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" There&amp;#039;s bat shit in my sandwich. There&amp;#039;s bat shit everywhere, actually. Under my nails. Between my toes. On the $1,000 camera lens. I&amp;#039;m ankle deep in the stuff, which looks like overcooked oatmeal. I thought it was mud. Two hundred feet deep inside the earth, I&amp;#039;d been concentrating on the one Truly Important Thing: the location of the exit, which registers as a distant pinprick of white-green light. I hadn&amp;#039;t even noticed the hundreds of bats overhead. That little piece of news is delivered by my guide, Armando Asencio. &amp;quot;When you look up, be sure to keep your mouth closed,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Important rule.&amp;quot; I figure I&amp;#039;ll have a few more rules to pick up over the next few days, considering my prior spelunking experience was limited to caves with floodlights, guardrails, and an uncomfortable number of German tourists. Here, two hours west of San Juan, there is none of that, just a jungly region of sinkholes, ravines, and some of the most amazing caves on the planet. Puerto Rico&amp;#039;s limestone, riddled by thirty-five million years of hydrologic havoc, boasts two thousand caverns, fewer than a third of which have been fully explored. I have three days to roam three of them, starting today with Armando leading me on a canyoneering-style exploration of Telescope Cave and the other tunnels of the Tanam\u00C3fff\u00C3f,\u00C3,\u00C2\u00A1 River. At thirty, Armando is muscular and compact, with a deadpan stare and pre-Yankee Johnny Damon mane. He and his wife, Julitza, who&amp;#039;s come along today, are back-to-the-land types, happy living on a farm, growing guavas, and raising their one-year-old daughter. They surf, backpack, and rock climb whenever they can, but Armando seems most at home in the caves. Deep underground, all by himself, he&amp;#039;ll often kill the headlamp and just sit for hours.  Today, though, he&amp;#039;s too busy helping me pick my way over rocks, keep vertical on a slick hillside of mud, and run the Tanam\u00C3fff\u00C3f,\u00C3,\u00C2\u00A1 boatless. The official term is &amp;quot;body rafting.&amp;quot; Earlier in the day, after we hiked into the jungle and jumped from a twenty-foot ledge into the river, Armando taught me the basics: Lie on your back. Let the current sweep you downstream. Keep your feet forward, with one dropped to feel for obstacles below the surface. Don&amp;#039;t lift your head to look for hazards; this causes your rear to plunge like the keel of a boat. Shooting through a small, rocky rapid, I learned this the hard way and have the bruises to show for it.  The day&amp;#039;s ritual is set, and it doesn&amp;#039;t suck: leap from boulders into the water, drift through caves, soak up a little sun, duck under riverside waterfalls. The bat shit rinses right off. With lightweight Tanam\u00C3fff\u00C3f,\u00C3,\u00C2\u00A1 behind us, Armando deems me ready for the labyrinth of Dug\u00C3fff\u00C3f,\u00C3,\u00C2\u00B3n Cave on day two. Relatively few people have ever prowled its Habitrail-like maze of passages; some areas probably haven&amp;#039;t been visited at all. Though certain aspects of Armando&amp;#039;s pre-Dug\u00C3fff\u00C3f,\u00C3,\u00C2\u00B3n pep talk are troubling--he describes one of the passages as &amp;quot;almost human-sized&amp;quot;--overall I&amp;#039;m sold on a vision of us making like mud-splattered versions of Lewis and Clark.  After meeting up with a few of Armando&amp;#039;s caver friends, we drive 4x4&amp;#039;s into the island&amp;#039;s lush, overgrown interior and set out on foot. After an hour of thrashing through vines and branches, Armando finds what he&amp;#039;s looking for. From the top of a low cliff, we chimney down, feet pressed against the rock face, backs smeared against a palm tree a couple feet away. At the bottom, a muddy track snakes down to a riverbed, which in turn arcs into the dark, toothy mouth of a cave. At first, Dug\u00C3fff\u00C3f,\u00C3,\u00C2\u00B3n seems standard issue--straight passage, roof about fifty feet high. But the tunnel soon tilts, forcing us to walk leaned to one side with a hand out for balance. Then the ceiling drops and we&amp;#039;re crawling. After a left fork, the pas-sage gets truly tiny: We come to a keyhole roughly the circumference of Paris Hilton&amp;#039;s waist. Arms straight forward like Superman, I try to squeeze through. Somebody in front, already through, grabs my wrists and starts yanking, but my shoulders won&amp;#039;t budge. Somebody behind shoves my feet forward, but they just push into my pelvis. My torso wears a tightly cinched girdle of rock.  I&amp;#039;m stuck. &amp;quot;Give it some time,&amp;quot; Armando says. &amp;quot;Your organs will readjust.&amp;quot; Hundreds of years ago, fasting Taino holy men sat in the island&amp;#039;s caves for days at a time awaiting visions. I&amp;#039;m having one now, no hallucinogens or vomiting spatulas required: a vision of me trapped in this sorry wormhole forever. I wriggle, wait, wriggle. Finally, after several minutes, enough time apparently for my kidneys to condense, I somehow make it through. Later, we swim into a partially flooded grotto that looks like it&amp;#039;s made of melting candle wax. Flash floods have washed away all of the grime, revealing glistening formations. Ahead, the passage becomes smaller and fully submerged for fifty feet. Armando and friends decide to take a deep breath and swim through the watery darkness to the other side. My feeling about doing this is: hell no. So I&amp;#039;m waiting here in this vaulted, four-foot-wide processional hall for them to come back. Fifteen minutes pass, then another fifteen. The walls around me, which had been vivid orange and black, grow fuzzy and yellow. Hallucination? Madness? No. My headlamp batteries are dying. Dying and . . . dead. Total blackness. I wave my hand in front of my face. Nothing. All around are the sounds of dripping water. Lacking anything better to do, I concentrate on picking out each part: a plink-plink to the right, a plink-plonk to left, a steady plop-plop-plop somewhere straight ahead. A few more long minutes pass. I&amp;#039;m relieved when I hear the voices of the returning cavers. Armando reaches me and hands me a spare headlamp. &amp;quot;Now you are a real caver,&amp;quot; he says, looking amused. The R\u00C3fff\u00C3f,\u00C3,\u00C2\u00ADo Camuy, my destination for the third day, begins as a typical island waterway, spilling from the soggy heights of the Cordillera Central down toward the Caribbean. After a dozen miles, though, the river does something odd: It disappears, flowing for eight miles underground through a one-thirtieth-scale, domed version of the Grand Canyon and surfacing only briefly at the bottoms of sinkholes.  Few if any Puerto Rican cavers know the Camuy system better than Rossano Boscarino, whom I&amp;#039;ve enlisted as my guide for this final test. At forty-two, he is one of the island&amp;#039;s most skilled cavers and rock climbers and an expert on subterranean search and rescue. Given these alpha-male credentials, I&amp;#039;m taken aback when Rossano shows up wearing attire that is less cave stud than it is cave ballerina: body-hugging black tights, candy-apple-red Lycra shirt, white helmet fixed with flashlights, knife strapped to his chest. Accompanying him, in matching team garb, are two assistant guides, Edda and Hector. When Rossano first got into spelunking, he toted a copy of Russell and Jeanne Gurnee&amp;#039;s Discovery at the R\u00C3fff\u00C3f,\u00C3,\u00C2\u00ADo Camuy, the book that introduced Puerto Rico&amp;#039;s caves to the world. &amp;quot;It was like reading Tom Sawyer or the Hardy Boys, and then you got to do it yourself,&amp;quot; Rossano says. He later befriended Russell Gurnee, who eventually gave him an exploratory tip. &amp;quot;Before he died, he kept telling me that I should climb above the National Geographic Hall,&amp;quot; Rossano says, referring to an elaborately decorated, mile-long section of the Camuy. Maybe, Russell thought, he would discover a whole new level of the cave. This afternoon, we&amp;#039;re going to find out. We hike to the bottom of the Tres Pueblos sinkhole, four hundred feet deep and perfectly round, as though someone had driven a monster golf tee into the ground and then yanked it out. There&amp;#039;s a hole at the bottom of the hole. Rossano rigs a rappelling rope and lowers the end into the deep, dark gash of the cave. Clipping in, I lean back and drop over the edge of the cliff. Suddenly, I&amp;#039;m dangling from a rope, with all the athleticism of a pi\u00C3fff\u00C3f,\u00C3,\u00C2\u00B1ata, hundreds of feet above a grotto whose bottom I cannot see. After reaching the base and hiking down a steep slope, we arrive at the Camuy. It flows away from the light beaming down from the cave&amp;#039;s entrance and into a dark, sheer-sided canyon. We body-raft in. The water is swift and smooth. It rounds several bends, sweeping us deeper into the mammoth hall. Hearing the sound of crashing water, we get out and clamber up a hillside of mud and giant boulders. Almost straight below, the river roars over a major rapid, and our headlamps illuminate white froth and a fearsome tangle of logs and rocks. &amp;quot;Sheeet. Fuck,&amp;quot; Edda says. &amp;quot;That is a toilet bowl down there.&amp;quot; Rossano points upslope at a short, 50 degree pitch of rock. &amp;quot;Just walk up it,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ll be surprised, you&amp;#039;ll stick to it.&amp;quot; He starts up it. Edda follows. &amp;quot;Just don&amp;#039;t fall,&amp;quot; Rossano calls back. &amp;quot;First you would break a few bones. Then you would go into the toilet bowl. Then you would die.&amp;quot; Gotcha. I nearly panic but don&amp;#039;t tumble, climbing higher. Mud and boulders are replaced with swirls of white and tan flowstone. A couple hundred feet above the river, we reach the base of a cliff. Rossano pulls pitons and bolts from his pack, preparing for the difficult climb to look for Gurnee&amp;#039;s mythical upper level. He&amp;#039;s going to scout it first, then have us follow if he finds anything, which he doubts he will. &amp;quot;I think the upper level is just an abandoned passage of the river,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;But you never know.&amp;quot; Turns out he&amp;#039;s right, and we don&amp;#039;t discover any new passageways today. But that&amp;#039;s fine. The idea that we could have is still pretty damn cool. How to Experience This Adventure FLY into San Juan and take highway 22 west to cave country. CONTACT Armando Asencio of Expediciones Palenque (787-823-4354), who will guide you through the Tanam\u00C3fff\u00C3f,\u00C3,\u00C2\u00A1 caves for $100 and into Dug\u00C3fff\u00C3f,\u00C3,\u00C2\u00B3n, a custom trek, for $300. For Camuy, turn to Rossano Boscarino of Aventuras Tierra Adentro (787-766-0470), whose custom trips are $500 for up to three people (spandex not included). BRING quick-drying clothes and sticky-soled water shoes. (Sneakers work, too.) AVOID Velcro. The ripping sound contains ultrahigh, bat-scaring frequencies. Seriously.  SLEEP at a restaurant. The rooms at El Buen Caf\u00C3fff\u00C3f,\u00C3,\u00C2\u00A9 in Hatillo are near the caves, the beach, and, for better or worse, the highway ($90 per night; 787-898-1000). GO anytime but the fall. Unless you enjoy dodging flash floods. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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