Fair enough on the bats although I still say packing up when the sun is streaming into the entrance is dumb thinking.
Double rope where they are both on at the same time backed up to each other's ropes and it becoming a tangled mess I still think is dumb. I understand safety guidelines but when safety guidelines make more issues then are they really still safe? Here our regulations recognize SRT as the way to do caves exactly because of tangling issues and other problems of double rope in caves. I should know our unit wrote the nfpa 1006 standard
And nothing can excuse not using helmets in a cave. Even if you aren't going to bump your head something could fall.
And nothing can excuse poor conservation ethics so blatently bad as deshething your machete and banging on formations to show people how they sound like music when you bang them. Or in the cave with hand paintings on the ceiling, lighting fires underneath them to stay in The shelter of the entrance I have nothing against cave camping I am against lighting fires which make smoke and soot underneath centuries old paintings of historical significance.
And I wasn't too thrilled about all the "we are th first ones ever here!" When they are being shown by the locals, there is old tattered worn flagging to the entrances (in no way freshly placed flagging doesn't go that bad in five weeks), and once in you see a path as we call here elephant tracks you can tell many people have been there. Cut to a scene they mistakenly keep in and the cave they are first ever to find and explore has a name...same one with tattered flagging and elephant tracks. Sureeeee.
Honestly though the thing that pissed me most was total lack of respect for the cave environment.
I've always enjoyed the BBC EARTH programming when we can get it here but this one was just terrible. Usually BBC has good conservation ethics and shows proper technique and respect for environment. I felt all of that was totally lacking probably because they didn't have one person along with cave experience it seemed.
I mean, even the scene toward the end of the last episode when the narator is talking about how their work will conserve this place they show a shot of them going down the river and almost timed at conserve the one biologist reaches up from the boat they are traveling in to an overhang branch and pulls it in on of those just for helluvit moves. Great timing. Pulling on trees for fun is totally conservation. People do it. But don't show it when you're talking about leaving nature alone and conserving it! It's contradictory.
