As Clear as Crystal Travel Video duration – 7.57 minutes Crystal Caves Bailey’s Bay, Bermuda Travel Video Adventure – Earth Calling Music David Summers, President Crystal Caves Well this is the Crystal Caves of Bermuda. Not just…not just caves but grounds as well, magnificent royal palms behind us as you can see. Oh I thought I was going to just go right down into the caves and looking around me, there are gorgeous gardens and flowers and magnificent trees. Oh it is all magnificent. Not just underground but when you’re underground you will find it even more magnificent. The caves are without doubt the premier visitation for all visitors coming here. We have 85000 visitors coming here every year which is a quite a percentage of our total tourism number. Well this is an adventure for any child, you go into the cave, go underground, see the lake, see the stalagmites and the stalactites and all the other formations that are there. It’s an adventure for any age kid really. Yes in fact we like to think that most of our visitors are children. (Laughter) Well this is the entrance to the cave now. Hi Leonard Wayne, Tour Guide Hi I’m Lenny your guide I’m Jessie, nice to meet you Lenny You’re ready to do a little spelunking? I’m so ready Alright Crystal Caves was discovered about 101 years ago. Two young boys were out playing cricket one evening and one of them lost the ball into some bushes. When he went to recover the ball, he found that it had gone into a very small hole in the ground. Then with a lot of bravado they opened the hole up, went and got some flash lights well it would have been candles in those days and then descended into the cave and that’s how the Crystal Caves were discovered. And then they were developed as a showcase. When it was first opened, it had a wooden case leading down a 100 feet to the water. This just was not successful for the number of visitors who wanted to come, one of whom was the famous American humorist Mark Twain. But I got no quotes of any words that he spoke during that trip. Then in 1912 work commenced on the construction of a tunnel all hand dug, 4 years later, it was open and that is the entrance today. Oh my gosh we are in a completely different world down here. Oh yeah isn’t it amazing? Yeah it is. This is just about where the boys came down to the cave and that is 130 feet above sea level. When we get to the bottom of this flight of steps we’ll be at sea level and the tourists actually came down through this entrance for about seven years before that entrance was blasted out. Oh those poor tourists! Now you can understand why we blasted that entrance out. It’s really scary coming out through there. Both of the caves have three of the different ages of the five ages of Bermuda geology. So we have the Upper Town Hill, the Lower Town Hill and the Walsingham formations. These are the three lowest and there are two on top of that. In Bermuda’s history, geology has a series of sand-dunes and one of the most incredible parts of it is that it is a wonderful laboratory for sea level rise. We can demonstrate to the people how the sea level has been at least 13 feet higher than it is now and up to 60 to 70 feet lower. This is what the inside of a limestone cave looks like. These hills, from which the cave was formed, began formation more than 30 million years ago from the remains of marine life. As those shells and fossils accumulated they were broken down into tiny fragments, bones and dunes and hardened and formed these limestone hills. The rainwater seeping from the surface, seeps down, dissolves the limestone creating voids. Those voids collapse in to larger caverns creating this cave system and all the passageways. As you can see those are very deep underwater caverns. Oh that’s a…I thought I’m seeing a reflection. That’s incredible That’s not a wall, that’s a reflection of the ceiling above but that actually goes down to 60 feet. That’s really deep The water is really clear down here. Oh it stays clear like that because there’s no sunlight down here and there’s no photosynthesis, no algae formed, no microscopic organisms can survive here and it also replenishes itself with the tides twice a day. So this water is constantly moving in and out of the cave. So is there an ocean entrance somewhere in a different part of the cave? Yes there is and that will be right in the back of the cave and that passageway is about half a mile long. Crystal Caves is just crystalline white, it’s brilliant. Fantasy cave has been touched by the soils in the geology of Bermuda and this has caused the formations to have an orange hue. The formations are giant chandeliers that are just incredible quite quite different from Crystal Caves and that is why we have so many people, over half our visitors, visit both of the caves. This is a floating walkway that we’re about to go across, there’s nothing to be afraid of. You won’t get sea sick or anything like that. But this bridge was first installed in the early 40s, before that the tourists used to actually go to the back of the cave by boat. If you look here, these are our organ pipe formations and in times of yore the older guys used to play tunes on these pipes. How many years would it take for the something like this to form? They form on an average of about 1 cubic inch every hundred years. So this one right here may be about 70 or 80 cubic inches. So that would make this formation at least 7 to 8000 years old. As you can see, they are wet, that means they are still forming. So they still have a lot more growing to do. They are just babies. These are babies, yes and the hundred years that we’ve been coming in these caves, very little has changed. Well it’s a whole different experience from, you know, the norm, the beaches, the beautiful scenery above ground. It’s like a world unto its own, you know, when you’re separated from all the hustle and the bustle that’s going on above in the world. You get a chance to escape and you know, if you come with a partner, you and your partner can just take it all in and it definitely makes the trip to Bermuda much more romantic. Over a hundred years we’ve been an ecotourism site. It is totally natural; the only thing that is really man made is the tunnel and the floating walkway. So this was the original eco-tourist’s eco- tour. It was very original and it will always be an eco tour. We don’t have to do anything to make it green.