break on through...

"WHAT A FRIENDLY LOOKING HOLE.
LET'S GO SEE WHAT LIVES INSIDE!"

Today I went to the other side. Literally. Physically. Metaphysically. Let me explain:

A couple months ago while visiting Olomana Gardens in the foothills of Waimanalo, I followed along with an impromptu group hike and found out about a hidden trail that follows the water flumes which wind through the mountains and provide all the irrigation water for the agriculture in the area. We came across a tunnel about 4" high that disappeared into an almost sheer face of mountainside and was told that if we were to go through it, we would come out to the Lost World on the other side...

WAIMANALO WATER FLUMES

Today I went back. Today I went through the black, and came out on the other side.

We peer into the entrance and can only see blackness 30-40 feet in. The cool water rushing around our ankles gurgles impassively, and my stomach twitches as my mind starts to paint macabre pictures of creatures that lurk in deep, dark places, and of pale gaping faces floating in the night.

FELLOW ADVENTURER AND SOUL-SEARCHER:
LUCIE VOELCKER, THE TRAVELING POET OF GERMANY
AT THE TUNNEL ENTRANCE

Adrenaline kicks in and I can feel the glint in my eye brightening. The Traveling Poet's gaze meets mine, and our glinting eyes smile in agreement that we are actually going to go in.

The 9-LED flashlight, a gift I received only the day before, can only light the way 20 feet ahead before being swallowed by the blackness. It is a strange feeling, knowing that there are tons and tons of dirt, rock, trees, and who knows what else pressing in all around you. It is perhaps an even stranger thing to knowingly descend into these dark places of the earth; once the mind starts chewing on the your fears, the chatter is difficult to stop:

• "What if the light goes out?"
• "What lives in here?"
• "Remember that creature in Star Wars that dragged Luke under the muck in the garbage compacter? I wonder if that thing lives here..."
• "Now I know how Gollum must have felt; no wonder he went insane...."
• "Don't drop the flashlight."
• "What lies ahead?"
• "What was that?!?"
  
• "I don't want to see any faces. Or dead bodies. I don't do dead bodies. Or floating apparitions. No floating apparitions please."
• "What if this doesn't come out on the other side?"
  
• "What was that that just brushed my ankle?!"
• "Don't drop the flashlight!!"
• "DO NOT. DROP. THE FLASHLIGHT."
  

And on and on and on and on.....

On and on we press, losing all sense of time and space, save for what the flashlight can show us for the next twenty feet, the next 30 seconds. The tunnel walls are cold and roughly hewn, and beads of water glisten on the walls like pearls in the gray sky.

The water seems to simply appear out of thin air. The ceiling bears down upon us, seeming to get lower and lower with each step...then it toys with me, opening up every now and then enough to let me stand up straight.

Thankfully, The Traveling Poet starts singing. It is haunting and surreal and macabre and beautiful and strangely comforting all at the same time...

THE SOUND OF PITCH BLACK -
FOR BEST EFFECT, VIEW FULLSCREEN

We pause for a moment and turn off the light. The cool water rushes around my ankles, like busy commuters rushing and gurgling to make their trains. The walls press in around me, and my unseeing eyes blink naievely, desperately groping for light.

There is no difference between keeping my eyes open or closed. Panic rises in my stomach, and I smile broadly to laugh silently and keep the fear at bay.

The screen of my mind and the screen of my retina are one and the same, both inky blank canvases awaiting inspiration and direction...

We press on, the rythym of our sloshing footsteps keeping pace with my quickening heartbeat. I force my mind to stay on the light at the end of the tunnel, though it does not come. On and on into the next 20 feet of darkness we slosh, the water no longer gurgling but relentlessly going the other way, passing silent judgment on the decision to walk against the flow.

My life has become a cliche, and I am loving every minute of it: fear mixed with wonder mixed with anticipation shaken in mountain spring water and pressed by a hundred million tons of sheer-faced mountain...

It is no longer my imagination, the ceiling is getting gradually lower and lower now. Up ahead at the edge of the flashlight, I can make out a different shape, and I cringe....it looks like the roof has caved in, and I don't want to think about the implications of that.

As we get closer, the tunnel turns almost 90 degrees to the left, and what I thought was a cave-in is actually an older tunnel that has since been sealed. The water seems to have quickened its pace and is much louder here, and the cave ceiling keep getting lower.

Now, we are duck-walking, arse-deep in the water, and I am wondering if we will keep going like this until we shrink down and down and down into the size of m&m candies, like Alice in Wonderland, on our way to smoke hookahs with giant existentially philosophic caterpillars...

Up ahead in the distance, I see a simmering light...

It's not the Hotel California, it's the Exit to the Tunnel...and I can breathe deeply again. My thighs are aching from duck-walking the last 100 feet, but it doesn't matter now, I can see the end.

The Travel Poet emerges first, fourty feet ahead of me, and when I finally emerge blinking in the sunlight, a whole new world ... the Lost World ... comes into focus...

We are Sam Neil and Laura Dern, we are the only two humans left on the planet, we are the first two human beings on the planet...we are Adam & Eve. The other side is lush, vibrant green, a living, breathing soundscape of nature...

THE SOUNDS OF NATURE

With newly refreshed eyes and ears, each sight, sound, smell, touch is heightened, and we explore this wilderness we have discovered with childlike wonder, taking our shoes off and squishing through the mud, running up the valley walls and whooping with joy.

As the nature-induced ecstasy fades, we bask in the afterglow and settle back down next to the Exit, out portal back into the world we just escaped. Not ready to return yet, we hunker into our packs and much on organic energy bars and vegan apple cakes given to us that morning by our genius rockclimbing/smoothie-making friend [Badass Harvard Laureate]...and the Traveling Poet strums Martin [her guitar], and bursts into song again...

She is taken by the moment, channeling words and chords and melodies that speak to the moment we are sharing... I sit at her feet and am 6 years old again, close my eyes and am lifted with her voice, swirling with the notes up through the trees... she tells me later that when this happens, it is as if her soul is speaking to her through her own music. I am witnessing a faerie singing her heartsong in the wilderness with my own eyes...

INSPIRATION - CLICK FOR YOUTUBE VIDEO

# # #

...Today, I sat under a mountain, and in the complete absence of light, became a thought.

A bodiless, floating thought. As if the tunnel had collapsed, and my consciousness was ascending through the layers of rock and dirt through the mountain to gain a better view...and in that moment, I experienced peace.

Peace, knowing that if I had indeed died, that I had died while adventuring, doing exactly what I want to be doing - something I love... and absolutely living in the moment.

Peace, knowing that few humans had ever trod into the heart of this mountain...and fewer still had taken the time to stop, turn off their flashlights, and savor the experience.

Peace, melting into the walls of the tunnel, becoming one with the 'aina.

Peace, knowing that the world is what you think it is.

Peace, in communion with nature.

Peace, reconnecting with the source.

Peace.

# # #

Travelog Redux - backpacking New Zealand

STA TRAVEL CENTERS MEAN BACKPACKING TO ME!

Thought I'd post an entry from the Travelog I kept in 2003 while backpacking New Zealand. I booked my flight into Aukland, and nothing else, deciding to figure everything out once I got there..."spontaneous travel", I called it. One of the best trips I have ever done [so far] in my life! No pics, only some images from my sketchbook at the time....enjoy:

9pm, Janus Hall Backpacker's Lodge, Wet All Day

....Waitomo Caves Gloworm Adventure Tour was well worth it, what an adventure!!

30-meter abseil into a hole in the ground starts things off...the hole looks like, well, a hole about 1/2 meter wide an 2 meters down, then you squeeze into the opening and find yourself hanging in a limestone chimney 30m off the cave floor....

...then down a narrow path to a short flying fox run (in the dark), quick break for tea & a biscuit a.k.a. cave cookie a.k.a. NZ Granola Bar...we dangle our feet over the edge of a 10-foot drop and peer into the still, pitch-black water below...can't tell how dep it is (or isn't)....we jump off the cliff into the freezng water below and paddle our way upstream where our guide shows us a chamber full of gloworms & tells us of their lifecycles:

"They are acually maggots of a certain kind of fly, the only maggots known to catch their food by using a light on their arse...only maggots known to trap their food with snot-like fishing lines they dangle to entangle their prey...after living as larvae for many weeks, they pupate into flies which live for three days & shag until they die of exhaustion....they have very short life cycles, but very large penises...what a trade-off, aye?? "

Then, after paddling uptream for about half an hour, we sit on our inner tubes and form a human chain, shut the lights off on our helmets...and float down the stream in the darkness, with only the pale glow of the maggots to light our way.

It is a surreal feeling, drifting downstream in an underground river in total darkness, with 7 other people crazy enough to want to do it with you, and your guide....you lose all sense of space & it feels like you are drifting in the cold vacuum of space; the glow worms look like the stars of distant galaxies....then *SPLASH* our other guide scares the s*%t out of us by making a god-awful noise which breaks the spell and heralds our arrival back to our entry point, where we came in on the flying fox & jumped into the water.

We ditch the inner tubes, turn our lights back on, and follow our guide downstream into the icy black water towards the roar of what sounds like a huge waterfall...we twist & urn & stumble thru a series of rapids, not knowing what lies beneath or where your foot is stepping, just trusting to your numb feet that tey will find the way.

"Watch out for the big eels" they say, and we cannot tell if they are joking or not...although I wonder when they tell us to keep our fingers out of the water lest they be mistaken for earthworms or grubs. Down a slide, we turn a corner & continue downstream, sometimes ankle-deep in water, sometimes chest-deep, sometimes paddling to keep your head afloat as the river bed drops away beneath you.

We pause and our guide points out a few stallegmite formatioins that remind them of different things: T-Rex claw over here, fairy castle over there...then the crown jewell, a formation that looks like a sheep farmer having a little too much fun with his sheep, doggy-style if ya know what I mean...

We press on despite the fact that I can no longer feel my toes, and the cave gets smaller and smaller, pressing in around us. We are crawling our way thru some spaces now, our guides have given us directions and we are now leading the way, the blind leading the blind...

We duck under another low ceiling into another cold pool, and Ritchie, our Maori guide, runs forrward to a nook in the wall and exclaims, "Check this out, it's Cecil!!" "Cecil" turns out to be a 1.5 foot-long eel who resembles a catfish with no eyes, and who is, apparently, asleep.

I am immediately reminded of the "shrieking eels" in [the movie] "The Princess Bride", an also reminded of the earlier warning at our entry point into the caves...yech...10 feet long, they said, 6 inchess in diameter...my skin crawls at the thought of such a creature wrapping itself around my leg, and with a shudder, we move on. Bloody uncanny those creatures, seems like they could live anywhere....their grey skin is unnatural, reminding me of Gollum.

We turn another corner and are given a choice....the easy way out, or do we want our money's worth...nobody objects, so we take the right fork and crawl under a tiny gap in the wall...to emerge under a 10M waterfall. We climb up one at a time, and squeeze through a narrow passageway to come to another waterfall, and...daylight.

It is with mixed feelings that we greet the daylight; sad that our adventure is coming to an end, glad that we are out of the cold...and on our way to hot showers & soup & bagels...what an amazing experience!

Two hours underground with complete strangers, and we emerge with the strange bond a shared experience creates. We know each other pretty well now: there are the 3 Italian guys who don't speak much English but laugh at everything you say...the Smiling Swiss, Felix, who beamed at you every time you looked his way...the Aussie couple, Danielle and her hubbie The Plumber, true-blue Aussies with that "no worries" attitude that meant they were up for anything thrown their way...Sharon, the British girl who teaches English in japan and was petrified the whole way, but who made it thru, foggy glasses and all...and, of course, Bigi [my Austrian travelling companion at the time], who is just...well, Bigi, making friends with everybody, and loving every minute of it.

What a great day!
12/21/2003

WARM AGAIN:
THE VERANDAH GRILL BACK AT THE BACKPACKER'S LODGE