Day 65 Friday 20/11/09

A busy underground day, as we headed off early to Ain Wadi Fsat once again. JC went ahead to push the low damp crawl and completed a through trip, climbing out a shaft whilst MC & EP continued to photograph the cave and its long-eared inhabitants.

The next exploration area was 3km lower down the valley, explored, surveyed and documented by Dr Kosa from Hungary. We crawled into AN1 to see if the water levels would allow us to complete the through trip. After passing porcupine needles, bats and some reasonable-sized mammal faeces, we came to a wet, flat crawl ... we decided to believe that Kosa was right that it was sumped.

We headed back to the car and completed the AN4 to AN5 through trip, where there are man-made ledges in the entrance of AN4, for what purpose we were unsure. Interestingly, a number of dead bats were observed on the floor and on a ledge.

The final area of karst we wished to visit was to Libya’s longest cave system, Ain Umm al Massabih, a cve with 17 entrances and length of 3,593m. Using Dr Kosa’s description from the ‘80s we found ourselves on the correct road and Hussein spoke to a man who directed us to the right dirt track – which is on the way to the football pitch! It was quite late when we set off into the cave, along with Hussein completing the first section and a driver of a lorry. In the entrance series, was foul-smelling black/green muddy water, evidently there had not been rain for some considerable time. We soon left that and found ourselves in some reasonably sized passage, traversing over pools then the cave narrowed, twisting and turning, meandering in marbled walls. JC was ahead, whilst MC &EP took photos. JC never reached the end and we turned back after a couple of hours, narrowly avoiding the bats on our exit out to the dark of the Cave Hills (Zakhrat al Ghar). Hussein had set up camp, a fire was going and we settled down to another night in the mountains.