Actun Tunichil Muknal 

Emily

We had a really awesome day! This morning at 8am, we left for a tour of the Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) cave. We were not allowed to take pictures although our guide said he would send Bill pictures this evening. Maybe we’ll get some that way.

We had a half hour hike on a trail through the woods to get to the cave. There were little lizards all over the place. The cave has a river running through it, so we had to swim through pretty frosty water to enter the cave. A little over half of the trip was spent exploring the cave through the river. Sometimes it was ankle deep and sometimes chest deep.

The cave was amazing! There were all kinds of different rock formations. Some of them looked like folds of fabric on the cave ceiling. Lots of them sparkled. We saw a bat.

The most fun part of the cave was the amount of marginally dangerous climbing they let us do. The rocks were slippery, but we climbed over boulders, through small cracks in the walls and high up into the cave. It was a fairly technical/physical climb where a fall could have at least meant a trip to the ER. On our way out of the cave, our guide took us through very narrow passages where you had to position your neck to slide through the narrowest parts. No tour company in the US would ever let people do the kind of climb we did today. At one point, they had roped a sketchy metal ladder to the side of a rock wall and had us climb up that. The feeling here seems to be that if you choose to go spelunking and climb up a boulder and something bad happens, you made a choice and that’s on you. Americans have turned lawsuits into a pastime so now we don’t get to do anything fun. Plus, there are a lot of stupid people who do stupid things and ruin everything for everyone else.

The Maya used the upper chambers of the cave as ritual sites. They believed that caves were openings to the underworld so they used caves to take a lot of drugs and make offerings to some unfriendly gods. We saw lots of pottery that had been used in offerings and the remains of people who had been sacrificed. Archeologists have also found blood-letting tools but we didn’t see any of those.

You can’t take pictures in the cave because at least three different times tourists have dropped cameras on artifacts they were photographing and broken things. One of the skulls had two big holes in it from cameras that had been dropped. After the third time, relevant authorities banned all cameras from the cave. Now they kick you out if you get caught smuggling in glasses with a camera attached or any other clandestine device.

We had an hour drive to the cave, which gave us time to see a lot of Mennonite farms. Mennonites have recently colonized large parts of Central America and are using the land for industrial agriculture. I just read a NatGeo article recently about this phenomenon in Guatemala. The Mennonites wear traditional clothing, drive buggies with horses but use tractors, combines and chemicals produced by Monsanto for farming. That seems contradictory. There are tensions between the Mennonites and local populations for a number of reasons.

After we got back, Bill went swimming and I laid on the bed doing absolutely nothing, which was really nice. We’ve had early mornings, at least for me, and I’m sore from all the climbing I’ve been doing. It has cooled off this evening so I’m on the screened deck with a cup of tea and some chocolate while I do this blog post.

Tomorrow morning we are doing a cave tubing tour then heading to our second destination at Caye Caulker. We’ve done everything we wanted to do in the San Ignacio area so I’m looking forward to the next location on the beach.

Hopefully Bill will get some pictures of our cave adventure!