Inside the Pawon Cave

The first place that we visited after the lunch was Gua Pawon (Pawon Cave). Unlike the Sang Hyang Poek, the Pawon Cave is a large, multi-story, and multi-chamber cave with a naturally-occuring inside courtyard and garden. It's like a huge apartment of the ancient time. Indeed, it was. The discovery of household and hunting weapon artifacts and human skeleton fossils confirmed that this place was a dwelling place of the prehistoric Bandung Plateau residents some 10,000 years ago.

We entered the cave from what experts believe to be the kitchen located at the lower level of the cave after a short track and climb from our basecamp, which is only about a few hundrerd meters from the cave. 'The kitchen' is probably where the name of this cave is derived from. Pawon, the name of the cave, in Sundanese (the native language of the West Javanese people), means kitchen. Legend-wise, this cave is also believed to be the kitchen where the foods for the wedding of Sangkuriang were prepared.

From the kitchen -- the entrance -- we climbed further through a small 'alleyway' onto the second floor and another chamber that faces what looked like a courtyard garden. Here, our tour leader gave more explanations about the cave.

Here is 'the door' (the opening) in the second floor of the cave that leads to the courtyard garden.

And the courtyard garden seen from a chamber believed to be the main hall or the common room of the ancient cave dwellers.

There's also a big window in this chamber from which we can see the beautiful green valley underneath. I suppose our ancestors loved a room with a view too. :)

Entrance to And Exit from Sang Hyang Poek

I suppose should have posted these photos before the one I posted yesterday in the sequence of this series. Anyway, I just want to show how the entrance to and the exit from Sang Hyang Poek cave look like:

This is the entrance to the cave. Quite small. We have to bend a bit to get inside. But the rooms inside are quite big. We can walk upright inside.

Pintu masuk ke gua Sang Hyang Poek cukup kecil. Kita harus agak membungkuk untuk masuk ke dalamnya. Namun ruangan di dalam gua cukup luas. Kita bisa berjalan tegak di dalamnya.

I've shown you the exit from inside in yesterday's post. This is what it looks like from the outside.

Pemandangan di luar pintu keluar gua Sang Hyang Poek cukup indah. Gua terletak di dalam tebing di sebelah kiri, dan di depan gua terdapat bebatuan besar dan, tentu saja, anak sungai Citarum dengan air yang cukup bening dan menyegarkan.

The stream (the Citarum tributary) in front of the cave is quite cool and refreshing, some of us took the time to enjoy it.

There are a lot of boulders in this river. Many of them are bigger that a buffalo.

From this place, we walked back to where we came from and Sang Hyang Tikoro, a legendary underwater cave, which is located near the Saguling Hydroelectric Dam.

Sanghyang Poek, The Cave

This is the continuation of my post yesterday and the day before.

Sanghyang Poek, the cave, was not as far away as I had thought it would be from Saguling Dam. After walking for only about 15 minutes, we arrived at the mouth of the cave. We walked inside and with the help of our torchlight explored it.

Sanghyang Poek is not that big a cave. It's more or less U-shaped. You enter from one mouth and exit at another opening. What you see inside is quite interesting though, especially if you walk with someone who knows a lot about the geological history of the place. It was quite dark inside and none of the pictures I did manage to take inside seem to come out right. So here's a picture that I took at the end of our exploration.

Gua Sanghyang Poek tidak terlalu jauh letaknya dari PLTA Saguling. Setelah berjalan kurang lebih 15 menit, kami sampai di mulut gua. Gua berbentuk U ini tidak terlalu besar dan bisa ditelusuri dari pintu masuk yang satu dan keluar dari pintu masuk yang lain. Suasana di dalam gua ini gelap dan cukup pengap. Kita memerlukan lampu senter untuk menelusurinya. Penelusuran gua akan lebih menarik kalau kita didampingi oleh seorang pemandu yang mengerti betul sejarah geologi tempat ini. Jika tidak, bentuk-bentuk batuan di dalamnya mungkin tidak akan terlalu menarik bagi kebanyakan orang.

The Track to Sang Hyang Poek

This is the continuation of my post yesterday.

From our departure point at Saguling Hydroelectric Dam, we walked south-southwest along the bank of the old (the original) Citarum River before it was diverted and dammed, past some fields and bushes like in the above photo. Our destination was Sang Hyang Poek, an ancient limestone cave which used to be situated underwater and was part of the Citarum flow but now lies above the water because the large part of the Citarum water has been diverted to feed the dam.

Sang Hyang Poek (sometimes also written Sanghyang Poek) is a Sundanese name which literally means the god of darkness. The name was probably given to describe the darkness inside the cave.

Along the way, we could see some towering limestone cliff on our leftside (see photo below). This limestone and the shells and fish fossils found in it indicate that this place used to be located under the sea. And indeed it was many thousand years ago.

To be continued tomorrow.

Ini kelanjutan dari posting kemarin. Dari PLTA Saguling, perjalanan kami dilanjutkan ke arah selatan menelusuri tepian aliran sungai Citarum lama (sebelum dialihkan dan dibendung untuk projek PLTA Saguling). Sepanjang perjalanan kita dapat melihat tebing kapur yang menjulang tinggi di sisi kiri. Tebing kapur ini dan fosil-fosil yang ditemukan di dalamnya menunjukkan bahwa daerah ini riuan tahun yang lalu terletak di bawah laut.