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San Gil is a small town north of Bogota, which has recently become a centre for adventure sports and outdoor activities. We stayed in Backpacker Sam’s VIP hostel – a really nice new hostel, although the triple bunks were a bit scary!

The next day we decided to go caving, something I hadn’t heard of before so didn’t really know what to expect. Some of the girls had done it the day before (Carmel’s sister and her 3 friends are on a 3 week holiday to Colombia at the moment) so we knew our clothes would get pretty filthy but that was about it.

We arrived at the office, got our headlamps and helmets, then our guide brought us through some fields and then down a ladder into the caves – eventually we got to 85m underground. You can walk through the caves for 6 hours, although we didn’t go that far but 2 and a half hours underground was quite enough for me!

Once down the ladder, we started walking through the caves. In some parts we had to duck our heads to the side to fit through, other parts we were crawling along in shallow water. We stopped along the way to go down a “mud slide” just to make sure we were totally filthy! We also had to do a duck dive under water and be pulled on a rope by our guide through a hole under the water. We were only holding our breath for about ten seconds but it was quite scary because you had no idea where you were going.

Later the guide made us turn off our head lamps and we walked in total darkness. It was strange because it was the same darkness with your eyes open or closed. Inside all the caves there were thousands of stalagtites and stalagmites (geography lessons coming back) – really impressive sitting right up next to them. We finished up around lunch time and went for a well deserved sandwich in Gringo Mike’s.