Wales II
Ben Richards, David Wilson, James Perry, James Wilson, Matti Mitropoulos, Leo Antwis, Sean Li, Julien Jean, Laura Temple, Salwa Ahmad, Magor Pocsvelier, Thurston Blount, Remi Soubes-Goldman, Ethan Beech, Zain Fletcher, Lamya Adam, George Wright, Advay Paniker, Tingxuan Ruan, Yete Pan, Wenhao Zang, Yining Ren, Claryce Yap, Fontaine Gibbs
Friday
I arrived at the Union to find that Matti, Salwa and I were the only ones responsible for packing the bus and getting all of the many freshers to Wales. Matti had flown all the way in from Germany for this weekend so that he could experience the chaos first hand, and thankfully chaos quickly descended. The entire street filled with soldiers and people carrying surprisingly large flags, presumably for some remembrance day something or other. In a stroke of genius Matti and I convinced the freshers to sit put in the minibus with no supervision while we packed up the last few items from stores, as well as Davey's million obscure items requested at the last minute - much better than everyone milling around in stores, why don't we always do this?
Just as we had finished piling kit down the aisle and filling the only empty seat to the roof given the lack of roof rack on the blue bus we had for the weekend Thurston, Julien and Laura arrived and threw large volumes of spare kit into the back of the van despite our pleading. It was also very confusing why they hadn't been able to turn up earlier to help packing, which they countered with elaborate trains of reasoning such as Laura having cycled at a non-negligible fraction of the speed of light on a Boris bike and boat enthusiast Ethan having for seemingly no apprant reason not gone to Acton despite the fact that it would have saved time for everyone involved. Fasctinating.
Eventually we left in good time and as we zoomed along I got my latest update on helicpters and alpine rambling from finest München. We stopped for food in Reading Sainsburys, where once again we suspiciously bumped into Laura's car doing just the same. Some freshers took so long to eat outside the bus that they stared on in horror as they saw the minibus with side door fully open slowly roll away as Matti finally lost patience. Salwa saved the day by pushign their shopping trolley dining table into the shelter, herding them into the bus and closing the doors behind them.
Matti drove the rest of the way, then did a million miles an hour down the tiny pot hole filled lane to the hut, while blasting take me home country roads from the speakers. Upon arrival a freshers shouted out "we're alive!" and everyone congratulated Matti on his remarkable ability to induce near death experiences. Tents were pitched, as we had 24 cavers to only 10 beds. Thurston brought his palace of mould and moistness, freshly rotted by the canal water of Hidden Earth many weeks prior, which hadn't vacated the giant 14-person tent given it had sat in a puddle in stores the entire time. Unsurpringly he had the entire thing to himself, other than Magor who promptly dropped his sleeping bag into one of the indoor paddling puddles.
Some Bristol cavers were staying at the hut as well, and had wild plans to explore every named passage in Daren on the survey as part of a three day trip. Insanity. Despite their requests for us to stay very quiet since they were going to wake up early the next day, they did not in fact go to bed nor wake up early, but did eventually leavae for their grand adventure the next day.
Ben
Back in England baby, and I had a pleasant moment of realisation on the train, deciding that although I shit on London a lot, it is actually a fantastic place. Also I requested a cake for my 100th (102nd technically but whatever) cave, and Laura went ham on an incredible full patisserie-level cake (many thanks). My suggestion of bringing it into a cave was met with horror.
Anyway I arrived in stores, chatted to Salwa for a bit whilst gradually gathering the dregs of whichever drawers I needed to find kit from, and eventually wandered off to find our allocated bus. At least this one turned on without complaint, unlike the previous trip I was on… Actually I just realised this trip is the first time in 2024 (not including slov) where I’ve been on a trip that wasn’t plagued by minibus trouble. Maybe a curse has been broken? Winter tour will tell I suppose.
Shopping was very chill since the main shop had been done by Davey (many thanks) but surprisingly not that much shorter as faff was dragged out a little long… While the tried and tested method of ‘just start driving off’ is a little brash, it does work better than any other method I’ve found of getting people to start boarding the bus.
Contrary to Ben’s claims, my drive along the country road whilst gently singing ‘country roads’ was very restrained, as I didn’t want to upset the precarious stability that the minibus‘ integrity seemed to have established. The freshers were just overreacting. A swift tent pitch and just a touch of the oh-so-sweet cider that is unfairly hard to find in the land of the Reinheitsgebot quickly led to a bedtime on horrendously uncomfortable sleeping mats. Fortunately Salwa and I were too busy chatting deep chats to sleep anyway, so by the time we actually went to sleep the discomfort was trumped by tiredness.
Matti
Saturday
Craig A Fynnon Group 1: Matti Mitropoulos, Sean Li, Julien Jean, Ethan Beech
I awoke to much chaos ensuing in the kitchen, but not much eating happening yet so I wandered around and didn’t make myself useful for some time. When it eventually came to choosing caves I expressed my non-enthusiasm for Aggy, and my gentle inclination towards the mighty muddy Craig. Although it was tempting to try swindle my way onto the Draenen group, I figured there’d be enough lags wanting to go there so I let it be – and they found out later that we didn’t have the key anyway so luck is me.
Our group was small and our freshers organised so there was little stress when getting the bus filled – or rather, emptied, cos we needed everything left in the hut so no one would shout at us for taking the batteries or something similarly crucial. Unfortunately getting the bus backed out of the driveway was fraught with uncertainty, featuring a heated debate about whether driving over an unstable-looking clump of slimy mud would cause the bus to slide and tumble down the hill. As the one sitting in the bus, I decided to wait until the debate was firmly settled before moving. Fortunately, as is not uncommon in this part of the world, an angry, shirtless Welshman appeared out of nowhere and began giving me firm directions on how to manoeuvre. Turns out he did actually know what he was doing and within no time I was out. Unfortunately, at exactly that moment, Thurston comes over and reports on the Draenen key chaos, and asks me to wait so a second group could go to Craig too. No problem, of course… and cue 45 minutes of waiting around. Nevermind, it was to be a chill trip anyway, and you don’t sign up to fresher‘s trips if you’re not prepared for a bit of chaos.
Once we were finally changed and ready to go, our team and the tart (?) team walked up the perilous A road and the less perilous path to the unassuming entrance. Having been to Craig a couple times there were no major surprises – the water was acceptably low and the pretties acceptably pretty. We made our way through the red tape at a relaxed pace, chatting a bit every now and again, until the Hall of the Mountain King was reached. Here we spent a short while chatting and vibing in the darkness, and ate the small slice of the banana cake I had sneaked in in Salwa’s Tupperware. I had scoffed at Sean’s idea of bringing a fork into the cave, but after my attempts at eating the cake without swallowing copious amounts of mud and grit spectacularly failed, I conceded and used cutlery.
Ethan had previously expressed discomfort at the tighter bits of the early stages, so when I informed him the next phase would be approximately 30 – 40 minutes of tight crawling (I had never been to the end so didn’t actually know), he wasn’t too pleased. We began, but after a couple minutes it became clear this was not his idea of fun, so we turned around. A similarly relaxed exit pace was kept, until the Gasloine Alley intersection – where I tried to encourage them that wading through the neck–deep water was actually not that bad and worth it, but they didn’t seem to agree. So I made my way through the impressive caverns alone for a few minutes. This passage genuinely is totally worth it – the reverberations are fantastic and it has a subtly different feel to the rest of the cave, and the water isn’t neck-deep for the whole time, it usually oscillates around belly-height.
Anyway, out into the cold receding light we emerge, wander over to the bus, figuring the other team still had a while to go. Comfortable conversation in the bus with Sean, and a cheeky trip to the nearby shops for snacks and booze, eventually ended when the bobbing lights in the distance were spotted. Back to the hut we carefully trundled, into the chaos of a meal halfway in the making. I chopped some stuff and drank some stuff, and ate more superlative multilayered celebratory cake. Pot and sling followed on from dinner, where I pulled out the romantic question – ‘Ethan, would you tree to my vine?’ We were actually a great team, but somehow almost all of the teams did astonishingly well, especially first-timer duo George and Advay. So there was no clear winner, it was a 5-way tie, if that’s a thing. A long cigar and chat with Leo followed, after which I tried not to wake Salwa when getting into my sleeping bag, failing terribly, and managed to get into my bag inside out – only realising the following morning.
Matti
Craig A Fynnon Group 2: David Wilson, Thurston Blount, Remi Soubes-Goldman
No one has written anything for this trip :(
Aggy Group 1: Leo Antwis, Laura Temple, Claryce Yap, Fontaine Gibbs
Aggy Group 2: James Perry, Magor Pocsvelier, Tingxuan Ruan, Yete Pan, Wenhao Zang, Yining Ren
No one has written anything for any of these trips :(
Aggy Group 3: Ben Richards, James Wilson, Zain Fletcher, Lamya Adam, George Wright, Advay Paniker
I woke up and stumbled out of my tent to thick fog and Julien furiously cooking bacon. It turned out these two facts were unrelated. A magnificent breakfast was prepared to feed the vast number of hungry cavers and Thurston got to work on organising trips. With 24 people we had 5 groups in total. 2 groups were to go to Draenen, me included, which was a cave I had never visited before and had been looking forward to for ages. The night before Remi had desccribed his routes through the maze of a system to the snowball, and to a camp he had done a while ago. The Derbyshire enthusiasts wanted to visit Craig A Fynnonn to renew our stocks of stores mud and one team was to go in Aggy to appease the cave gods, so we set off to find the keys. There was no key to Draenen. We checked the emails. The email didn't ask for Draenen. We checked the WhatsApp messages. The messages had asked for Draenen. We were sad.
Having already many many updates to the trip lists, we proceeded to do even more crossing out and rewriting now our plans had been scuppered. All in Aggy was the plan. The Dubz Draenen power team was split up so as to limit their powers, and Davey went to Craig while James joined me on a bimble to the Aggy music room. Finally after eternal the faff of getting people changed, batteries in lights and chocolate bars in pockets the teams disperessed. Matti did such a terrible job of turning the minibus around that an angry Welsh man came out of his house just to show him how to do it properly, as watching the incompetence from afar had clearly caused him serious internal anger. His highly aggresive politeness got the bus turned around in no time, as so often seems to be the Welsh way.
Just before we could escape for the caves a group of hikers stopped by the hut, and after ewe started chatting the leader of the group told us he'd actually gone to Imperial back in the 70s, not long after the caving club had been formed. He was not a caver himself but stories were exchanged and they hikers settled down to lunch before we had even left the hut for the morning. Typical.
As we walked along the tram tracks to Aggy the mist in the valley below was swirling around the autumnal trees, giving perhaps the most impressive view I've ever seen from the walk along the hillside. We found Perry, Magor and the gang doing coaxing some unconvinced freshers into doing the 10m warm up through trip cave, but they were not having much luck. Perry even did the entire cave with his tackle sack on his back, but this was still not enough to convince them. Finally we turned up and Lamya showed them how it’s done, blasting through the entire 10m cave in mere seconds. Suddenly everyone became very enthusiastic to give it a go.
Walked onwards to Eggy, where I then went for a traditional pre-cave bladder emptying only to bump into some rambling caver in the undergrowth who looking for new entrances and talking about letter box shaped cave entrances. I came back to find Advait had lost his headlight somewhere on the way from Eggy, so he jogged back to look for it. It turned out to be right next to Eggy, but fortunately he jogged quickly.
Finally we set off into the cave. I was carrying Ged, full of my many camera peli cases which had by this point grown to 5 2 tiny cases, 3 small cases and two large for my mirrorless and my first club outing of the giga flash. We bombed it down through the entrance series, first bumping into Perry and the gang and then Laura and the gang who were completely lost in the notorious boulder choke. I approached them to see one fresher in the middle of a helmet off squeeze, heading right back to where we had just come from. Ah yes, freshers trips.
After showing the others the correct way, we slithered up to the main passage through the boulders and stopped for a snack break. Having hit the main passageway we zoomed down to the gypsum cornflakes (how did they form?!) and did the traditional all lights off session. In the distance we could hear Perry and gang approaching, getting louder and louder until they seemed to stop and then get quieter again. We therefore gave up on our plan to surprise them in the dark and headed onto the music room, where we were promptly Rick Rolled.
The freshers wanted a clay arts and crafts break, and James and I wanted to go exploring, so we parted ways and I accidently found the cliffs of Dover while poking around behind the music room. There are loads of tubes going off here, it seems a popular place to dig, and we quickly found our way to the end of the main passageway and poked in all the holes we could find as we headed back. James wasn’t keen on one muddy crawl heading off into the wall, but I was in the modd for a challenge so zoomed off into it, calling back to James that it kept going and matched the Aven series passageway on the map. It twisted and turned until it seemingly ended in a small chamber. Upon closer inspection there were many welly lines leading to the wall at the back, from where a slot in the ceiling was visible and led to the surpringly large Aven Series main chamber. This also had many holes heading off of it but we couldn't be bothered to check them out so headed back. The online survey marked no significant routes from this chamber, but the survey on the wall in the hut showed this connecting back to the gurgling streamway audible from the music room, allowing a fun roundtrip that I shall try and do next time I'm in town.
After returning to the others, the freshers had made some fantastic creations, with Lamya sculpting a very impressive cat complete with whiskers, Zain making a less impressive series of sausages that spelled ICCC and Advait making an even less impressive orange sized ball of mud that he intended to take all the way out of the cave with him. A group photo and then we were on our way. Noticing trident passage was quite large on the survey I poked my head in on the way out, only to find that there was nothing easily visible that resembled a trident. Pure lies. Perhaps I missed something obvious.
Took some epic photos on the way back with my new giga flash, and then zoomed back to the surface given we were vaguely approaching callout. We still had enough time to let the freshers try leading the way back through the boulder choke. They immediately got lost and had to double back. James took back full navigational responsibilities. We made it out for 7 ish, so no sunlight for us as we trugged back along the tram tracks. Zain's light had basically completly died by this point so he was trying to walk next to us along the one way path which at times was challenging.
Back at the hut we changed and were treated to lasagne with triple ply pasta sheets, some of which had even been cooked. In fairness to Thurston, he wasn't the one who had dumped all the lasagne sheets into the saucepan in one congealed brick, since he delegated that one task. Everything else was top notch. I ventured into the kitchen to see what the fuss was about and was horrified to see the chefs frantically peeling sheets of lasagne pasta off of the congealed brick and reconsituting them into new sheets quilted together from the torn fragments. Bizarre.
Then had Laura’s fantastic banana cake for Matti’s 100th cave anniversary, of which I believe a slice had made it's way to Craig A Muddon. Many wildly inappropriate accents and impressions emerged from George over the evening, and a fiercly competitive game of pot and sling was had with many freshers joining in on the chaos and doing very well indeed.
Ben R
Sunday
Eggy: Matti Mitropoulos, Sean Li, Salwa Ahmad, Remi Soubes-Goldman, Advay Paniker, Claryce Yap
A very chill morning ensued, where porridge was had, faff happened around me but I refused to engage with very much of it. The Silica Mine group seemed intent on generating maximal confusion even though they didn’t even need much kit for it, so I just let it swirl around me, only moving into my kit after the bus had pulled out of the drive.
I had never been to Eggy, but remembered that the ladder to get into the upper series was at the end of a short squeezy bit that you need to commit to get through. So during the couple hours of clambering around, whenever I got to a tight bit, I committed. Turns out, that one of the tighter passages goes on for quite a while before it dies, but I was committed so thoroughly disappointed Advay when I informed him we needed to reverse out the entire way. He couldn’t quite turn around so had to shuffle backwards the whole way – I just about managed it, so we were face to face, shuffling for 20 minutes or so, singing a wild assortment of songs while we waited to back up. After apologising for the cock up, we slowly made our way out, took a cheeky group photo at the entrance with Remi pissing in the background, and wandered back to the hut. Unsurprisingly, we were back before the faff team, so gradually started cleaning and tidying and eating and just a bit of faff.
The journey back was entertaining, with George serenading us with various classical masterpieces, explaining each to Salwa with infectious enthusiasm. A highlight was Salwa remarking that after entering London she feels ‘all her stress melt away’ - Shortly after, thinking I’m on a slip road, I accelerate over-enthusiastically, realise I’m about to run a hidden red light, and am forced to emergency brake from 50 or so to nil in record time. Safe to say her stress levels were elevated. I was a little jumpy after that and kind of forgot about Bella Ciao – quickly asked Salwa to bring it up as we trundled down Kensington High Street, and play it at double speed so we could catch up. Unfortunately Youtube freaked out and played it at what felt like 8x speed, finishing in a matter of seconds, so we played it about 4 times before timing the ending terribly with our arrival at Beit Quad. A slightly underwhelming ending to an otherwise excellent weekend.
Matti
Upper Dinas Silica Mine: Ben Richards, David Wilson, James Wilson, Leo Antwis, Julien Jean, Laura Temple, Magor Pocsvelier, Thurston Blount, Ethan Beech, Lamya Adam, George Wright, Tingxuan Ruan
Matti played Bella Ciao at 2x speed as we returned to the Union to make up for his lack of foresight, and I shall never forgive him.
In other news we woke up, consumed the actually-quite-good-if-you-add-more-milk-afterwards porridge and slowly one by one decided to all go to the silica mine. It was quite a long drive away, 50 mins or so, but it sounded like the perfect combination of chill and not Eggy. To maintain the tradition one team did go to Eggy after all.
We zoomed off through the Welsh countryside to Dinas Rock, where the geologists immediately ran out of the car and started climbing all over the rocks. Can't take them anywhere those geologists, honestly. After rounding up the rock addicts we followed Davey around the back of the hill, up a very pretty river valley and passed by some boulderers on the way to a short slippery climb up some rocks. Of course I had Ged once again, so found this a little harder than everyone else but there's nothing I won't do for a photo sesh.
The entrance to the mine was shortly after the climb, and I was actually really impressed by the mine - it's ridiculous! We first explored the flooded galleries, since there are 6 lower levels that are now underwater and accessible only by diving. For hundreds of meters beside the water the last horizontal level continues on i teh diagonal bed, past iron brown stals, bright yellow sulfur seams and occasional obscure pieces of machinery.
The floor had rails for the old metal mine carts, some of which you could still see in the river outside, and eventually we made it to the end of the first passage. We turned left into the next parallel line and then headed back on ourselves until we found a large winch setup with pipes running along the ceilings, looking incredibly dystopian.
Beyond this was a large ventilation shaft that climbed up at a 45 degree slope for what felt like another hudnred metres or more, before suddenly popping out on the top of the mountain, surrounded by wilderness and dense bracken, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. This made the mine go from great to amazing. The view was great, and we stopped for cheese and chocolate, before heading back down the endless shaft, now trying not to fall over as we stooped and skidded back down to the lower levels.
After this we continued on to the vast main room, held up by supiciously small pillars, with beams of light in the distance from other portals to the overworld. We explored a few of these, and I ended up with Julien, Leo and Thurston while the others seemed to want to leave. I successfully convinced the others to take some epic photos, and so we spent about an hour messing around in the cave, not realising the others meant that they wanted to be back at the hut by 4, not back at the bus by 4 as we had thought. Oops. Photos came out well though.
After some grovelling apologies and promises that the photos were worth the others waiting around by the bus for half an hour, we zoomed back to the hut, cleared up and headed back to the big smoke. I awoke from my slumber to hear George pumping out "Jerusalem" as we re-entered glorious England, after which he seemed to go on a Beethoven spree. Big up Ludwig. As we finally approached the Union Matti completely botched the execution of Bella Ciao, managing to play a 2x speed version by accident? While this confused the freshers it pained me, but all was forgiven since the weekend had been a fantastic one. Until next time Wales!
