| « Previous | Home | Next » | actun tunichil muknal 23 March, 2007 |
 ‹em>photo: david lindley if i thought that the canoeing through the caves had been fun, it was nothing compared to the next day when we went caving at actun tunichil muknal - commonly known throughout the area as ATM. i only had with me a small point and shoot in a waterproof housing which produced pretty awful photos, but if you want to see what it was like down there then please follow the link here where there are five photos posted. sue and i had never done anything remotely like caving previously, so it was a certain amount of trepidation that we decided to make the trip - actually it took a little bit of hard bargaining at the time to get sue involved; the alternative being a day beside a very nice pool with two for the price of one margueritas - however we felt that it would possibly be the one unforgettable experience of the trip and so we decided to go for it. the day started with a similarly bumpy ride out through farmland as the day before to reach the limestone hills behind san ignacio. eventually we reached a clearing in the trees where we started a 45 minute hike through the forest to reach the caves. the hike itself was an experience in that we had to ford three fairly rapidly flowing rivers along the way and at one stage we were struck by an overwhelming musky smell that, our guide explained, was from a boa constrictor that must have recently passed by. we reached a clearing where we ate an early lunch (we would be underground for over 4 hours) and were issued our miner's helmets and given a safety spiel in no uncertain terms by our obviously ex-military guide. he also gave us a little of the history: the caves were only discovered in the 1970's and not really explored to any degree till 1991; he being one of the first people to open them up with the archaeologists. going in to the cave we had to scramble down a bank and plunge into the cold waters that emerged from the mouth of the cave; swimming for 20 metres into the dark behind before climbing a shallow bank within - it was only at this point that i wondered whether we were doing the sensible thing going in there; there was a strong sense of being swallowed by the earth. from that point though there was little time to think about things as we had to scramble, wade, squeeze, swim, duck and climb though the network of natural features we faced, all at the same time surrounded by a dense, inky blackness penetrated only by the noise of rushing water and the occasional soft flutter of bats. after 30 minutes or so of this activity we hauled our wet bodies up a series of boulders and rested for a while: it would be dry going from now on and, as we would be walking amongst religious artifacts, we had to remove our footwear and just wear socks (and pants of course). heading further in we soon started to come across broken pots that had apparently laid there for up to a thousand years. all were damaged to some degree; the mayans believed that everything had a spirit and hence, once the pot was used, they would break it to release the spirit within. it was fascinating to hear that these had at some stage been used in sacred rituals and that they probably held water as some kind of appeal to chac, the rain god. a little further on we came across our first skull. calcified solidly into the rock around, you could clearly make out a depression where the person had been dispatched with a kind of stone axe/hammer. it appears that a number of human sacrifices were made here; marking out these caves as an important religious place to the mayans who perhaps used these sacrifices to appease the gods and bring rain. in total the remains of 14 people have been found: 7 adults and 7 children, all under the age of five. finally, and after climbing an extremely handy mayan aluminium ladder, we got to the limit of the permitted access into the caves, marked by the remains of a 14 year old girl, possibly sacrificed up to 1000 years ago. The mayan name given to these caves - actun tunichil muknal – means “cave of the stone sepulcher”, after this girl whose life ended so suddenly all of those years ago. from here we had to return to the entrance by the same route as we entered, and i have to admit that when we (literally) saw the light at the end of the tunnel, i was just so disappointed that it was over. if i could have gone back in there and then i would have; it was just one of the most memorable experiences of my life. listening to: 6 underground ~ sneaker pimps | |
|
Posted by davidlindley Archived under: belize, most commented |
Permalink | Comment (55) |
