Underground Worlds
Travel writer David Farley details the startling history of humankind’s fascination with what lies below the soil
As I write this, the world is cheering. After being lost for a week, a team of young soccer players has been found in the cave they wandered into in Thailand. It took ingenuity to get them out, but they’ve been saved.
Nobody yet knows why the team entered the cave despite warnings about flooding. But I think we all can understand the impulse to do so. There’s a primal excitement in exploring the “underworld.” This might be why so many people travel specifically to do so, to all corners of the globe.
To help them plan these adventures, prolific travel writer David Farley has come out with a new book called “Underground Worlds: A Guide to Spectacular Subterranean Places.”
A handsome coffee table tome with loads of photos, it starts with the startling history of man’s fascination with what lies below the soil, a history that stretches back some 43,000 years.
That’s when the first mine was dug in what is today Swaziland, as archeologists discovered in the 1970s when they started digging near newly unearthed tools.
“Nobody yet knows why the team entered the cave despite warnings about flooding. But I think we all can understand the impulse to do so. There’s a primal excitement in exploring the ‘underworld.’ This might be why so many people travel specifically to do so, to all corners of the globe.”