As if there weren't enough caves to go around, several slightly loco members of ZOTZ decided to dig one of their own...
It all began when we heard about a small hole located at the foot of a hill in Rancho El Zapotillo and called "The Air Conditioner" because delicious cool air would pour forth from it on the sultriest afternoon, as regular as clockwork.
A certain rather overweight and rather overgreedy individual, interested in purchasing this amazing air conditioner, invited ZOTZ to explore the mysterious tunnel to see if it might lead to a huge (and valuable) underground lake.
Naturally, we were to carry out this exploration at our own expense, but - inspired by a pure love for speleological adventure (if not science) - we offered to go "where no rather overweight individual has ever gone before."
Dig or else: A belly crawl got us only 6 or 7 meters in, before the tunnel pinched shut. However, we noticed that the floor of the passage was nothing but loose dirt - so, for some strange reason, we decided to dig it out! Well, actually, Susy, Mano and Pablo prudently but ungrammatically questioned the wisdom of such a move ("What? Us dig?") while John and Juan masochistically but grammatically exclaimed, "Sure, dudes, we shall dig!" As you can see, the one element that did not enter into this decision was democracy.
Eat dirt: Now, some of those World War II Escape-from-the-German Prison movies make tunneling look like a "jolly good adventure." The truth is, you've got to eat, breathe and swallow kilos of DIRT in such a tunnel, especially if you've got one person in front actually digging and a chain gang behind him using
their hands and feet as shovels to move the dirt back and out the door.
It sucks: An all-day dig led to no lake, and the longer the tunnel got, the more it looked like the air was coming from the sides rather than from up ahead. After spending all day scraping, gagging and sweating, we crawled out and staggered to our campsite. About 10 PM it suddenly occurred to John to visit the mouth of the tunnel. Sure enough the "Air Conditioner" was no longer blowing but sucking!
What made us crawl back in that little hole the next morning and excavate right up to the end of the tunnel, is better left unmentioned. It was already obvious that the hill - a great heap of volcanic rubble covered with topsoil and plants - is a vast reservoir not of water, but of air... a reservoir that breathes 
in and out regularly, according to laws of air pressure and temperature.
What was it like digging your own cave? All the "moles" (except John, who has really weird tastes) put it in no uncertain terms: We'd rather eat a jar of Vegemite* than go through THAT again!
*Vegemite: a black, gooey substance which looks and tastes like tar and is consumed in great quantities only by balmy Australians and John Pint
