The Extraordinary Patience of Nature

Part 2 of our 42 Euro ticket was for the Postojna Cave. One of Slovenia’s biggest tourist attractions, with over 30 million people who have visited, this extensive cave is truly a wonderland. You enter on a train, reminiscent of the Disneyland rides like “the Haunted House,” but this is the real deal. You pass chamber after chamber of extraordinary formations while being dripped on by above. After 10 minutes or so, you get off the train and walk with a live guide. She shines the flashlights on the various formations that look like something else—the chicken, the rooster, the vanilla ice cream cone and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, for starters. 

 

On you go in a world unlike anything known above ground. Like snorkeling, your first impression is astonishment at this whole other world beneath the surface that you would never guess exists. The guide gives us a Geology 101 lesson that includes the mineral content of the various different-colored stalagtite (from above), stalagmite (from below) and columns (when the two meet). Most astounding is this fact: It takes about a hundred years of constant dripping for a stalagmite to grow ½ inch. She told us that the largest column in the cave is 300,000 years old!!!

 

This scale of time and this slow, slow, slow building of a wondrous creation gives one pause. Such extraordinary patience to build something of beauty. Something we short-lived humans can’t afford and so we create in bursts and little floods. But for those wholly dedicated to their art, there is also that sense of a steady, steady drip over a long period of time before things really take shape. Something to ponder. 

 

Near the end, we passed an aquarium with a newt-like creature called an Olm. A colorless body with no eyes but unusual longevity (100 years) and the capacity to live for up to ten years without food. The sign spoke of these attributes as enviable, but given a choice to possess them and live my life as an Olm or stick with the human incarnation, I’d clearly choose the latter. 

 

At the end was, of course, the shop, which advertised itself as the World’s Only Underground Cave Post Office. Just outside the shop was a spacious chamber known as the Concert Hall and they actually have had a few operas performed there with an audience of up to 6,000. I sang a bit my overtone-singing thing, but it wasn’t as resonant as other spaces I’ve known. 

 

So there you have it. The Castle and the Cave. Check them out if you’re within shouting distance. On we go.