A Time for Spelunking

I just returned from a visit with the cousins to Lianzhou, which is a small city in Guangdong Province. I went from Shantou to Guangzhou first. Despite the "theifs and racketeers" my student warned me about, I found Guangzhou to be a nice city, although a little large. I waited for the first cousin at the mall, and then we met the other cousin at the bus station, where we hopped the 5-hour fast bus to Lianzhou.

Every city has it's own claims to fame, and Lianzhou has the Subterranean River. It is a huge cave with amazing rock formations, so far down into the ground that the cousins joked that if you went much further, you could go to America.


Just looking down from the entrance, as we waited for a guide, was pretty amazing. It's called the "Big Mouth Cave," because the cousins explained the opening of the cave looks like a big mouth. Their four-year-old niece was a little frightened by the size of it. It's true, though, that it looked like the mouth of Monstro (the whale who swallowed Pinocchio).


The bottom left formation is called a "lotus flower," and the pieces really look like the petals of a flower. We walked up and down staircases for 40 min. and the tour ended with a 20 min. boat ride on the small cave river.

-吴佩芙