Those beautiful spring days: the earth is blooming with flowers, the trees are covered with greenery, clumsy ants are warming themselves in the sunshine, but the air already smells of summer - walking down the street, you start to see a butterfly emerging. Even the wind and rain, which blow and curl the hair, are so warm as signs of the awakening of nature and the approaching summer. It forces you to get up - get up not only from bed, but also from the slumber of the soul. As if someone were hitting your face and shaking you... As if shouting: "get up"... And this inexplicably shakes life: on the one hand - fear of something, on the other - a desire to breathe as deeply as possible and go out into the world in search of happiness and joy.
After passing through the city, you can smell that smell and feel like you've opened your eyes for the first time... after sleeping. After the kind of sleep that doesn't make your eyes cry, that matures your thoughts, and you don't want to be sad or worried about anything. For a whole week, we breathed and lived in just such a city and spring... under a fertile sky. And we got up from the bench only when the sun went down, the lights came on in the windows and the cool evening shadows began to creep in from the forest.
But the weekend is for our outings, no matter the weather. Fortunately, it was great.
The mysterious, wild and rugged Mani Peninsula. This in itself is very interesting: the villages stand opposite each other, towering with watchtowers; the ancestors of the brave Spartans live in them.
The Mani Peninsula cannot boast of rich vegetation; its shores are often inaccessible and rocky. If it were not for the warm sun, one could call it a harsh region. But this wild and harsh land also has its pearls. For example, cave systems are hidden on the western shore of Bay Dirou. One of them, called Diros caves, has been open to visitors for a long time.
Diros caves are huge. It has now been studied to a depth of approximately 15 km; barely 1.5 km is available for tourist inspection. I have long dreamed of visiting this cave, because the cave is flooded and most of the route takes tourists by boat.
It's very romantic. Low vaults overgrown with stalactites, arches of stalagmites, columns of stalagnates. Dim mysterious lighting, the light splash of the helmsman's oar... silence... a turn, new formations and boom - a cold drop falls on the top of the head.
And you don’t know where to look: either left or right. I want to put my hand in the water and touch it. What is it like? And it's cold. About 14 degrees Celsius and very, very hard. Well, yes, this is understandable: a large amount of calcareous rock is dissolved in it.
The next rock falls into the stone cracks, licks up the calcite and slowly rolls down, leaving behind a barely noticeable trace of lime. Slowly, slowly, stalactites grow. It’s not for nothing that they are translated from Greek as flowing drop by drop. But how do they decorate the earth’s cavities with their formations?
Stalactites can look like completely ordinary icicles, or they can create a fringe effect. They can form lacy smudges, which in turn will resemble majestic statues that emerged from under the chisel of a skilled stonemason, or they may seem like a bizarre forest.
The sun does not penetrate here and never has. For many years, human eyes did not see these fabulous palaces, these halls in the magnificent decoration of calcite deposits. And in a nearby cave they found the site of an ancient man. They found the bones of a young couple in love who have maintained their close embrace for 6,000 years. In the explored part of the Diros caves, archaeologists found only the bones of prehistoric animals.
At the beginning of the last century, there were already people who had marked the entrance to the underworld, but there were no daredevils to visit it. For it seemed to them that this was a move to the kingdom of Hades, no less. Only in the 50s of the last century was an expedition sent here. They took ropes, candles, and the like, and a group of daredevils entered the gates of Hades. To say that they were amazed by the splendor that greeted them would be an understatement.
Years have passed. The cave has been equipped for visiting. They brought in a destructive light on the underground kingdom and, of course, the ecosystem of these places now accessible to the greedy gaze of tourists suffered, but it is still impressive.
An oarsman behind you drives the boat with an oar. It sways in the seemingly bottomless darkness of the water of the River Styx, the boat quickly turns. Sometimes we can see another boat quickly flashing ahead, sometimes we are alone.
Photography in low light conditions does not convey all the mystery of the place. At least the video has sound. You can hear how a wave was born from the movement of the oar, how it rolled and hit the wall of the cave with an echo.
The cave is presented in an unusually friendly manner. Of the available one and a half kilometers, you travel about a little over a kilometer in a boat, and the rest, after taking off your life jacket, you walk. And here no one rushes you!
Yes, no one will let you touch the tubes of stalactites and break off the tops of stalagmites. But no one will forbid you to stand frozen by a crying icicle, look and slowly examine the internal feeding channel, and then close your eyes from a cold drop falling on your nose.
I don’t know if we were so lucky, because during our visit there were not many people, but at some point my husband and I were left completely alone and were in no hurry, looked at the magical scenery, shared our impressions, and then went out into the sun. We sat in the sun and looked at the very nice local beach, which offers its own cozy bay to visitors to the cave. We overcame the desire to stay on it until the evening and drove on as far as we could because our kids stayed with neighbors.
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