A benign figure looking down. The imagination is allowed to run wild once inside the caves. The tourguides are trained exceptionally well, and must know the caves, its legends and stories by heart before they are allowed to take a group through. The stories they tell make the formations come alive.

The coffin! Strange-sounding name? Maybe, but everything in the caves seems to be either bigger or smaller than real life. The coffin is a hole in the cave floor where you emerge after sliding, slipping and bending through several passages and openings.

The Devil's Chimney must be one of the most notorious passages in the Cango Caves. Almost everybody who knows somebody who visited the caves, have a story to tell - about getting stuck, about getting claustrophobia while in there, about this and that. The chimney is about 45cm (18 inches) or so wide, and when you are in there, there is no turning back.
My legs are short, and I just couldn't get a knee up to start my passage, until the lady behind me gave me a push! The children, of course, scurried through, waited for us, came back again and went through once more.

A person dwarfed by a formation. It is almost impossible to realise how big some of these formations really are. Lights also give a depth to them, a glittering appearance and a magic presence. Over the years light and oxygen started damaging the caves inside. Green algae grows on some formations. For that reason lights are switched off as soon as tourists leave one hall to enter another.

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KIBANA-SHAKUNAGE (Rhododendron aureum): One of the Alpine Rhododendrons. Its pale-yellow color is expressed in both the Japanese and the Latin name (image).