Indigenous Kanak tribesmen on the South Pacific islands stay well away from the water-filled caverns where the remains of ancestral warlords have been laid to rest in a world said to be peopled by the age-old spirits of the land.
But for tourists, scuba-divers and what the French call "speleonauts"-deep water-diving speleologists-the caves tucked away in the jungles of the sun-baked French islands provide sport and discovery.
On a narrow dirt track fringed by towering ferns, a group of divers, flippers in hand and tanks belted on backs, move toward a gap in the greenery.
The mouth of a cave opens onto a vast cathedral-like chamber where thick columns of lace-edged stalactites and stalagmites, millions of years old, frame a gateway to an underwater lake.
60 Feet Underground
With a plop, the five wet-suited divers disappear below the still, black waters of this eerily silent world about 60 feet under the ground.
Half an hour later, the explorers from Australia resurface ecstatic from their first cave-dive into one of the few fresh water cave-diving sites in the world.
On a narrow dirt track fringed by towering ferns, a group of divers, flippers in hand and tanks belted on backs, move toward a gap in the greenery.
The mouth of a cave opens onto a vast cathedral-like chamber where thick columns of lace-edged stalactites and stalagmites, millions of years old, frame a gateway to an underwater lake.
60 Feet Underground
With a plop, the five wet-suited divers disappear below the still, black waters of this eerily silent world about 60 feet under the ground.
Half an hour later, the explorers from Australia resurface ecstatic from their first cave-dive into one of the few fresh water cave-diving sites in the world.