Planet Earth

I caught the repeat of the Cave episode of the BBC Planet Earth series over the weekend. And as amazing as the episode itself was the last 10/15 minutes showing behind the scene footage was even better. In one particular cave the floor was a thick several inches deep carpet of droppings! It was absolutely disgusting. And it was crawling with cockroaches. The men were just completely smeared in this stuff.
But what was truly amazing was the filming of the Lechuguilla cave. It took the film crew two years to gain permission fro the filming and its unlikely that such a opportunity will be ever granted again. It’s the deepest cave in the USA, discovered only fairly recently and is considered to be the most beautiful cave in the world, mostly due to its ‘Chandelier Ballroom’.

Subhanallah, it was amazing. They stayed down in the caves for 10 days even though local experts recommend a maximum of 5 days!! Can you imagine 10 days without sunlight, without seeing the sky, without knowing whether its day or night. Doing this out of choice! They were crawling through the tiniest of crawl spaces, literally spaces so small that if you get stuck then the only way to get you out would be by breaking bones! Now I went caving in Cheddar Gorge (remember that guys?) and I remember having to crawl through small crawl ways on our belly and crawl along ledges where to your left is open black abyss (I still cannot believe they let school kids do that!).
I think one of the things mentioned on the show was that once someone broke their ankle and it took 100 experts three days to get this person out! Was all pretty amazing to see how it was all done. I remember the waterways one where they filmed the Piranhas. Now I had this image of them all in a boat floating a long with a camera dipped in the water filming this whole thing. Haha! In actual fact the filming was done by someone mad enough to swim with the Piranhas!