Part 1 - Stuck in a Cave

This is a story from about 4 years ago when when 3 friends and I spent a month in Panama and Colombia after graduating from college. The only other piece of background info you need to know is that we were on an island off the coast of Panama, and found a local Guaymi indian who said that he and his brother could takes us into a cave there on the island. Of course, this sounded like a great thing to do.

Well, we were able to come up with 3 hard-hats and a few flashlights. Of course there were 6 of us (4 gringos + 2 guides), and the flashlights were not water-proof (this is an example of "foreshadowing"). Feeling semi-prepared, we sat off on our adventure. We took a short boat ride through a small creek into the jungle, walked about 20 minutes to the entrance of the cave, and walked in.

The roof of the cave was covered in bats, and the floor of the cave was covered in water and bat droppings. During our first 10 minutes in the cave, we came across a caiman. I'm no animal expert, so I'll just say that these are like smaller versions of the alligators we see in Mississippi and Louisiana. Anyway, my friend Drew decided that he wanted to grab the caiman's tail. I disagreed, because I was standing about 2 feet away from the caiman's mouth full of teeth. So Drew grabs the tail, and the caiman darts away toward my direction. I would have swam right into my legs if I hadn't quickly scrambled onto a rock just before Drew grabbed the tail.

So we proceed into the cave, and the water gets deeper. In the picture above, you can see that the water at some points got up to my chest level. We went deep into the cave for about an hour and a half until we came to a large hole in the roof of the cave - we could look up and see the canopy of the jungle. This is when our flashlights started going out, because they had gotten wet. The problem was that this large hole was not a viable cave-exit, because the roof of the cave was approximately 30-feet above us. We had no choice but to turn around and try to go all the way back to the cave's entrance.

We decided to start quickly making our way back toward where we had entered. Meanwhile, we are losing one flashlight after another. This had the potential to get really bad - I don't know if we would have been able to find our way out without a flashlight. It would have been pitch-black. Maybe the indian guides would have been able to get us out of there in the dark, but certainly not without a bunch of cuts, bruises and twisted ankles. Plus, remember that not all of us were wearing hard-hats, so all those dangling stalactites would have been a major hazard in the dark.

Eventually, we were down to one single working flashlight, but luckily that one lasted the 20 minutes more that it took us to reach the cave's entrance. I can tell you that while we were a little nervous, we probably did not really appreciate just how bad things could have been if we had lost our last functioning flashlight. The danger just didn´t seem that real until we looked back at the situation later on. This is a pretty common gringo-move that sometimes gets people in trouble in Latin America. I have a theory that when gringos are on vacation, there is just a small part of the brain that thinks the gringo is in Disney World. Somehow, the gringo does not really comprehend that this isn´t a "ride" and that there is nobody there taking care of him. Well, I am writing this story a few years later, so obviously we made it out of the cave.