hong Son loop. Most people that stopped by only stayed a couple days, and the only caving they did was the kayak trip and the bird show (more about that later). This also caused a transportation problem, since we didn't have transport, and there weren't other cavers to pool with to rent a car or a car and driver.

My other disappointment was that it was hard to get to the caves. There were a relatively small number within walking distance, and even for those, the directions were somewhat vague. There were lots of maps, but in many cases the maps had conflicting paths to the caves, and it wasn't until several days in that we figured out which map was the most accurate for the local stuff. That one happened to be the one hidden in the kitchen, not the big one out in the main room, and not the photocopy given out on arrival. The staff tried to give us some help, but the language barrier made it difficult. They could at least tell us which were hard and which were easy to find.

Day 1

The first day we tried to find Green Corner Cave, Xmas Cave, and an unnamed cave, all accessible from one stretch of road. We didn't get an early start because I like sleeping late, so it was a hot hike out in the sun, with very little shade. We managed to find Green Corner fairly easily, but although the entrance was impressive, it was a pretty small (and mostly inactive) cave as far as we could tell. There were some big spiders, and one climb out of the cave looked a bit like Shelob's lair.

Green Corner Cave, from Thailand 2009 - Cave Lodge

We continued on the road, but couldn't determine which path led to Xmas Cave. There was one well defined path, one stile into a field, one path that went steeply down into the same field, and one poorly defined path that skirted a stream. According to the information on the map, it could have been any of these. We decided to try and get more information at the lodge, and skip that one in favor of the next which looked like it had better landmarks.

Further along the road got very steep, along with the temperature getting hotter. The two landmarks we had to work with were a fire tower on the right and a ridge on the left. We hiked a long way (the map says "not to scale") and the ridge in the distance always seemed to be over the next rise. Just after we gave up and turned around, we spotted the fire tower - we'd passed it somehow without seeing it. The elevation of the bank on the side of the road hid it from view when coming up the hill. We considered climbing the fire tower, but the rungs of the ladder were made from skinny pieces of brittle bamboo which didn't look like it would hold either of us.

Finally, we found a substantial path heading off along the ridge. Although the time was getting late, we decided to follow it so we could at least find the cave, even if we had no time left to explore it. Eventually this path came to a gate which had a lot of brush stacked in front of it. We climbed over the gate and followed the path a bit more and came upon some huts which looked like they were in use. There was a Lahu hill tribe village in the area, but that was supposed to be the next path up on the map. Frustrated, we turned around and went back to the lodge. Later one of the staff told us that we could have asked them where the cave was.

Day 2

Since we hadn't had much success on our own, we decided to take one of the guided trips on the second day. We were most interested in the longer one, advertised as "4 to 5 hours of serious caving", but we needed a minimum group of 5 in order to get the price down to a reasonable level. Also, the staff told us that no one had done that trip in a while, so she'd have to check and see if the guide would still do it (he would). There were 3 other people there that we'd been talking to, and they were interested in doing a cave, and were willing to be talked into the long trip. So, Kyle, Isabel, and Katya joined us for the second day of caving on the trip to Tham Boon Hoong (also called Tham Pung Hung). "Tham" is the Thai word for "cave".

It was quite a trek to get to the cave. First, all five of us rode in the back of the Cave Lodge pickup over winding and occasionally poorly paved roads to get to the parking spot. This was on the edge of a small village, and overlooking a very hilly cultivated region which was studded with limestone outcroppings and knobs. Then we walked down a steeply sloped ridge that ran along the edge of some of the crops, including a couple bean fields. Along the way, our guide demonstrated how to shoot long grasses out of our fingers like arrows. Then, we went down the side of the ridge into a valley, which was even steeper. This was very jungle like, with huge stands of bamboo and muddy ground, even though it hadn't rained since we'd arrived. We picked our way down, crawling over fallen bamboo as thick as my thigh and dreaded the return climb. Eventually we arrived at the large mouth of the cave where there was a bamboo platform. I think it might have been built by the cave survey expedition several years ago as a place to camp. This cave is currently the 9th longest in Thailand, at 4.5km long, so you can imagine that the surveying might have taken a while.

Tham Boon Hoong entrance, from Thailand 2009 - Cave Lodge

Boon Hoong is mostly walking stream passage punctuated with the occasional medium size room. There were about 6 crawling spots, several duckwalks or duck-unders, and 1 belly crawl toward the back. There were quite a few formations, and they were in very good condition. Unusually, there were very few large formations aside from flowstone, but many many groups of smaller ones. There was one section where a formation had built up on a mud bank, and then the mud bank had washed away leaving a shelf of stone which supported a pillar. Maybe the passage floods violently on rare occasions and this keeps most of the formations small? There were a lot of very white, delicate looking stalactites and a memorable piece of large brown flowstone that had a groove worn in it by a trick of water which had then deposited some small brown crystals. Unfortunately, it didn't photograph very well. In a nearby area, there was a large piece of beige flowstone which looked like it was covered with glitter (mica, I would guess). At one point we noticed on an odd formation high on a bank, and had to take a closer look. It turned out to be a miniature village that someone had sculpted by adding mud animals and details to a small formation.

Glittering flowstone, from Thailand 2009 - Cave Lodge

The cave had quite a bit of wildlife. Of course there were bats, but we also saw cave crickets (with really long feelers), cave crayfish that were translucent, crabs, some pale rolley-poleys, and an unusual fungus. Everywhere that we saw pieces of rotting bamboo in the cave, a thin white fungus was sprouting from it and spreading a delicate, root-like network as large as a couple feet in diameter. We saw one that seemed to be growing a stalk which Danny thought might be the fruiting body of a slime mold. Net research also shows a similarity to some wood decay fungi structures (mycelium). Does anyone know?

Bamboo fungus, from Thailand 2009 - Cave Lodge

We turned around when we got to the point where the stream fell into a wide and deep pit - we'd joined the pit from the side, and couldn't see the bottom, even with our brightest lights. In all, we were in the cave for about 5 hours, including a break for lunch (fried rice and a chocolate muffin) and a shorter break at the same spot on the way out.

It was fun, and good to be caving again after a long dry spell, but I itched to explore the cave at a slower pace, rather than being guided through it. I found a map afterward, and there's only one significant side passage, but there were a lot of interesting looking areas that we passed by when we were in it. One other things to mention - we were all a bit surprised at how our guide was outfitted. He did the entire trip, caving and hill climbing, in dress pants and black slip-on loafers.

Day 3

While we were at Tham Boon Hoong, Kyle's mother had tried out the kayaking trip that Cave Lodge offers. Cave Lodge sits on the bank of of the Lang River (Nam Lang), and you can get kayaks to run down the river, and through the huge passageway of Tham Lod, which is the major tourist attraction for the area. She thought this was a really fun trip, and suggested that we do it too. All five of us were up for it, so on our 3rd day of caving, that's what we did.

The kayaks were inflatables (mine had considerable patching with duct tape), and worked well except for some really shallow spots. Kyle and Katya each went with one of the guides (giving Kyle the ability to run a waterproof movie camera he had), Danny went with Isabel, and I was excited to go solo. The river itself was entertaining without getting difficult. Frequent, but small patches of Class I or easy Class II. Danny and Isabel ended up in a tree once, and I dumped shortly after entering the cave because I didn't turn quick enough. There were two surprise rapids on the trip - big concrete dams that we just went over, and down the steep ramp.

Ryan kayaking, from Thailand 2009 - Cave Lodge

The portion through the cave was very short, we didn't even have time for our eyes to adjust before we were on the other side. The cave is listed as 1 km long, but there are two substantial side passages, so the river portion might only be 500m or less. Overall, this was a lot of fun. I enjoyed it even more than the caving the day before.

Cave kayaking, from Thailand 2009 - Cave Lodge

After we got back, we took a short break and then walked back to the river exit side of the cave. At sundown, there's a "bird show", in which a gigantic group of swallows, on the order of hundreds of thousands, fly into the cave while the bats fly out. It's an amazing sight - the birds start collecting outside as the light changes, and then there's a constant rush of them into the cave for about a half an hour or so. If you can get your eyes to adjust to the darkness of the cave rather than the fading light outside then you can see a huge wheeling mass of the birds flying in a circle in the big entrance chamber as they prepare to nest for the night. The bats are much smaller than the birds, so it's very hard to see them, and I'm not sure if I did or not. At one point, I could see a bunch of shadows on the rock moving in the opposite direction from the swifts, and smaller, but it could have been swifts flying back out. Maybe the bats use the upstream entrance to leave for the night.

Day 4

On the 4th day, we decided to try again for Xmas cave. We went back to the path that like the best match to the map, as well as the most trodden, and began following it. It started off going through a field of great smelling giant mint, past a motorbike that someone had left there, and off into the woods. We walked in the woods a long way, well after we left we should be looping back to the cave, until we found the path going up the hillside. This was possibly right, so we continued, past a creepy looking stone marker. Where the path crested a saddle, we began to hear sounds - chopping bamboo and singing. After listening a bit, we followed the path down to where a small group of people were building two bamboo shelters, similar to the remnants of ones we'd seen in earlier places along the path. They couldn't tell us where the cave was, only that it wasn't further along the path, presumably where they'd come from (maybe that Lahu hill tribe village?). So we backtracked to the road and examined the other possibilities, ruling everything out except the fenced path. We followed that through some old fields, one of which had been corn but now looked like it was growing wild with pumpkin. After some false leads, we almost gave up and turned around, but Danny persisted, and wanted to investigate the uppermost field, and quickly found the cave off to the side.

Danny in the field of mint, from Thailand 2009 - Cave Lodge

We geared up and spent about an hour and a half in the cave. This one was very different, as it was more vertical than horizontal. It went down and down, and we could see that this was an old cave with what had once been beautiful formations that had either fallen from the distant ceiling or been crushed by falling rock when rock dividing an upper and lower section had collapsed. At the bottom of the initial rockfall, we came to a tricky downclimb which led to a small stream passage. This led to an arched entrance into a room, but the entrance was 75% blocked by rubble, and the open upper part was guarded by the largest bats I've seen outside of a zoo - big, black ones, which I'd never encountered in the wild before. We skirted the guardians and followed the passage to a tight squeeze. Beyond that, the remainder of the stream that hadn't gone elsewhere emptied into a small pool. Danny crossed the pool and saw a crawling passage that went further, but due to the lateness of the day, we decided to turn around there. I later found out that this goes for a short bit to a dropoff, which then leads to the bad air cave nearby. So we couldn't have gone much further anyway.

Tight squeeze, from Thailand 2009 - Cave Lodge

On the way back out we took a few minutes to do some light painting style photographs, where you take a very long exposure and use your headlamp to paint the rocks with light, or to uplight a specific formation. This will allow you to take a picture of a much larger space than the flash can illuminate. They turned out pretty well, especially for a pocket camera.

Light painting experiment, from Thailand 2009 - Cave Lodge

Day 6

The fifth day at Cave Lodge was not for caving, but for visiting a hill tribe. (Danny will cover that in another post.) The sixth day was mostly spent driving around to see the hill tribe villages. However, we did stop and see Coffin Cave, which is one of the show caves in the area. Somewhere around 1200 to 2000 years ago, the people that lived in what is now northern Thailand buried some of their dead in hollowed out teak logs that they put in caves. There are about 60 caves that they've discovered with these coffins. This particular cave was long dry, and the coffins were very well preserved. The cave itself was mostly a collection of rooms in the hillside.

Coffin at Coffin Cave, from Thailand 2009 - Cave Lodge

We'd had fun with the cave exploration, and the most fun when we were on our own. Since this was one of the premier caving regions in the world, and the caves were relatively open to access (compared to in the USA), we decided that we'd try to do some more caving later, and made adjustments to our trip to spend several extra days in the town of Phitsanulok, which had previously just been a stopover point for a Sukhothai visit.

More Photos...