As a reward for bringing a load of Estee Lauder cosmetics for his wife, Joan's friend Jiasong took us to visit Yunshui Dong, a cave in suburban Southwest Beijing. This is in the same general area as the well-known Qian Zhen Dong (Stone Flower Cave), which we visited in 1999. This trip was a surprise to us, so we didn't have time to figure out the proper settings to use our digital camera in the cave. Sorry the underground images are such low quality.
We had to drive for about an hour through increasingly rural parts of Beijing to reach the cave, which is in a mountainous park area called Shangfang Shan. Once we located the park entrance, we learned that we could hike three hours up a steep trail to the cave entrance, or ride a cable car. The cable car was a minor adventure in itself, since the operators don't stop the cable to let riders get in and out of the cars. Each car holds two people; Joan and Jiasong rode in one, and Lily and Dan in another. On reaching the terminus, Dan handed Lily out to an attendant and scrambled out himself. The upper terminus is still 50 meters below the cave entrance, with a very steep set of irregular steps in between.
Like Stone Flower, Cloud and Water is a show cave that has been lit and paved for visitors' comfort. That's about all it shares with Stone Flower, though. The floors are extremely smooth, and wet and slippery in places. Lighting is garish green or blue, and pretty dim, overall. The guide's speil made a lot of extravagant claims for the relative size and quality of the cave's features, but it was far inferior in all respect to Stone Flower. For instance, he said one of the rooms was "the largest cave chamber in China," which is far from the case, and that the formations are "second only to those in Stone Flower" among Chinese caves. They aren't that great. Dan thought it would be cool in the cave, but he wound up carrying everybody's jackets.
The cave is a connected series of six large domes, some of which have large stalagmites in them. The largest of those is probably about ten meters high,and like the others, kind of beat-up. All the large features are illuminated with green floodlights. The passages between domes are sparsely lit, but the floors are smooth. Dan brought his own flashlight. The only truly remarkable natural feature was a large cluster of some kind of needle crystals that covered most of one wall. These were neither illuminated nor remarked on by the guide. Someone apparently felt that the natural features were inadequate, so they populated the cave with life-sized figures in an oddly primitive style, and some monument structures. The guide was not forthcoming about the significance of all the figures, but we eventually figured out that the ones in the upper level, who were all in robes and seemed somehow religious, represented some version of Heaven. In lower levels are a lot of ill-dressed figures inflicting or suffering torture of various kinds. We assume that's Hell. Some of those scenes were pretty graphic.
All in all, the cave was disappointing, since whatever natural attraction it had was overwhelmed by the weird quasi-religious statuary and masonry.
