A visit to Maracaibo is not something you can do in a couple of hours, even if the Maracaibo in question is a remote passage in the Three Counties Cave complex and not a town in Venezuela. We toyed with the idea of following the route through Cow Pot described in the caving book, “Not for the faint hearted”, but decided to stick with the more popular one that we knew well.
The first half hour or so of caving in Cow Pot is pretty ordinary apart from one very small problem that we will come back to. It gets more exciting when you reach the final pitch down into Fall Pot. Here, above a drop of forty metres or so, you traverse around the upper walls of the pot to the opposite side, to get a good rope-hang for the descent. You rig a rope to protect yourself as you go, of course, but that does not make the task much less alarming. Happily, Gary was willing to be brave, with assistance from Matt. Following them, with the ropes in place, was adventure enough for me. Most regular cavers are comfortable once they are hanging on a rope and, with fear dispelled, the descent was another matter – awesome, yes, but a joy to do.
We followed Montague’s Passage, a high level route, for about an hour, sliding around on acres of grey mud and clambering among slippery boulder. At one point you climb down to a lower col and then back up into a continuation of Montague’s Passage – free climbs but protected by fixed ropes. Once beyond there we dumped our SRT kits and continued unencumbered, eventually descending to the main streamway at Oxbow Corner. After wading for a couple of minutes we found the entrance leading to Maracaibo – an unpromising, crawling-sized hole beside the underground stream. A bit of a grovel and a winding crawl soon led to a higher, long, straight passage too narrow to make progress in at the bottom. We climbed up and traversed – hard work, and difficult in places where there were no ledges to stand on and everything depended on friction.
Beyond the traverse we reached what had come to see. We found ourselves crawling through a wonderland of cave formations that just went on and on. Eventually the cave closed down and we had to climb into a parallel, undecorated passage. When it broke back into a wider section of the original passage, further up stream, what confronted us made what we had seen earlier seem hardly worth the trouble of looking at. Having exhausted all the standard expressions of delight, escalated to expletives, and run out of them, we turned in desperation to more dated terms and were all agreed that this passage really was spiffing.
When we got to a wet, flat-out crawl that needed some excavating before we could fit into it, we checked the time. We had been underground for about four and a half hours. We knew from the descriptions that if we persevered with the crawl it would take us to yet more formations but we decided we were ready to turn back.
We followed the main stream for part of the return journey – a wide, high passage carrying clear water down cascades, into pools, and along stony streambeds. We climbed back up to the high level route only when we were below the place where we had left our SRT kits. Prussicking back up into Cow Pot was hard work for tired bodies but not a big issue. We knew what the big issue would be – the very small one close to the entrance – but we were distracted from thinking about it by the arrival of two bats while we were derigging the pitch. They swooped back and forth, sometimes coming within inches of us, racing in and out of the darkness. When the bats passed between us, our lights shone through wings so delicate that it was like watching an artistic piece of filming in a fantasy movie.
Rope packed, we faced that small-sized problem near the entrance. Two sections of passage, one vertical and one near vertical, in quick succession are so small that to get through them you have to take your SRT gear off. Sliding down them on the way in was deceptively easy. Sliding up things is not consistent with the laws of gravity. There are fixed ropes to pull on, but arms – especially tired arms – are not strong points in human anatomy and these two squeezes have limited footholds. We all got through in the end. The bats came, too, and wheeled around us as we made our final climbs to the surface.
We had been underground for eight hours. And what an eight hours. A spectacular pothole descent, lengthy stretches of big passages, magnificent formations, a splendid streamway, and the spectacle of a pair of bats in flight. Worth the effort? You bet!
