Today we took the hour and a half drive from Katoomba to the Jenolan Caves, arriving around 11am. After a walk along the Blue Lake and a bit of lunch at the Jenolan Caves House, we took an hour and a half tour of the Temple of Baal cave.
The tour leads you down into the cave entrance known as Moloch's Grotto which contains a wide variety of decoration including the only display of cave pearls at Jenolan as well as plenty of spectacular helictites. This continues further down into the cave, about 60m underground to the main chamber, the Temple of Baal itself. It is one of the largest chambers at Jenolan, being only slighter shorter in height than the Cathedral in the Lucas, but has a far greater volume than that chamber. Much of the limestone is brilliant orange although the chamber is dominated by Jenolan's largest shawl, the white Angel's Wing.
It's hard to imagine the hardship faced by early explorers discovering these cave systems with only candles and flares to help map them. Even though the cave is 800m above sea level and 150kms from the ocean, there are imprints of fossilised sea snails in the walls that have helped place the caves age at around 340 million years. To sum it up, a pretty damn cool place to experience.
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| The Blue Lake and weir. |
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| A bottle left to collect water since the 1950's forming a crystallized coating. |
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| The Angel Wing shawl |
I'm always amazed when visiting those caves and also think about what it would have been like for the discoverers. That Blue Lake looks so pretty (I've never seen that)! Look forward to the next blog from VIC.
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