Chipayike n°1

General description

Michael Laumanns - 28/11/2015

Chipayike n°1 consists of three individual adjacent caves. Some pottery and fragments thereof give witness that the eastern cave served as a shelter in times of the Mozambican civil war. The eastern cave has three entrances, two horizontal ones and a vertical rift entrance. The entrances are interconnected by a 25 m long, 5 m wide and in the average 2 m high chamber. The western part of the chamber is substantially higher with about 5 m and accommodates a few flying foxes ofthe species Rousettus aegyptiacus leachii (A.SMITH 1829). In the middle part of the chamber another crawl continues to the S but ends after i3 m. The middle cave consists of a 1,5 m high horizontal phreatic passage, which leads in SW direction. Some nice calcite formations can be found along the left wall side. After 20 m the gallery becomes a crawl, which then leads into a small 10 m long chamber. Its continuations are neither passable southward, nor northward. At the southern end, one can climb up into a small chamber with a daylight opening. The floor of the main passage is covered with fine grained sediment, The western cave has a length of just less than 20 m and leads in SW direction, too. 7 m from the entrance a 5 m long chamber opens to the right. After 10 m there is an impassable daylight opening in the cave’s roof. At the terminus the right wall side is covered by calcite formations. Various spiders and insects but no further animals were registered. No conglomerate fillings were found in the caves. An air temperature between 20,5 - 21,0° C was measured.