tony from suffolk said:
It could be worse! Other countries tend to have different views on the conservation of caves. Back in the early seventies, whilst caving in Yugoslavia, a friend happened to admire a particular small stalactite and pointed it out to the Yugoslav cavers we were with at the time. On our last night, one of them proudly brought forth a neat wooden box which he gave to my friend, and there, lovingly nestled in some cotton wool, was the stalactite...
We couldn't make a fuss really.
I don't know about Yugoslav culture, but I have had friends from certain cultures where if you admire something, if you can gift it to the person who admired it, you do, *especially* if a visitor. I wonder if something like that influenced it.
And yeah...I put down tape in the cave we found, and people are already complaining, threatening to take it out as trash, I've had to pull mud out of pearls (that are taped off)...wtf people. I'll probably be back down there in November and I am actually worried about what I'll find. And it isn't "public" the location yet, so it's friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends...We even laid out white tape so it looks nice and is easy to photoshop out, and it's laid in a way you can photo everything there easily without crossing the lines. It is just...disappointing. I made a general post on fb about some stuff left in it found (gloves, hair tie) and the mud in the pearls, and was jumped on. I don't get it. I don't know whos they are or who messed the mud, not calling anyone out, simply making the observation of how sad it was that *already* it is happening. I just...I don't see it happening in the UK? is it just because I'm not always there? But the "vibe" i get from you brits is way more conservation minded than it is here in the sense that *everyone* follows it, rather than 80% and the other 20% are enough to ruin it over time (numbers pulled from my arse, for an idea, of what it feels like it is here).