Gua Temperong

06.01.93 Team: Philip, Jan. Sainzhuan, Wye. and Liz Daniels.

Highway, quarry track, faint trail through hills. Those limestone cliffs are worth climbing but I bet no-ones bothered. Glad I’m still in a four-wheel jeep. It’s time to park - Don’t drive on that Dragon like thing Philip It is gone before I can get a picture.
‘Liz, get your wellies on and pass me a beer.’ We tossed a coin and Philip carried the lunch whilst I carried his eight year-old son. Wading through a stream in the direction of a cliff is always a good sign!

From the survey It appeared that we entered on the Sin Soon Lee tin mine side, a railway tunnel passage with some low cut bits to ferret In at a rather muddy water level. Onward and a bit of upward exploring found us at the top of the Treasure Room half an hour later. Nothing doing up here bar losing a pint of sweat and sneezing alot from the dusty air.

Regaining the stream level by another route we backtracked to tear a small child away from his mud pies and forged onwards. The survey doesn’t really show that in most sections of this cave the stream has cut away a small wet passage of its own which connects to the larger, older system above at infrequent intervals. We wriggled in the water and poked noses in all the places that we could. It was quite clear that most of the interest would be in the older, hotter roof section. There were some lovely flowstone and helictites before we reached daylight and the familiar limestone walls were regained.

Philip and I tried to return by way of an old upper level route whist the others took the stream. Some dodgy climbs (slings were useful) and we were miles above the water and looking a long way down. The upper level passage has a higher branch which we followed. Past dried up water courses, a massive stal and then a rooftop view of Gergasi Cavern. We did our fly on the wall act and crawled along a tiny ledge in the roof but finding the route down proved very dodgy and we gave it a miss.
Back tracking down the climbs proved very tricky and very slippy. Heart in my mouth as I saw Philip roll/slide down 50 feet of guano covered rock slope. He was shaken with some skin missing from his arms but otherwise alright. My turn next and I really didn’t want to do it (especially with a red scorpion close to my first handhold). I forget how I did it but I must have put my tong legs to the test. Finding our way back to the water proved no easy task at the entrance either. We couldn’t find the way for ages. Luckily some footprints could be seen under and almost overhanging boulder. I really did not remember coming up that way.

Lessons learnt - to mark our way and wear long sleeved shirts. We proceeded back out, tired but safe. Swimming in sunny streams is a perfect way to clean off!

Elizabeth Daniels.

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