Lengthening the World’s Longest Sandstone Cave
Olly and I were lucky to get places on the renowned Meghalaya caving expedition this February. Meghalaya is a state in north-east India, next to Assam (famous for it’s tea). The name Meghalaya is Sanskrit for “abode of the clouds”.
Fun Meghalaya facts :
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Mawsanram (town near Krem Puri) is the wettest place on earth
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Within the state there are three main tribal groups; Jaintia, Khasi and Garo who each speak a different language
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There is a matrilineal system with property and names passed down through the female line
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Shillong (the capital) is much cooler than tropical India as a consequence of its high altitude; at ~1500m above sea level
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The scenery around Shillong reminded European settlers of Scotland hence the nick name “Scotland of the east”
Our journey to Shillong was rather long but reasonably smooth. Luckily we missed the snowstorm which shut Manchester airport and only had minor de-icing delays. We had another delay on our internal flight from Mumbai to Guwahati as we seemed to be refuelled twice, once on the runway. We also had a worrying moment where a man with a toolbox was spotted wandering around under the wing of the plane. However, we arrived safely and were quite relieved to spot our many bags trundling around the baggage carousel.
It is possible to fly to Shillong but we had been advised against this as more often than not flights are diverted or cancelled due to fog. Instead we had a three hour car journey from Guwahati to Shillong, I was intrigued to see that our driver had his blood type painted on the car near the fuel cap. This was our first experience of Indian roads, to me it looked like total danger chaos but the old hands told us that it actually used to be much worse as there are now far fewer coal lorries on the roads.
Meghalaya has been in the international news recently when a group of miners became trapped in flooded illegal coal mine workings. Although mining of coal was banned in 2014 due to the horrendous safety and pollution record, a loop hole allowing the transportation of already extracted coal piles on the surface meant many mines continued to operate. However, this month a further ban on the transportation of coal was implemented and hence fewer coal lorries are on the roads.
We eventually arrived through the slow crawling traffic of Shillong and dropped our kit bags off at Brian’s house. Brian who lives in Shillong has been caving with the expedition for over 20 years and sorts a lot of the logistics. He also has the biggest bonsai tree collection I have ever seen. We then checked into our hotel had a few beers and went to bed. I did wonder what was missing from our hotel room and in the morning I realised that it was windows. The standard rooms had no windows, but this was actually beneficial as you didn’t get the 6am bus station noise.
After breakfast we headed to Brian’s to start the kit organising. This year there was no real doctor on the expedition so Olly and I took charge of the medical kits. We did an inventory and found Dr Cat’s shopping list from last year. We pondered over what was OK to be out of date and then set off with a rather long list drugs to purchase most of which are prescription only in the UK. Three pharmacies later we had a big bag of most of these, which was both worrying and convenient. You can buy almost anything over the counter which explains India’s antibiotic resistance problem. The only challenge was actually getting served at the counter where there appeared to be no queuing system and I seemed to have very poor “bar presence”.
The next morning our small group set off (this was the pre-expedition week with a small group of cavers).
Our task for the week was to finish the exploration and survey of a cave called Krem Puri which the expedition had been exploring for the previous two years. Krem Puri is particularly special as it is formed entirely in sandstone, the passage is a mixture of low crawling maze and deep canyons, there are some sand stalagmite type formations which are thought to be new to science. After last years expedition the total surveyed passage was just under 25km making it the longest sandstone cave in the world. This world ranking has made Krem Puri very popular with tourists, this is both a blessing and a curse, whilst the popularity of the cave brings wealth to the local area and many people are getting to see and experience the cave, the cave has suffered from graffiti.
Much of this graffiti is the result of tourists marking the walls with arrows such that they don't get lost in the complicated maze of passages but some is pointless name tagging. As most of this cave is inactive (does not carry flowing water) and is millions of years old, this graffiti will now be a permanent feature.
Over the week our task was to explore and survey a series of high level passages, descend down a couple of undescended holes and collect water samples for scientific analysis. On the first afternoon we were in the cave working out the passages we needed to explore we heard some voices further along the canyon.
Soon a group of four guys in flip flops with phones for torches stumbled up to us, it turns out that they were lost and they were very pleased to see us. Mark pointed them in the direction of the exit and we carried on, ten minutes later we hear another group down the canyon, it turned out to be the same guys who had managed to go around in a big loop. Mark decided to take them directly to the cave entrance we had entered to ensure their safe exit. This was not the entrance they had come in and they were quite rightly alarmed that there was significantly more crawling in small sandy tubes than they had done on the way in. However they trusted that Mark knew what he was doing and they were soon deposited safely in daylight.
Mark actually has a bit of a reputation for getting lost in the cave, to be honest its very easy to do with so many turnings and connections, everything looks the same.
To access the unexplored high level passages we could not use conventional means like climbing or bolting as the rock is super crumbly. Instead Mark and Brian had organised for the locals to leave a 6m long bamboo pole outside the cave entrance. With this we used a technique called "may-poling" where a wire ladder is first tied to he end of the pole which is then hoisted up and leaned against the rock face. You then trust your fiends to brace the pole whilst you scale the wire ladder. Our 6m bamboo pole was a little thinner than we had hoped for which actually worked in our favour, although it was unnervingly flexible whilst climbing this extra flexibility actually made navigating the pole around a lot of sharp corners, in a Chuckle Brothers fashion, much easier.
Being the lightest I was sent up the pole first, but after it bore my weight we took it in turns to explore all the high level passages, unfortunately finding all were infilled with sand and impassable in this area of the cave.
The other passage we needed to check was much further into the cave up a passage called the Grand Canyon, it turned out to be quite an ordeal getting there with perilous traversing (straddling a large drop) on very crumbly ledges with a sprinkling of large loose boulders for good measure. After two hours we had managed to get ourselves and the 6m bamboo pole to the passage of interest. Here the team split; Mark and Brian went left to explore and survey the new passage. Cookie, Olly and I climbed right up the pole into an area of known passage called the mini maze which had some unsurveyed sections. We soon found out why these were unsurveyed as they got smaller and smaller and then muddier. Whilst crawling in a body sized tube filled with gloopy mud I realised the funny patterns on the floor were actually thousands of rat footprints. I really hoped that I wasn't about to come face to face with one of the four very large healthy looking rats we had seen scampering up the canyon earlier. With no rat encounters our misery was rewarded by seeing what Cookie described as the best fossilised dinosaur vertebrae in the whole cave.
There is a third entrance to the cave which requires a 60m abseil down a cliff face to a stunning balcony in the trees. We rigged this route mainly for fun but also for easy access to some flowing water at this end of the cave which we wanted to sample to record the temperature, pH, conductivity and carbonate content. This enabled us to do a through trip which you enter and exit through different parts of the cave.
After a number of days crawling around in some of Krem Puri's more unpleasant areas we were quite happy that Mark was satisfied we had ticked off all the question marks on the survey and that we could travel back to Shillong to meet with everyone arriving for the main expedition.