Explore world's deepest underground hotel

  • 3 days ago
Transcript
00:00Don't tell me we're going in there. I'm afraid we are. This is the way in.
00:12Looks terrifying. So are we nearly there?
00:17Getting there. We'll drop two more floors I'm afraid.
00:22Down there? Yeah, I'd say.
00:27It's quite slippy.
00:41Are you sure this is the way? I think so.
00:49So how do you bring all the fresh bedding down to deep sleep?
00:53Just some big backpacks. Surely not this way? Yeah, I'm afraid so.
01:03Well, this is it. Wow.
01:06Just got to find the right key here.
01:10That looks like a big door. Yeah, it keeps all the monsters in.
01:17Right. Here we are. Come on in.
01:22Wow.
01:28This is incredible. Do you like it?
01:34It is amazing.
01:38You can take your helmet off now if you want to give your head a rest.
01:41Perfect, thank you. So when you're in here you don't have to wear your helmet?
01:45No, not if you don't want to. Come up these steps and have a sit down.
01:57Thank you very much.
01:59Right now we are sat in the bottom of a slate mine.
02:03We are 1,375 vertical feet underground.
02:08There's a lot of cave camps in the UK and certainly abroad where caves and mines are so big.
02:15If you want to go and explore the far reaches of them you have to camp down there.
02:20Everything has been manually carried down. There's no trolley entrance anywhere.
02:27It's been a lot of work. It's taken about four years, a bit longer actually.
02:31But this is an adventure experience. It's a guided overnight adventure.
02:37So it's always under the guidance and control of a team of instructors.
02:43We meet at our base on the surface and it takes about half an hour to walk up to the mine from there.
02:50And about half an hour through the mine to get down to this point.
02:55There's always two instructors at any one time in the chamber with them throughout the evening.
03:02There's four log cabins here. Each log cabin has two single beds in.
03:07So that's obviously eight guests.
03:10We also have a grotto which is a bit posher.
03:16That's got a double bed in it so that gives us a capacity for ten guests.
03:21This is structurally a really good chamber. It's about the best structural chamber we've managed to find.
03:28There's over a thousand chambers in this hillside.
03:32A lot of them are quite old and they were put in by people who were being pushed very, very hard
03:38for maximum productivity at the expense of everything including safety.
03:43They're too wide and the pillars are too narrow.
03:46They've not been engineered in a way that gives them a long-term stability.
03:52But by the time you get to the 1930s when this chamber was cut it was very different.
03:57The level of engineering that's gone into these chambers is miles ahead of the really old ones.
04:04It would have been a lot easier to do it just inside the mine, not all the way down here.
04:12But we wanted it to be in the deepest point.
04:17That's its USP. If it was just inside the mine it wouldn't have been quite as an impressive a feat I don't think.
04:26Having said that, it's certainly been a lot more work than I expected.
04:31Not that I really knew what to expect. We've just been getting on with it and it's been ready when it's ready.
04:37If I had my time again now I probably wouldn't have been so ambitious with the location.
04:42But here we are. We've done it.

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