Krisna Jama

One Monday morning, at about 9am when most people are drinking coffee infront of their work PC's, I was 60m below the surface with Marko Trebusak, fellow NPN participant, on a Slovenian workshop to one of the most amazing natural specticals I have ever seen to which I feel extremely privelidged.

Krizna Jama is a complex of caves on the east side of the Cerknica Lake. The tunnels are 8km long filled with stalgtites and stalagmites. There are 22 underground lakes filled with fresh crystal clear turqoise coloured water. We took the longer 4 hour visit for a total of about 5 UK pounds (!) which took us into the deepest parts of the caves and to some of the best specticles I was assured.

Dressed in red boiler suits, white hard hats, white wellies, we looked like the Beastie Boys in the 'Intergalactic' video. Torches, battery packs, camera stuff at the ready our guide opened the gates to the caves (locked for saftey reasons) and then locked us all in which made me think of Stephen King novels for a few seconds. Following white tape to mark the walkways the light gets visibly less as we ventured into the dark. The first sign of water and a large infaltable raft awaited, which we paddled into the darkness. Unlike you would imagine, we had to keep lifting the raft over obstacles, so the drill of 'everyone out and then everyone back in' became rather familiar. A smaller raft change and the air seemed easier to breathe. Despite a 0deg ground tempurature the caves were warmer at about 6-7 degrees, making them the ideal place for wintering bats. We past the 'Pirate Ship', a natural structure that looked more like a cartoon snail to me and paddled deeper and deeper into more complex and larger caves. The beautiful water colour and stunning structures were just incredible.

Finally after an hour of travelling into the cave we had arrived at the most impressive natural structure I have ever seen, Kalvarija or 'The Calvery', a simply enormous cave filled with huge stalagtites and stalagmites shown in my photograph.

After setting up the cameras to the right of the water, our guide who was also a photographer and had photographed the tourist brochures, helped us light the otherwise dark cave with torches -

The front structures are lit by head torches, the background was lit by our guide hiding out of site in the deepest part of the cave, whilst another waterproof torch was placed under water to create an irridescent blue / green water effect.

Exposures were set to 1minute using a cable release, ISO 400 f16 using a 5D, 17-40 @ 17mm all tripod mounted of course. We took about 5 different exposures, each one with the torches giving slightly different results, this was the best of them IMO. I would like to mention the centre cloumn is about 3-4 metres high, if you can imagine me as 6foot3 I only come up about half way. The TIFF of this image is utterly staggering, I am just sorry that I cannot post this any bigger.

Back in the raft and our guide showed us one final trick; five or six stalagtites hanging from the ceiling could be played like a 10000 year old xylophone with the oar of the boat, which amazed me being a musician. Not very practical for gigs though....

What an experience! I could have spent all day in here but we had other areas to discover. Thank you Marko, I will never forget the caves at Krizna Jama.