About the caves
The Capricorn Caves were formed in limestone around 390 million years ago, when this part of Queensland lay beneath an ancient tropical sea. The caves were discovered by European settlers in the 1880s and quickly became a curiosity for visitors exploring the region.
Today the caves are a popular attraction near Rockhampton, known for their impressive chambers, narrow passageways and remarkable acoustics. Guided tours take visitors through cathedral-like caverns and twisting tunnels — a cool, underground contrast to Queensland’s tropical heat above ground. 🪨
Credit: chatGPT
Our tour
Nikki likes a cave, so we had booked a guided tour as part of our planning last year. There were three options, the easiest being the Cathedral Cave Tour, then Capricorn Explorer and the hardest Capricorn Adventurer. The Adventurer Tour seemed a bit too strenuous for us (squeezing ability required) so we opted for the Explorer.
As it turned out that one also required a certain amount of squeezing ability, thank goodness we didn’t opt for the Adventurer one, and it was quite tricky in spots. We were also by far the oldest on the tour, and our guide Flynn even made a joke about that (cheeky git).
He was great fun though and extremely knowledgeable, and he took us around several caves, including a ‘bat cave’ where the bats are literally flying around you. Their sonar is excellent though (we had to turn our headlamps off) and they didn’t bump into any of us.
Possibly the spookiest bit was the ‘dark’ cave where we switched off all our headlamps, and him his torch, and you could literally see nothing, not even your hand in front of your face. As Flynn said, it’s a total absence of light, and if you stay like that for a while, 15 mins or so, your brain starts to try and fill in the gaps and you can get hallucinations.
A very interesting and fun hour and a half and we left the cave extremely wet and quite muddy from sliding down rocks and squeezing around corners. Fortunately neither of us got stuck !
