ShowCaveBlog

On 24-SEP-2008 a cruise ship of Carnival Cruise Lines dropped anchor at the Belize coast. Their contracted tour operator, Bel-Cruise, offered day trips including a trip with cave tubing on Cave’s Branch River. The river was rather high this day, so the Institute of Archaeology (which is licensing the operators) issued a warning, but did not prohibit the tours. Most local tour companies canceled their trips due to the poor conditions, but not Bel-Cruise. So under the difficult conditions over 300 cruise ship passengers were participating the cave tubing. Almost at the end of the tour, strong currents pushed one tube toward the cave walls and a couple was sucked beneath the water. The man was rescued, his wife could not be reached in time and drowned. The guides attempted CPR but were not able to rescue her.

There are numerous tour operators at Caves’s Branch River. They are all licensed by the Institute of Archaeology, which is responsible for the area. The caves are important archaeologic sites, and the goal of the IOA is the protection of the site, not the enforcement of security regulations. However, they could have stopped the tours but did not. The responsible operators stopped their tours. We have listed only one operator, Cave’s Branch River Lodge on showcaves.com. We can’t actually tell if they are responsible, but we guess so.

Many people on discussion boards on the web tell about safety issues on the Bel-Cruise tours. There are people telling about groups without guides, lost in the cave and crying for help. Actually it is hard to tell if those stories are true.

Cave tubing is probably the most important day trip for Belize, so it is of enormous economic importance for the country. Members of the Belize Tourism Board (BTB), the Ministry of Tourism and Belize’s National Institute of Culture and History (NICH) met to improve safety precautions. The established mandatory protective policies, which are effective 15-OCT-2008, include:

1. The guide to guest ratio of 1 guide to 8 guests, as prescribed by law, will be enforced as a policy for use of the caves.
2. The Institute of Archaeology will install signs regarding policies that must be adhered to when using the cave system for tours.
3. The BTB will work in collaboration with NICH to increase the presence of Tourism Police in the area.
4. Staggered entrance to the caves will be implemented by the IOA.
5. All tour guides will have to complete a mandatory training course given by the IOA and the BTB before November 2009.

Most important is obviously the last point. The trainings include a 2-3 day theory course which will cover Caves and the Ancient Maya, Cave Safety, Cave Ethics, Cave Geology and Regulations for operating in caves and the penalties that will be levied if policies are not adhered to. A five day course will cover Swift Water Rescue, Advanced First Aid and Cave Rescue. For security reasons the second one is much more important, hopefully this is the mandatory part.

As a matter of fact river caves are always dangerous, cavers know this. Most of the spectacular accidents of the last years happened in connection with flooding caves. So we are not really sure why all this regulations, which are somewhat basic, were not in effect before. On the other hand, they will not prevent further accidents, although they will make them less likely and hopefully optimize the rescue efforts if something happens.

We have listed many dangerous cave trips on showcaves.com, we try our best to warn and we hope our visitors have some common sense to decide what they do. We actually recommend dry trips, which are offered too in Belize. Such tubing experiences are only for physically fit people, which are good swimmers, not for couples from Orlando, Florida, in their fifties, who think it was as comfortable as a boat cruise down the Mississippi on a steamer. At the end, everyone is responsible for his own life, and white water rafting of any kind is definitely a recreational activity where accidents happen, above and below ground.

There is a website operated by the New7Wonders Foundation which is actually a huge poll. More than one hundred million people have already voted for a ranking of world wonders. Now there is a new vote for seven wonders of nature, which means a sort of ranking for biotopes, geotopes and so forth.

We do not know if this is an altruistic initiative or just a way to collect millions of addresses. Please decide yourself if you want to vote.

However, we were astonished today as we learned that many of the top ten ranks are actually karst related. There is Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park currently on rank 1, a river cave located on the Philippines, then there is Ha Long Bay in Vietnam, which is actually a flooded tower karst with abundant caves, the Chocolate Hills on the Philippines is also a tower karst area with many caves, Ali Sadr Cave is a show cave in the Iran. This means four of the first ten on the list are karst related. Not too bad….

This is only a snapshot of 01-OCT-2008. For an actual list look at:
 The top 77 candidates of the New7Wonders of Nature Nominees

There is news about a doline with a small cave located on Grand Cayman in the Caribbean Sea. The popular spot, once used for swimming, will be developed with a path and a folding stairway down into the sinkhole. A guide will be stationed at the cave to explain it to people and give them access, probably also to make sure nothing is destroyed. Because of the small size there will probably be no guided tours, visitors will visit the cave self guided.

The cave contains special animals, living in the fresh water which covers part of the floor ankle high. Those isopods willl probably be shown to the visitors through a stereoscope.

Cayman Islands – Cay Compass News Online – Blue Hole Cave will be exhibit