.... are you supposed to be scared inside a lava tunnel ... it sounds like you should be ...

the volcano on santa cruz ... or is it the volcano that IS santa cruz island in the galapagos hasn't erupted in a million years, give or take a couple years .... when it was erupting, lava would flow out and the outer edges would cool and harden in the air ... kind of like the crust of bread baking harder and faster than the inside .... once that crust was cooled and hardened, lave kept flowing through it ... sometimes the lava flowed out all together, leaving empty tubes... tunnels ... santa cruz is full of them .... we went in one ...

here's a picture of us inside, no flash, looking back up towards the hole entrance ...

here is the exact same picture ..... and, oh, let's turn the flash on.... so we were walking in very dark darkness, except for the intermittent electric lights ... and the occasional flash photography ... 

sophie was nervous about being in a lava tube... scientifically speaking it is interesting ... but conversationally, it's kinda creepy weird ... yup, let's walk in the huge dark tunnel that leads down into the ground where the hot lava used to flow ... very journey to the center of the earth like ... and you just have to believe dora the explorer when she says it's completely safe, sophie, the lava isn't flowing any more ... hasn't in a million years .... let's try and grasp how long a million years is ... nope, can't do it ...

this tunnel is a HUGE one ... this is about a quarter mile into it and still the ceiling is very high ... some lava tubes are tiny ... i imagine that the wider they are like this, the longer they are likely to be too, right?

dora said you could walk miles into this one .... but it was super muddy ... and the farther we got, the darker and the muddier it became ...

when i was standing outside the lobby of my hotel, looking far in the distance, i asked my hostess how far away the ocean was ... it looked to me to be ten miles? ... she said it was a 24 hour hike away .... but that if you tried to hike it, you would die .... harsh, right? why would you die ... lots of reasons, but the one most pertinent to this blog post is that there are lava tubes all through the area even though it looked like forest .... so if you tried to walk, some of those lava tubes have thin walls and you'd just go crashing through them ... and maybe fall all the way to the center of the earth .... so ... we didn't walk that way ...

here we are on our way out of this one ...

tomorrow's blog?

safari camp ....