Erin Lynch

Erin Lynch and friends in the Hong Meigui Caving Club have explored and surveyed over one hundred kilometres of cave in China. Many of their expeditions have been much more independent of official control than previously possible.

The following email excerpts from Erin explain how it started:

APRIL 2000: "...Let me tell you a little bit about what I'm planning. Rob Garrett from the Red Rose/Oxford University and I would like to spend a year in China, starting in October of '00. I'd like to visit 3 or 4 karst areas, and spend several months in each.

With just the two of us, we won't have the manpower or equipment to push anything really complex, but we could do a lot of the recce work for future expeditions. I don't have a fixed itinerary as yet, but I've heard good things about Jiang Kou, Ho Chi Ba, and the west of Sichuan in general. I'm looking for other suggestions or recommendations, and I want to make sure that I don't step on any toes if certain groups feel like they have "dibs" on a given area...

As for Rob, he actually had a real job, which he quit to become a cave bum."

"Andy Eavis put me in touch with Professor Zhu from the Guillin Karst Institute, and it looks like everything should be in place by late December, which is a little later than I had hoped, but still great."

"In gruesome detail, I'm currently a first year PhD student in Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech. My affiliation with Caltech made me eligible to apply to the Durfee Foundation's "American/Chinese Adventure Capital Program". The program funds vocational "adventures" in China. I submitted a proposal to spend a year caving, and they liked it, so here I am. (Unfortunately my research advisor was less enthused, but I didn't really want to spend the next 5 years writing Fortran anyway)."

Part of Hong Meigui survey

JAN 2001: "It's good to hear from you. Can you tell me what the Yorkshire Ramblers want to do in Leye? Prof. Zhu is planning to go to Leye in 2 weeks, to stay there for 2 months. I want to make sure that we don't inadvertently scoop their leads, as that would be a bit antisocial to say the least. I think that Prof. Zhu has arranged to do a rather large study of the area for the Leye government. At the moment it's not clear if James, Rob, and I will be able to choose which pits we want to descend and survey, or if Prof. Zhu will assign tasks to us. Mr. Huang and Mr. Cai are learning SRT, so maybe we'll all be caving together."

Erin's determination to explore Chinese caves in the least expensive way has been the catalyst to enable others to follow her. James Alker, Olly Betts, Duncan Collis, Hillary Greaves, Ben Lovett, Claire McElwain, Rob Garrett, Matt Ryan and others are a new generation of cavers changing the face of exploration in China.

None of this devalues the efforts of the traditional caving expeditions alongside which the Hong Meigui have worked. Rather it shows that a variety of approaches are now possible in China. Also encouraging is the huge interest shown in caves and karst in China itself. Hopefully this will lead to greater environmental awareness and participation by Chinese cavers trained with modern equipment in cave exploration. There will be interesting discoveries and adventures for all in one of the largest caving bearing areas in the World for years to come!

The following pages contain pictures and some stories of the Hong Meigui cave explorations between April and June 2002.

2002 Index

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