TRAVEL EDITOR’S NOTE
Only one of the photos accompanying this feature is authentic to the time the writer travelled. Writer Daniel Wood explains, “Trying to shoot inside a humungous darkened cave in the age of analog film isn’t easy. You need an ASA of well over 600.) Sought pix of for the Nepal rhino anecdote… again, the situation was less than ideal, and I was again using colour Kodak film. Nothing of Hungary’s Lake Balaton, a very beautiful place” Bottom line; it’s hard to take photos in life and death situations.
When I dare lift my eyes toward the ceiling inside Deer Cave — something done with the vague awareness that there’s a lot of guano up there and a lot of gravity down here — its scale seems so colossal it is almost silly. The cavern, almost 150 metres high and a kilometre long, could house a dozen of North America’s domed stadiums with room left over for all the world’s Taco Bells. Thirty-storey-high waterfalls mist the cave’s air, adding a certain je ne sais quoi to the smell of the guano-coated walkway.
“The thing you have to watch out for is the spiders,” James finally confesses. “Spiders?”
“Yeah. Huntsman spiders. Very bad.”
He then tells me the natives use the crushed spiders as the basic ingredient for the deadly poison they apply to their blowpipe dart tips. He adds that the cave spiders are small and fast. They are also black!
This information does the trick. I no longer worry about snakes.
RISEN FROM THE DEAD
A tenting mid-July sun rose over Hungary’s enormous Lake Balaton with the promise of a day’s adventure. Along with another friend, I would join Janos to sail north across the 12-kilometre-wide lake to visit Janos’s girlfriend on the opposite shore.
A Sunday morning trip on a small rented sailboat, lunch with the girlfriend’s family, back in the late afternoon to our international work camp where we’d volunteered as summer labourers.
Midway through the return southward trip, a thunderstorm moved across the vineyard-covered slopes above Siófok. The wind increased, the waves heightened, lightning began striking the darkening hills ahead, and Janos realized that tacking into the approaching storm was foolhardy.
We turned. The boom swung 180 degrees. Waves broke over the gunwales. I bailed madly. Sinking appeared inevitable. We found ourselves flying northward now, our emotions someplace between fright and exhilaration.
We hit the cobbled beach at full speed, driving the centreboard upward with an awful screech. By the time we’d followed the shore’s train line back to Janos’s girlfriend’s home, we were soaked, but safe.
A family member was deputized — the summer cottage had no phone — to head to the local station master and have him send a teletype to the train station master in Siófok that we’d be staying the night there, and would he convey this message to our boss at the nearby work camp?
Late the next morning, while sailing southwest to return the boat to the Szántód rental facility, I noticed, far ahead, a helicopter making low passes over the lake as if it were searching for something.
It was mid-afternoon when we docked the boat and I realized something was wrong. The approaching shop owner had launched a tirade in Hungarian aimed at Janos. He turned and translated: “They think we died. It’s on the news. It’s on TV. No one at the camp got our message. The police, the helicopter … they’ve been searching for us all day.”
It gets worse. The police arrived, and the shouting and explanations began all over again. Despite having done nothing wrong, as we insisted, it seemed — having cost them so much wasted time and worry — we weren’t being sufficiently contrite.
It gets worse.
When we arrived back at the work camp, our boss met us. The enraged words were in Hungarian, but I didn’t need a translator to know that we were, as he saw it, culpable for what happened. We had screwed up. Worse: we embarrassed him!
Our workmates greeted us as heroes, risen from the dead. But in our boss’s eyes, we should have died.
In fact, I think he wished it.