Punkva Caves and Brno

Well, it's official... I have found yet another love. Caves. We had another field trip yesterday to Southern Moravia to visit the Punkva Caves located below the Moravian Karst. There are more than 1000 known caves in CZ, four of them are opened to public. To preserve this unique phenomena, the Moravian Karst was proclaimed a protected area in 1965. The area is home to the historic Macocha Abyss. This Abyss was really a bottomless pit that researchers hesitated to explore because, well it was a bottomless black hole who would want to repel down into that...? So we went of course. We had to get up at 6 to get on a train by 7, probably the easliest I have been us since I have been here! We rode the train to a small rural town and then took a bus even farther out into nowhere at which point we walked and walked along trails through a beautiful forest on a great and sunny fall day until we arrived at the park where the caves were.

Esther and I on the walk

Beautiful forest

 We came up to a gondola that took us straight down into the abyss where the tour would start. When  say straight down, I mean straight down.... It was exciting! We got our tickets and proceeded into the caves with our guide who instructed us NOT to touch anything since our touch kills the process.

You can see the route we took, Gondola from up top down to the bottom, then we entered the cave

We walked down a long tunnel which was fun, it was very narrow and cold but I was excited to be dumped out onto a big catwalk bridge that looked over the first cabin of the cave.

Stunning view of the first cabin 

 We walked through various cabins and learned about the different stalagmites and formations. Many are named for what they resemble, there was a over turned umbrella, an elephant ear and a gnome. The guide told us that the only time that the cave formations were disturbed/harmed was in the construction of the paths through to make it a tourist accessible site. They installed walkways and subdued lighting in the dry part of the caves and the catwalk bridge in the beginning of the tour.

Part of the many tunnels 

This isnt my photo but it gives a better perspective of where we were

The next part we walked into was called the Macocha Abyss. This is the bottom of the "pit" looking up to the top. It was amazing when we walked in, there was this godlike music playing and a beautiful green pool at the base of it. Unfortunately the area is pretty restricted and we couldn't move around to take alot of photos (nd my camera lens is broken and cant zoom out...) so I used another picture to give perspective. From this part we went back underground to what started the "wet" part of the caves. The water flows into a certain lower part of the caves from the "Amarture Cave"  This part was my favorite....

A small boat powered by air pressure

Here we go.... They are blurry because we were moving/in a boat

Not much clearance up top... maybe 5-6 feet. You definitely couldn't stand up in the boat

 In many places we were cutting tight corners and bumping into the walls so I was doing my best to fend the boat off/not get hit in the head... I had to be told to duck a lot because my camera was up to my face most of the time... Its a tight space in there!

Beautifully lit caverns above our heads and water lit up bright green beneath

 In the construction they did a wonderful job lighting the caves, there were lights underwater to show how green and beautiful it was and lights in small coves to light up the rock formations. I sat in the front and tried to get some video footage but it was pretty dark in some parts. The pictures are ok, some turned out but most of them are blurry because we were on a briskly moving boat but you get the idea even if they are blurry.

We popped out of what looks like a small crevice, which it was....

The caves were stunning, such a neat experience especially the water aspect of it, I don't think there are alot of caves that provide the water part of the tour so it was really neat to get to do something like that. When we finished the tour we went back up on the gondola and returned to Brno by bus.

More amazing Czech countryside

Picking leaves to press

We stayed in Brno for a few hours and had dinner. There was a wine festival of some sort in their old town square too. Brno is the second largest city in the Czech Republic, it seemed small though but we didn't get to see much of it before we took the train back home but from what I did see it was very quaint and pretty.