And after a journey that seems endless here we are once again in Chiapas. The obligatory stop in Mexico City was made fruitful by making a tour of the National Museum of Anthropology. And the photo with the "big head" could not miss!
Arrived in Chiapas the early hours have served to do the shopping and to prepare the materials of the three operating groups.
Here we go. Wednesday we will start the expedition «Chiapas 2014», to the Rio La Venta Canyon and Selva El Ocote, a spectacular karstic area in the western part of the state of Chiapas, Mexico. We're going to continue the explorative work initiated by our association more than twenty years ago that, with almost thirty expeditions, has enabled us to discover and document an immense underground world.
Down there the mountains are pierced by large rivers that have carved galleries, halls and salons of colossal dimensions. It is an underground network of hundreds, perphas thousands of miles, and we have only begun to discover it. Searching for caves around the world is the way we travel, moving a bit further, even slightly, the boundaries of the known world.
The true and unique treasures that the caves preserve!
On our way back to Rome we can not do without thinking about what we leave behind. In fact, as often happens, the last two days of the expedition were full of surprises and left us much to think about for the next year.
After a few days, during which the team in Pinlaung has been engaged in recognitions that led to minor results, we decided to go back to an old local reporting: sink hole Hti Ngut.
On the second day of the work the transverse that leads over the waterfall is finished, now all around us are just damp and mossy concretions on which the anchors do not hold up, to look for the rock beneath the concretions is useless, they are too thick. With another small passage we reach a plate of good rock for the anchors, here we see the vertical and a terrace down below us that allows us to get over the waterfall, at least if not dry at least out of the water jet.
The start the descent to the side of this river that rushes headlong, raising puffs of water spray. The descent continues and even if damp there are no problems. We arrive at the base of the jump, after a thirty meters of vertical in the void, a concretion allows us to arm a transverse to bring us away from the stream of the water, and finally we are at the base of the shaft over the waterfall that in front of us creates a barrier and that has prevented the passage during the first explorations.
February 9. Over the past two days, with the team that is based in Pinlaung we continued the exploration of the cave found friday, War Kway Lee Cave: at first we concentrated on the great resurgence, stopping after about 160 meters in front of a waterfall about 8 meters high.
Yesterday, we descended swimming the river that runs along the road for War Kway Lee, to test the hypothesis of a connection: found the point where the river sinks loudly, we were able to go down on the side of the waterfall. After about forty meters the water slips into a narrow canyon, flowing tumultuous and making it impossible to continue.
From the surveys carried out it seems clear that the water is the same as the resurgence of the river: so we put aside the hypothesis of a link between the sinkhole of Te Tong and War Lee Kway.
