First Week In My New Job as a Tour Guide

 I have scored my dream job as a Tour Guide at Capricorn Caves.

The Caves are amazing. 

My first week was exhausting. For the first 2 days I went on 5 tours each day with a different guide, learning where to take people on the Cathedral Tour and what information to tell them. On the 3rd day I went with a different guide on 3 tours in the morning. Each guide does their tour differently and talks about different things. 

In the afternoon I went for a walk around the site so I could get my bearings. On the 4^th day I did a bit of reading then went on a tour with the lady who has been there the longest. Afterwards she spent some time with me on my own so I could start to learn the information in more depth. After lunch, I went into the caves on my own! I wanted to play around with the lights.

The caves are up in a mountain, which is unusual, as most caves are down underground. The entrance into the caves is a collapsed cave roof with giant fig trees, roots, orchids and vines growing down from the top of the cliffs above. Stairs take the groups down into the Vestibule Cavern which is full of different colours and speleothems or cave decorations: cave coral, stalagtites and flowstone. 

I went into two other caves on the last day, a beautiful cave called the harp, with a light that shows the harp and another  that shows Batman hanging in his bat lair. It has a chimney that many dead animals have fallen down. The caves are full of billions and trillions of bones. The school groups that come through do an activity  where they sift through the guano, or bat poo searching for tiny bones. 

There was so much to see and learn, my head was buzzing. 

The Cathedral Tour is the most popular tour, it goes for 45 minutes and shows visitors the easily accessible caves. They hear a brief overview of the cave's formation, some information about bats, the extremely rare fern, Tectaria Devexa, a bit about the history of the cave's discovery in the late 1800's by the Olsen family who came to Australia from Norway as farmers. There is also an inspiring musical performance in the Cathedral Chamber.

Thousands of tiny bent wing bats were hiding-out in the Honeymoon Suite, they come and go so it was lucky they were there. They have a really stinky bat smell. We could hear and smell them from the High Dome Cave. The sound they make collectively sounds like a running stream of water. The noises they make individually is them talking to each other. Bats are the most vocal mammal, other than humans, though a lot of their sounds are a higher frequency than we can hear.

When they fly out at night they eat 400-600 insects each a night, or 40% of their body weight. They reduce the population of mosquitoes and insect pests that destroy crops. Their poo, or guano has been compacted to make the floor of the cave; roots of the fig trees grow down metres and metres through cracks in the cave and get nutrients to grow from the guano. The trees provide habitat for the animals in the dry rainforest. Bats are a vital part of the ecosystem. 

On Friday night all the staff were taken out to dinner in Rockhampton which was a really nice way to start my time there. I met the bosses and had steak with avocado in béarnaise sauce and chocolate pudding in chocolate sauce.

The reason for this delicious dinner was they had the most profitable quarter the caves have ever had, so congratulations to the team who work so hard running such interesting tours every day.

There are other tours: the Adventure Tour where you climb through tunnels and disappear up through the middle of rocks, and the Explorer Tour. It is awesome. We went in and out of different caves and saw the archaeological dig in the Colosseum Cave. They have discovered bones of ancient megafauna such as a 10m long snake that may be the mythological rainbow serpent and the thylacoleo-carnifex, the distant ancestor of the drop bear.

I spent Friday afternoon going through the caves on my own, plunging myself into darkness and experimenting with the lighting. It was a bit freaky when bats swooped over my

head, but I made it back alive.

On my way into the cave I saw a really weird insect. I think it is an earwig who has used the cave crystals to make a house on its back as camoflage from the bats. It must have taken a very long time to make it's shell. I might be the only person in the world who has ever seen it.