Hey there my Hive friends and followers!
I´m happy to deliver another post that I have been promising for some time already. It´s probably one of my last posts from Zanzibar and it will take you to the mysterious Kuza Cave. The cave is hidden in a little jungle just outside of the picturesque coastal town of Jambiani in the northeastern part of the Unguja Island and since we were actually based in Jambiani, we couldn´t miss this special cave adventure.
I didn´t realy find much information about the cave on the internet so the following lines will rather be just my own subjective description and observations. The cave itself is a huge limestone sinkhole flooded with crystal clear fresh water. If you have ever been to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, you surely know what cenotes are and this is exactly what the Kuza Cave looked like and felt like.
The entrance fee is 10 USD and once you pay, you can stay in the cave for as long as you wish. That was actually great because there were several groups of people who arrived to the cave in tour minibuses so we could just wait until they go back to the buses and leave for some other attractions of the island. Therefore, we could have the cave just for ourselves for a few moments.
I tried to take pictures of the cave without the strangers in them but you can still see some other visitors of the cave is some of the shots, sorry about that. Talking about photographing caves, this must actually be one of the most difficult photography disciplines because the light conditions are extremely poor in caves and the waving water of the flooded part creates these visual distortions and reflections that might look cool but are super hard to capture with a decent focus.
With that being said, most of the photos that you are now going to see are quite horrible from the quality standpoint but I think that even real cameras would struggle in such an extreme environment, let alone my old poor phone :D :/ But enough moaning, let´s take a look...
I hope you still enjoyed the pictures, despite their low quality. As you have surely noticed, a significant part of the cave is decorated with all these amazing stalactites and stalagmites and you can also see a lot of different colors on the walls, I guess it was caused by the occurrence of different chemical elements such as iron, sulfur etc.
The water was pleasantly cool and refreshing, much more than the ocean that gets super warm in this part of Africa (Zanzibar is actually located just a few degrees off the equator). It was crystal clear and I wished I had brought my snorkeling gear with me because there was some interesting wildlife to be observed in there, including some beautiful freshwater crabs.
I should also add that near the entrance to the cave, there is a little community center where you can learn more about the history and culture of the area and even buy some Swahili cooking and dancing lessons.
To find out the exact location of the Kuza Cave, feel free to check out the Pinmapple, I pinned it there ;)
PS: I have some traveling and very busy days ahead of me so getting to replying to your comments and checking out your posts might take me a bit longer than usually this time. Sorry about that and thanks for understanding.