Swimming in Mud

The other cooling activity of our time in Moon Hill was the mud caves. A good couple-hour tour through the inside of those amazing karst mountains, where stalactites hung like hollow billowing sheets from the ceiling, so that when you tap on them, they thrum like kettle drums. All kinds of shapes appear in the stalagmites – from Buddha’s head, to the goddess Kuanyin, to Harry Potter’s owl Hedwig.

Deep inside the cave are pools of silted mud. We were prepared – doing the caving in bathing suits, and trepidatiously, we stepped into the muddy water. It is fantastic for the skin, according to the notices, but it felt like crumbly slime. Instantly our bodies all became the same warm brown color. Caucasians no more, we descended into the cool slippery water.

A miracle happened. There was so much sediment in the water that the body’s buoyancy changed, even more so than salt water. When we finally gathered the courage to lie back in the mud, instead of swimming with our toes dragging the bottom, our legs plopped up to the surface: bloop! bloop! It was hysterically funny and a little unnerving.

Fortunately next to the mud pool was a clear-water pool that we quickly muddied washing ourselves off.