Crystal Cave, Bermuda 2005 – Photography, Images and Cameras

We went to Bermuda in April, 2005. Bermuda is a lovely place: picturesque, clean, well-organized – a sort of Switzerland in the North Atlantic. I was actually surprised that it was in the Atlantic as I’d always thought of it as being in the Caribbean. Nice though it is it’s also quite small and unless you want to spend all of your time in/at/around the water there’s not all that much to do. There are a few excursions though and one day we went on one of them: to these caves. From the entrance to the caves you go down a very steep set of steps. That finished my wife. She has a fear of heights and just couldn’t go down, so she said she wait for me outside. So down I went. I’m glad we went. I like caves and these were pretty impressive. Wikipedia describes them as follows:

Crystal Cave is the most famous of Bermuda’s many subterranean caverns. It is located in Hamilton Parish, close to Castle Harbour. The cave is approximately 500 m long, and 62 m deep. Lower 19 – 20 m are below water level. The cave formed at lower sea level and, as the sea level rose, many speleothems, which formed in air, now are under water level.

A tourist attraction since 1907, it was discovered in 1905 by Carl Gibbons and Edgar Hollis, two 12-year-old boys searching for a lost cricket ball. Soon after, the Wilkinson family (the owners of the property since 1884) learned of the discovery, Mr. Percy Wilkinson lowered his 14-year-old son Bernard into it with a bicycle lamp on 140 feet of strong rope tied to a tree to explore the cave.

The area surrounding Harrington Sound (which lies to the south of Crystal Cave) is of limestone formation and noted for many subterranean waterways, through which the waters of the sound empty into the Atlantic. Crystal Cave is one of these, and – as its name suggests – is one of the most spectacularly beautiful, with many stalactites, stalagmites, and deep crystal-clear pools. However, some crystal formations have been damaged by earthquakes in the far past.

The pictures aren’t stunning, but considering they were taken with a Canon Powershot S50 (an early 2000s 5Mp camera – essentially a fairly sophisticated compact point and shoot) they’re not that bad either. It was quite dark an I was quite surprised that I got anything at all.