Flashback : The Magic Cave

There I was in Laos, a karstic country studded with breathtaking caves, hoping to visit some. I love caves. It's one of the things I search for on the internet when I know I'm going to see a new country, the others being Earth Sandwich-ableness, coordinates of gravity hills, and mountains and highpoints to climb.

With the exception of a few caves I visited with my brothers and dad back in Florida, this new-found love of caves started in France on a hitchhiking, hiking, and camping trip on the Mediterranean coast. That trip led us to the Magic Cave.

La Ciotat

One morning, a group of Montpellierans hitchhiked east to the town of La Ciotat, which in Provencal colorfully means "the city." It's known as the birthplace of petanque, a Southern French version of boules and bocci balls. "The city" also lies along the calanques, which are, superficially speaking, French fjords. Junko, my hitchhiking partner, and I caught a truck going all the way from Montpellier to La Ciotat, known in my hitchhiking world as a hole in one. In town, we and the other groups of hitchhikers couchsurfed, swam, and Tai-chi'ed with an older Danish-French couple living there. The following day we started hiking back west in the direction of Cassis and Marseille across the calanques. Upon leaving, Jorgen, the Danish half of the couple, mentioned that there may be a cave in the calanques where we could spend the night, but he wasn't sure exactly where it was. So our group sent Sofia, the circus student, to climb down the various cliffs looking for a cavern. By dusk, we were losing hope of finding the cave and started looking for camping spots. Within moments, we spied a narrow steep trail heading down the cliff toward the sea. So down we went, too. And there it was, an opaque entrance looking out onto the Med. Heck yeah !

On the cliffs looking down.

The cave consisted of one large rectangularish room with a long table and a chimney. We were not the first visitors. In the middle of our joy, our true situation dawned on us. This was one of our first hiking trips and one of the most hastily-planned : we had three or four small headlamps, a few matches, a bottle of wine and a bottle of water. I don't really remember if we had any food to speak of. And it was cold in the cave, nearly freezing. We played some card games by headlamplight, but we were all dreaming of a fire and some food.

Mouth of the cave.

That's when we heard a rustling. And a swishing. From outside. Then the rustling became a bustling, and the swishing a stirring. Then came the whispering. Oh shit, who are these guys ? We started to get worried. Then we saw lights flickering at the mouth of the cave, and then two young - obviously French - men burst into the cave, carrying...firewood and potatoes. Welcome to our dark abode !

Our bottle of wine disappeared before our visitors arrived, and while we were introducing ourselves, the collective mind of the Montpellierans was now dreaming and hoping that Dionysus might just drop in. We got the next best thing : more French people entered the cave carrying backpacks full of wine bottles. The fire raging, the potatoes steaming, the wine flowing, the cave party had begun. All we were missing was a bit of musi---and here come two more francais carrying guitars. Someone else must have been thinking of some pot because that showed up a few minutes later. Within an hour, our motley group of Canadians, a Moroccan, a Japanese, a Spaniard, a Swede, an American, and a howling dog went from hungry and bored to well-satiated and raucous. Thanks to the Magic Cave.

From then on, we sought out all the caves we could in southern France...and they were all mostly amazing, but not quite as magical as that first cave. Not sure why. Did I mention that we found a monkey's paw on the route to the magic cave ?