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The Dutch don't have much in the way of high ground, so tend to extract maximum value from the few undulations, slopes or knobbles that their country can actually muster. South Limburg is the most up 'n' down-iest province they've got, and therefore it's become pretty much a “happy hills” theme park for Lowlanders. For a start it's got the country's highest peak, the 321 meter Drielandenpunt, and so it’s infested with herds of homegrown ramblers reveling in the novelty of walking up, over the top and down the other side of their landscape, rather than just across it. It's an attractive countryside, too, with much use made of those rolling and wooded hills for concealing and then suddenly revealing film-set castles, mellowed monasteries and bucolic villages.

Even further value has been wrested from this novel, (for the Dutch, at least), third dimension through centuries of industrious coal and maarl stone mining. Every bit of this uppity land has been tunnelled into, through and under, giving it the geological equivalent of terminal woodworm. South Limburg, seemingly, is just a tangle of tunnels, shafts, holes and passages with a thin coating of land to keep the rain out. So it makes sense, then, in a land of keen cyclists and often-inclement weather, that someone was going to come up with cave cycling as a business idea. It's not a complicated concept. Fifty meters deep on the edge of the town of Valkenburg is a maarl mine, with some 150 kilometers of tunnels and passages. Then there’s a pile of bikes, 150 of them, waiting down there at the bottom, in the dark. And there’s you, the punter.

The entrance to the mine is suitably Tardis-like for this weird foray into a hidden world; a tiny shed on a hilltop, holding little more than a tightly wound, and clamorously echoing, spiral staircase heading down into Limburg's guts. Jerry Jansen, who was charged with guiding me through the caves, claimed that the first steps on the staircase weeded out any claustrophobics well before they could get into the mine itself and cause trouble. Having passed this test in speleological aptitude, by merely walking downstairs, I was rewarded with a low-slung, single-gear mountain bike, with a rear disc brake and hefty dynamo light. I also got a crash helmet, and a safety talk.

"Don’t get separated from the guide - if you do, you’ve got about 24 hours before you die of dehydration, unless we find you first." Jerry was serious, "You certainly won’t find your way back to the start on your own, so if you get lost you just have to stay still and wait - the guide will retrace the route - then - after twenty minutes - if he hasn’t found you, we bring in all our staff to search, and after an hour of that, well, then we have to call in the police and the fire brigade."

So far they've never had to whistle up the boys in blue, despite running anything up to 600 people through on a busy weekend. In fact, straddling my bike in the well-lit cavern at the start, listening to Jerry’s spiel, and watching a bunch of Dutch Maxim-generation lads being kitted out with wheels, danger seemed remote. Get lost? Die of dehydration? C'mon. I mean, I was going for a short pedal in a glorified underpass, right?

Then we set off. Jerry and I burning rubber like a scratch team of Trolls training for a shot at the Tour de Caverns of Hell, wheels skidding in the dust, bikes bouncing over the rock floor. The lads set off on a different route, their shouts fading behind us, until I could hear only the sound of our own whirring dynamos and the click of freewheels. And that strange sound like the flaring of a distant Bunsen burner which is the sound of silence.

The 150 kilometers of tunnels had been sawn out over half a century of hard work. Block after block of valuable building stone extracted to build the castles, monasteries, and villages topside had left the ceilings and walls of each passage looking disconcertingly the same. This combined with the twisting, crossing and forking of the corridors through every possible binary code combination of left and right had created a horrifically complicated maze, that had then been pumped full of more darkness than you could have imagined possible. It was like cycling through the Theory of Relativity, with time and space losing all meaning and disappearing up their own bums.

Within twenty pedal turns of leaving the last passage that had lights, and after two or three corners turned I was hopelessly lost. And wondering if Jerry know where he was going? Really? I was disorientated in the way one becomes when mousing ones way through Doom or any of the other shoot 'em up computer games that rely on 'turn the corner into darkness' graphics for full effect. Though here, rather than an earful of sound-card crackling, booming and whooshing, if I wasn’t quick on the crouch, I ended up getting clonked on my helmeted bonce by sudden lowerings in the roof.

Jerry did seem to know his way through this maze of dark nothings - though it occurred to me that he could be taking me thirty times around the same 150-meter circuit and I’d never know the difference. Equally, it could have been that the bit when he pulled his bike to a halt, and our dynamo lights died, and a solid black darkness snapped on like a negative-image floodlight, whilst he flashed a pitiful torch around a selection of similar looking holes in the rock whilst muttering, “Yeah, it could be this one…maybe…I’m pretty sure…but..” wasn’t just for effect.

Whatever, when I finally parked the bike, (front-wheel poked into a slot hewn into the soft rock), and started the long ascent of the spiral staircase back to the light, and to weather, I found myself humming that Simon & Garfunkel ditty that had been nagging at my brain. “Hallo darkness my old friend,” indeed! “The soooound of silence?” They seemed to know what they were singing about. Maybe those two dippy warblers had got out of their bed-sits a bit more than I suspected, and had actually dragged their Raleigh Choppers down a cave or two in their time.

CAVE BIKING FACT FILE


General Info: ASP Adventure, www. aspadventure.nl, run cave biking for groups of minimum ten participants throughout the week. Individuals are only taken at weekends. Tel :+31(0)43-6011508 to book

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