Wednesday, March 16, 2022
8:23 a.m. Pronto Coffee
Chiang Dao, Thailand
Let’s see if I can lose myself in the story of the cave. I’ve been to this cave once already. But it is divided into two sections, which they call Zone 1 and Zone 2. Zone 1 is the main cave. It is lit up with electric lights, and you don’t need a guide to go there. Zone 2 consists of two, or three, or even four different caves that are linked by narrow passageways. These caves are more natural and have no lighting at all. To visit them you have to go in with a local guide with a kerosene lantern. To visit Zone 1 costs 40 baht for foreigners and 20 baht for Thais. To visit Zone 2 with a lantern guide costs 200 baht for foreigners. That would cover a group of several people. I’m not sure what they charge Thai people. The dual pricing in Thailand is interesting and is always a source of debate. I think people at ticket counters have dealt with enough foreigners complaining about the dual-pricing that they now try to hide it. They post the prices for foreigners in English, and they will have the English tickets prominently displayed on the counter. The price for Thai people is in a separate place and is always just in Thai, so many foreigners don’t even notice that they are paying a much higher price. And the tickets for Thai people are kept hidden underneath the tickets for foreigners, so you don’t ever see them.
When I visited the Nam Lod Cave, I tipped both of my guides, and they seemed to be surprised and confused by that. But at the Chiang Dao cave, they made a big deal out of how the guides would appreciate a tip. The woman that sold me my ticket spoke English, and she gave me quite a speech about how the guides are volunteers from the village, and a tip would be appreciated by them. I don’t know if they give this same speech to the Thais. I doubt it, since tipping is not a custom in Thailand. I doubt very much that any Thai group would tip their lantern guide. The tipping story also seemed a bit disingenuous. Prominent signs actually break down where the 200-baht ticket price goes. The money is divided up between various groups and organizations, with 50 baht going to pay for the lantern fuel and 90 baht going directly to the guide. That 90 baht is their salary. And with that being the case, they aren’t volunteers at all. But their plea for tips insists on them being volunteers. Of course, it doesn’t matter much. I gave my guide a tip of 100 baht, which, considering that it is 50% of the ticket price itself and more than her actual 90-baht salary, could be seen as generous. She certainly seemed surprised that I gave her so much. But it’s less than $4 Canadian. And for the experience of going into that cave, it’s a very small amount to pay.
I also made a big deal out of taking video of this temple cave visit. I took a lot of video on my first visit as well. And on this second visit, I duplicated a lot of that video. It’s just that I’d learned a lot on my first visit about the cave and about the temple. And on this second visit, I went over some things I’d already talked about, and I had a lot better information this time. And I used my Panasonic G85 again. I didn’t even have the GoPro on a chest harness. I never used the GoPro at all. I just used the G85 for the whole experience. I’m starting to wonder now why I was so intent on using the GoPro so much before. It’s true that the G85 has difficulty with autofocus, and it is a much more complex and demanding camera, but using it produces much better results. And it is superior to the GoPro in so many ways. It was such a relief to go through the entire cave and not have to worry even once about the camera. In that same time period, the GoPro would have caused a constant stream of problems ranging from overheating to freezing to failing to record audio to the battery dying multiple times. Of course, the GoPro would also be unable to record video in such a dark environment anyway. The G85 just worked. I didn’t have a single problem with it from the start to the finish. And from a brief look at the video afterwards, it did a nice job of exposing the dark interior of the cave. AND I seem to be developing techniques for reducing the problems associated with its poor autofocus. My main approach was to set up four complete Custom Modes. And each Custom Mode consists of a range of settings suitable for a certain situation. Many cameras don’t even have Custom Modes available. But the G85 has two Custom Modes right on the mode dial. And the second Custom Mode can be subdivided into three more. The advantage to this is that I can switch from one to the other just by turning the mode dial. I can change the Mode Dial from C1 to C2 with just one click, and that effectively can change twenty different settings all at once.
The main thing I changed for each Custom Mode was the focusing technique. In particular, I created a Custom Mode for those times when I had the camera turned around and facing me directly. Normally, it’s difficult to do this with the G85 because the focus keeps changing. The camera will focus on me. But if I move, the camera will choose something else to focus on. And throughout the video, the object in focus will shift constantly. And even when it is focused on one thing, it will pulse in and out of focus. It’s very annoying. But this time, I decided to use the Tracking Mode for focusing. With this mode, I can lock the camera onto one object, and in theory, the camera will track that object and stay focused on it even when it moves around the screen. In this Custom Mode, I turn the camera around and aim it at my face and half-press the shutter button. This causes the camera to lock focus on my face. And then I can hold the camera farther away and move it around, and the camera will stay focused on me. Then I can press the shutter button and start recording video. The disadvantage to this approach is that I have to change the Custom Mode every time I flip the camera around. I can’t just film myself and then turn the camera around and film what is around me. I have to stop recording, change the Custom Mode (to one with a suitable focusing method), and then press the shutter button again to restart recording. The tracking isn’t perfect, either. It’s nowhere near as good as the tracking you’d get with a Sony or Canon camera or more expensive Panasonic. The Panasonic G85 is a budget camera, so it doesn’t have the most advanced technology, but I seem to be getting acceptable results with this system.
On this second visit, I didn’t go directly into the cave. When I arrived, I wandered around the temple compound a bit, and I shot some video of their small museum, of the fish pond, of the various information signs, and then of the temple ruins. I couldn’t get any information about this, but there were some very old temple ruins on a rocky outcropping nearby. These ruins are actually named on the ticket as the Twenty-Five Top Temple. But beyond that, I wasn’t able to get any information. And once I’d wandered around the temple compound, I went inside the cave itself. I went slowly again. As always, I was surprised to see how quickly other people went by. At the very entrance to the cave, there is a wide area with dozens of Buddhist statues and shrines and a dozen interesting geological features. It’s a beautiful spot. I stayed there with my camera for a very long time. And the longer I stayed there, the more interesting details I uncovered. I kept seeing more and more things. And the entire time I was there, only two other people stopped for even a few seconds. Everyone else just walked right by and ignored everything around them.
The two people that did stop briefly were two young foreign men. They surprised me as well, because they climbed up onto the main temple platform without removing their shoes. I was up there at the time, and of course I had removed my sandals. It’s second nature by now to remove my footwear whenever I get remotely close to a sacred Buddhist site. It’s not always fully apparent when you are expected to remove your shoes and when you don’t need to. So I err on the side of caution and routinely remove them. But in this case, up on the shrine platform at the entrance to the cave, it could not have been clearer that this was a sacred site. The stone ground itself was covered here and there with carpets for people to kneel on and pray and make their offerings. I can’t imagine how anyone could stomp up the steps to this area without realizing that they should remove their shoes.
I think my greater awareness of my surroundings and slower pace come directly from my photography habits. I appreciate the hobby from that point of view. I’ve noticed over the decades that there can be a debate about photography. There is a certain set of people who really look down their nose at anyone who takes pictures. They see the camera as being a barrier. They argue that if you are always taking pictures, you aren’t really present in the moment. That may be true for some people. For them, taking pictures is a burden. But it isn’t for me. My camera helps me immensely in terms of appreciating where I am and absorbing all the details. I find it deepens my experience of everything I do.
Once I left the entrance to the cave, I found myself in a much larger area where Zones 1 & 2 of the cave system intersect. At this point, you can proceed down the Zone 1 cave with the electric lights. Or you can go to a table and pay 200 baht for a lantern guide to take you into Zone 2. As I learned during my tour, the trip through Zone 2 ends at a point where the dark cave joins up with the lighted Zone 1 cave. You essentially go in a circle through the Zone 2 caves and link back up with Zone 1.
Throughout the experience, I kept wondering what was the best way to experience the Chiang Dao cave. For example, is there any point to even going into Zone 2? Maybe Zone 1 is enough all by itself. Zone 1 only costs 40 baht, and the cave itself is quite long and large and elaborate. It is also so well-lit that you can see everything. After you experience Zone 1, why should you bother going into caves that are exactly the same but pitch black? What’s the point? Why pay five times as much to now go into a cave where you can’t see anything?
This question was answered almost immediately upon entering Zone 2. And the answer is that you absolutely should visit both Zone 1 and Zone 2. I enjoyed my visit to Zone 1 immensely. However, the experience of going through Zone 2 was completely different and deeply enjoyable in a completely new way. For one thing, being in the dark made the cave feel much more real and atmospheric and interesting. This is, after all, what a cave environment is really like in its natural state. Because it is dark and natural, for example, it is full of bats. There were almost no bats in Zone 1. The bright light drove them out. But the Zone 2 caves were full of bats. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of them were all over the ceiling and flying around.
There was also a sense of mystery and danger in the dark cave. My guide’s lantern and my flashlight could penetrate only so much of the darkness, and I had the sense of the immensity of this cave. Given enough time and exploration, you could probably uncover new tunnels leading to new caves deeper and deeper into the earth. And who knows what is down there? Your brain could dance around the idea of what would happen if your guide’s lantern ran out of kerosene and your flashlight batteries died. And you’d be there in the dark, deep underground, lost.
The rock formations also felt more natural overall. The Zone 1 cave had been converted largely into a Buddhist temple. But in Zone 2, there were far fewer statues and shrines. We came across three in total, and my guide stopped at all three of them to pray and make an offering. With just the lantern lighting up the scene, it was quite dramatic as she kneeled in front of the statues. And since the cave had been left in its natural state, you could appreciate the way stalagmites grew up from the cave floor to meet the stalactites coming down from the ceiling. I went a bit crazy with this idea while I was in the cave, and I thought of it as a great love story. The stalactite above and the stalagmite below were both part of a natural pair, and as they grew, they were reaching out for each other over tens of thousands of years, constantly yearning, always growing until the day when they could finally touch and form one column. And during these thousands of years, any number of things could happen to interfere with this love story. It could be a tragic story as the stalactite grows too heavy and unstable and breaks off and falls to the cave floor. The matching stalagmite would no longer have the source of the dripping water that created it, and they would both, essentially, die. As I went through the caves of Zone 2, I saw this pairing of stalactite and stalagmite everywhere in various stages. Some stalactites were no more than a tiny sliver, just a narrow finger of pure white mineral. The drips of water forming on the end could be larger than the stalactite itself, and the stalagmite being formed below could be nothing more than a slight rise in the rocky ground, barely discernible, but growing nonetheless. In other places, the stalactite and stalagmite would be mere inches apart. Sometimes just a fraction of an inch would be separating them, and you could imagine the number of years that would have to pass for that separation to lessen to nothing and they could finally touch. In other places, of course, the two had met tens of thousands of years ago, and they had grown into massive columns dozens of feet in diameter. Some were so large that they formed their own cave walls. And in other places, the stalagmite and stalactite were separated by so much distance that they wouldn’t even be aware of one another’s existence. The stalactite would be forming on the ceiling a hundred and fifty feet above me, lost in the dark. And the matching stalagmite on the cave’s floor was so far away that they wouldn’t even be aware of each other. They were simply too far apart to even be aware that the other existed. This struck me as a love story where your perfect match, your soulmate, was out there in the world, somewhere, but you are separated by so much distance that you never meet.
In Zone 1, you saw very little of this romantic pairing. The stalactites were there coming down from the ceiling, and the drips of water were there on their tips and falling to the rock and sand below. But there were few matching stalagmites. Perhaps in preparing Zone 1 for hundreds of visitors per day, they had broken away the stalagmites so that people wouldn’t trip over them. Perhaps the feet of the many visitors had worn them away to nothing. I was wondering, in fact, where all the sand in Zone 1 had come from. The path you followed from the entrance to the cave’s end was essentially a manufactured path. Many places had been built up with cement and railings, like a city sidewalk. In all the other areas, the path consisted of a soft, sandy bed. On my first visit, I just assumed this was natural and a result of this once being a riverbed. Yet, the caves in Zone 2 were also riverbeds once upon a time. And yet there was no sand there. The cave floor in Zone 2 was all rock and stalagmites. In Zone 1, the cave floor was cement and sand. I wondered if perhaps the sand had been brought in deliberately and placed there to make it safer for visitors, making it less natural and interfering with the growth of stalagmites.
Making your way through Zone 2 required getting on your hands and knees and carefully working through narrow passageways. I can’t remember exactly, but I think there were three places in particular where you had to snake your way slowly through claustrophobic, slippery, and somewhat tricky tunnels. They weren’t very long, but they were challenging. It was particularly difficult for someone like me because of my height but also because I was wearing a thick knapsack while holding a camera in one hand and a flashlight in the other. It wasn’t easy. I was sweating heavily and breathing hard by the time I got to the other side. And the only way I could get through was to remove my knapsack and push it through the tunnel ahead of me. It was too narrow to have it on my back. I appreciated these tunnels for many reasons. They certainly drove home the reality of a cave system. Your brain can’t help but contemplate what it would be like to go through one of these tunnels as it gets narrower and narrower until you are trapped and unable to move forward or even go back. Plus, as a visitor, you normally aren’t supposed to touch any of the rock formations. This is just common sense, but it is also told to you on signs and by the guides and ticket-sellers. So you naturally go through the entire cave system without ever getting the chance to touch the rock. But as you go through the narrow passageways, you have no choice. The only way to get through is to use your hands, and you get the tactile sensation of what the slippery, wet rocks feel like. This makes going through Zone 2 a more real and physical experience than simply strolling along the soft sandy path in Zone 1. It is also inevitable that you bang your head. No matter how careful you are, you will smack your head against the cave ceiling and the rock formations. If you had any curiosity about what the rocks felt like, that smack against your head certainly satisfied some of that.
Everything I just wrote answered my first question about whether it was worth visiting both Zones 1 and 2. It’s definitely worth it. In Zone 2, you also got the experience of spending a lot of time in the deep dark. And then you have that sudden and powerful sense of change when you emerge back into the light. It’s quite something to reemerge into the world of light after being in the dark for so long.
But there is also the question of which zone to visit first. What would be better? Should you go to Zone 1 first and then go to Zone 2? Or should you go to Zone 2 first? I was thinking about this as I was entering Zone 2, and I saw arguments on both sides. But after my visit to Zone 2 was over, I had the definite feeling that it was better to do what I had done: visit Zone 1 first, even on a separate day, and then return to visit Zone 2.
I say that because after I came out of Zone 2 this time, Zone 1 felt like a bit of a letdown. The brightly lit cave felt somewhat fake all of a sudden. I realized that if I had gone to Zone 2 first, I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate Zone 1 as much. But on my first visit, when I had gone only to Zone 1, I thought the place was amazing. I hadn’t been in the dark cave yet, so I was entranced by all the rock formations I could see in the bright light. I enjoyed my visit to Zone 1 very much. And then I also enjoyed my visit to Zone 2 because it added so much to what I had seen and experienced in Zone 1. But I think if I’d done it the other way around, I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate each one as much as I did. Visitors should take in Zone 1 first and then go into Zone 2.
I noticed, however, that due to the physical layout of the caves, everyone went into Zone 2 first. As visitors enter the cave, they are approached right away by someone that encourages them to go into Zone 2. And the start of the Zone 2 experience is right there. So people just naturally do that first. And the Zone 2 tour ends in the Zone 1 cave towards the end. And I think people just rush through Zone 1 afterward and leave. They would never get the chance to really appreciate Zone 1 because it would feel somewhat thin and pale after their time in the dark.
And that was my second visit to the Chiang Dao cave. It was great. I haven’t had a chance to really review the video from that experience, but I watched a little bit of it when I copied the files to my hard drives. And it looked pretty good. I think my focusing techniques were effective.