LUMIANG CAVE WITHIN THE SAGADA CAVE CONNECTION

Sagada boasts more than a cool mountain climate, forests full of pines and tree ferns, and exotic burial rituals. Our principle reason for coming here was to bone up on our spelunking skills by doing the famous Cave Connection, a four-hour cave crawling tour linking the Lumiang and Sumaging cave systems. This tour requires its participants to repel down vertical shafts, crawl, squirm, dangle off of ledges, slip, slide, wade waist-deep through underground streams, and clamber over wedding cake cave formations – in other words, it’s serious food for your inner child.
 

But the trip is not for the faint of heart. No safety equipment was provided and the entire tour is conducted by the light of a gas lantern. Twenty minutes into our tour, our gas lantern started to malfunction and our guide was forced to return to town to get a replacement leaving us sitting deep within the cave in pitch-black isolation with bats fluttering around our heads for more than 45 minutes. I thought it was hilarious, but the wait was a bit of a challenge for Thomas who suffers from mild claustrophobia.

Further on as we were exploring the lower sections of Sumaging cave, I was slightly behind Thomas and the guide because I had stopped to examine a formation. Evidently, the guide had carefully directed Thomas through a pool, but nobody had thought to tell me. I stepped into what I thought was shallow water, but in reality, I was stepping into the mouth of a water-filled vertical tube. Thomas, who at that very instant was asking the guide to come back with the lantern, said that one moment I was walking through the cave and the next I had vanished. Not realizing I was stepping into a bottomless pit, I simple dropped straight down into the tube miraculously not touching any of the jagged rocks along the way. The effect was pretty much like being swallowed by a giant. Thomas said he was scanning the cave trying to figure out where I had gone when, all of a sudden, I reemerged from the flooded floor. First lesson of spelunking, don’t assume shallow water conceals a solid floor.

Technical difficulties aside, working our way through the cave system was a real adrenaline kick. The first half felt like we were hamsters crawling through the ultimate tube maze. Later it opened into larger karst caverns.

 

In the deepest portions of the cave, far from both the entrance and the exit, we discovered animist faith healers chanting at the base of a monolithic pink stalagmite, which looked like some prehistoric altar. Our guide had never seen such faith healers before and all three of us sat off in the distance curiously listening to the mysterious chanting.

The highlight was certainly exploring the underground stream that flows through the lower reaches of Sumaging. Elaborate waterfalls of stone, beautiful calcium terracing, glittery walls, water-logged stalagmites and glistening multi-hued stalactites greeted us at every turn.

 

Source: lonelyplanet.com