IRAN SALT CAVES 2019 Marco Mecchia Hot dry desert – on the map the area is coloured light purple. The La Venta expedition, numbering 17 speleologists, leaves Italy on 2 February, 2019, reaching Shiraz, capital of Fars Province, in the dead of night. At the airport we are met by Yones, an Iranian speleologist and friend, with the drivers of the minibuses that will take us around Iran. We load everything up and head immediately for Firuzabad, where it is still dark when we arrive. We are perhaps the only Western tourists in the city, and the locals are hospitable and curious. The first day is given over to organisation and shopping, and the next morning we split up into two teams and get going. One team will focus on the small dome of Khoorab, where the exploration of a resurgence last year came to a halt when faced with a bottleneck, and the other on Jahani, one of the largest Iranian diapirs, in part already explored by Czech speleologists. On this second diapir, after a number of attempts, we identify an unpaved road that comes close to the south-western flank of the mountain, which is yet to be investigated. The minibus clambers up to a square that was once used by bulldozers for the extraction of salt; from here, we overlook a valley that rises up to the plateau with steep, multicoloured slopes. We pitch our tents, and the first night we are surprised by the temperatures approaching zero. The stern expedition chief communicates the wake up time: 6 a.m. local every day, to make the most of the cooler morning hours. And every morning Antonio and I emerge at 6 from our tent, which is a little isolated from the others, only to find, time and again, all of the other members of the team The ascent of the Nameki diapir, near the city of Lar
finishing their breakfast, the coffee having already cooled down. “How efficient!” I think to myself. Only at the end of the week do I discover that the time difference with respect to Italy is not two hours, as my watch had it, but two-and-a-half hours. However, every day we leave the camp before sunlight floods the valley. Salt clusters are covered almost everywhere by a several metre thick layer of insoluble deposits and detritus. On the side of the diapir and on the upland we find a number of sinkholes and hundreds of dolines, a few of which have promising black holes at the bottom, which make us look forward to unforgettable explorations. Over the course of three days, we descend into fifteen or so shafts, down to a depth of sixty metres. Invariably, though, the bottom is obstructed, with no indication of a way through; a situation very similar to that described by the CzechIranian team vis-à-vis the north-western sector of the plateau. We take the opportunity to visit Waterfall Cave – a through gallery at the end of a long valley that cuts through the highland, flowing into the south-eastern slope of the dome – before we meet up again with the other team at Firuzabad. On the Khoorab, Marco has placed his animal traps both inside and outside the cave; the exploration of the resurgence comes to an end shortly beyond the bottleneck, and a few small caves are added to the records we are compiling; nothing spectacular, though. On our day off, we decide what to do on the second half of the expedition. The other team heads for Lar, 200 km to the south-east, where they will meet the local authorities, and together with the local caving group they will climb the nearby Nameki diapir, exploring
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