After having instant noodles for breakfast (cheh, no time to cook so damn early in the morning)... we headed out to check out the times for the lakes cruises. $38.50 per person for a 2.5 hour cruise at 2.30pm... perfect... so while there was time, we decided to head to the Buchan (pronounced as 'Buck-en') Caves to see why it was one of the destinations to visit while at LE.
It took about 45 mins to drive up north to an isolated area where the caves were and so once we arrived, we began our 1 hour journey into the caves, which (I believed...) was 600m deep underground.
So anyway, the one we visited was called the Royal Cave. There's another called the Fairy Cave but that was said to be smaller. I can't remember much of what the guide told us but basically, the caves were constructed by water, coral, rocks etc from millions of years ago. The formations of limestone and everything else were so interesting. Here is one of the first formations, known as the 'Font of the Gods' (picture is the same as on the ticket shown before but this one I took myself). Pretty interesting, or is it not?
Moving along, we came across lots of icicle-like structures sticking from the top of the caves, such as these:
If you're wondering what they're called, the name is stalactites, and those that grow from the cave bottom are stalagmites. Yeeeah, I listened. So what else was down there? These sparkling crystal-like rocks... I thought they were very beautiful up close.
I am not too sure what they were exactly, but it was a massive formation. So while we were pretty much at the bottom of the deep caves by now, the next stage was to walk back up again. Not tiring at the least, heck, I never knew we were so down below already. Step by step, whilst walking up, we came across this 2m TALL stalagmite... its name is Cleopatra's Needle.
I've no idea why it is named that and I really don't need or want to know so continuing on, we finally saw daylight. It was literally the light at the end of the tunnel. Now back to civilisation, we ended up being at the top of a mountain and the view was just spectacular. Green, green grass and trees...
Okay, that may have sounded sarcastic on some level, but seriously, you can hardly see something like this back in Melbourne. The grange at the back of my house plus my front yard can never compare to what the above picture had to offer. Anyway, so that was the caves. On the drive back, I saw another beautiful landscape which had to be taken.
I took this in the car with high speed shutter on (because obviously, the car was moving fast).
I don't know why but I admire natural scenery a lot (and the pictures I manage to take of them). It's not possible for me (or maybe I just can't because of a mind blank at the moment) to explain in words their uniqueness because it's like one of those things you have to be there for to know the feeling. :)
I think there were a bit too many photos in this post so I will continue about the Lakes Cruise we took in the afternoon later.
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