"It's okay, just don't think about the Thailand caves"
The tourist attractions here on Tongotapu are a mixed bag, ranging from the underwhelming (Captain Cook's landing point), to the amusingly-bad (the three headed coconut tree) to the under-utilised (most of the beaches and coastline).
By far my favourite of the things I've ticked off so far though, has been Anahulu caves. We headed down as a group one afternoon, after some of the others who'd already been, mentioned that there was a cave you could swim in, about thirty minutes from town. I wasn't necessarily expecting a lot, but it seemed a good enough way to kill a few hours.
We arrived to find essentially a field, where a guy was sitting on a plastic chair. We each paid him 15TOP to turn on a rusty-looking generator, he pointed to a path leading towards the coast, and that was it. If you're thinking this sounds like the start of a cheesy horror film where a bunch of young brits get picked off one by one, you'd be pretty on the money. The cave entrance was close by, and one by one we had to duck under a low-hanging rock to get inside. The path through was pretty dark, despite the generator powering a handful of lights, and would definitely not make it through a health and safety inspection in England.
But, after a few moments of uncertainty, I realised- this was actually a pretty cool cave. There were tonnes of stalagmites and stalagtites to be seen, and it was actually much bigger inside than I'd realised. At the very end of the path was the pool where you could swim and the water was so clear that you could see all the way to the rocks at the bottom, though it must have been at least 12ft deep (if not more- that was just as far down as I went!).
We spent about an hour swimming around in the near-dark and messing around with underwater photography. There are ledges around the side where you can hold onto, but otherwise you need to tread water most of the time you're in the pool, so it was surprisingly tiring! We tried to take some group photos, but it's surprisingly difficult to co-ordinate seven people treading water next to each other simultaneously whilst posing for a photo- who would have guessed?!
We had the place to ourselves the entire time, which made the whole experience both even cooler and more surreal- swimming somewhere like this is something I definitely don't think I'll get the chance to do again!
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| In all its glory |
We arrived to find essentially a field, where a guy was sitting on a plastic chair. We each paid him 15TOP to turn on a rusty-looking generator, he pointed to a path leading towards the coast, and that was it. If you're thinking this sounds like the start of a cheesy horror film where a bunch of young brits get picked off one by one, you'd be pretty on the money. The cave entrance was close by, and one by one we had to duck under a low-hanging rock to get inside. The path through was pretty dark, despite the generator powering a handful of lights, and would definitely not make it through a health and safety inspection in England.
 |
| View from the entrance |
But, after a few moments of uncertainty, I realised- this was actually a pretty cool cave. There were tonnes of stalagmites and stalagtites to be seen, and it was actually much bigger inside than I'd realised. At the very end of the path was the pool where you could swim and the water was so clear that you could see all the way to the rocks at the bottom, though it must have been at least 12ft deep (if not more- that was just as far down as I went!).
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| A picture of the pool- it turns out photos in the dark are tricky! |
We spent about an hour swimming around in the near-dark and messing around with underwater photography. There are ledges around the side where you can hold onto, but otherwise you need to tread water most of the time you're in the pool, so it was surprisingly tiring! We tried to take some group photos, but it's surprisingly difficult to co-ordinate seven people treading water next to each other simultaneously whilst posing for a photo- who would have guessed?!
We had the place to ourselves the entire time, which made the whole experience both even cooler and more surreal- swimming somewhere like this is something I definitely don't think I'll get the chance to do again!
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