Which was fine. We had to be ready to go at 7:50, where a shuttle picked us up and took us into San Ignacio to meet our tour guide whom I will refer to as Tour Guide, a small Mayan man about 40 with huge shins and glassy black hair. And smallest of small worlds, Anna again. She was taking the tour too. We packed into a van with a few girls from Canada, a couple from the Nederland's, and a Polish girl from New York. I asked Tour Guide a lot of questions about his job as an archaeologist and the field school he teaches for down here. He answered them, but I couldn't really tell if I was annoying him or not, so I stopped.
We drove into the park only 7 miles, but it took 45 minutes. The roads were badly pitted and we had to drive through a river at one point, passing an orange grove being harvested and some corn fields. When we were finally driven past the check point, we were told that we're not allowed to take our cameras past the parking lot and most of our stuff was left behind in the car.
We hiked about two miles through dense jungle, across three fairly large rivers up to our chests (or mine, anyway), and finally made it to the mouth of the cave. It was beautiful, stretching over our heads and into the sunlit canopy. The water was the crystal blue that only cave water seems to be, and shafts of light pierced through to the bottom. When we stepped in, it was only to our ankles, but it soon became clear that the bottom was a deep pool and we were all going to have to swim in.
Stolen from the internet!
We swam through and to the right, so far that I felt in serious danger of my water-logged hiking boots dragging me down to the bottom. Finally, solid ground came up beneath my feet. The water was still about shin high, but shin high I could handle.
As we hiked, the water level peaked and trothed from completely dry to neck level. You always had to have eyes up and down, watching for boulders in the water and stalactites overhead. Luckily we were wearing helmets with headlamps, because more than once I stood up very hard into some very sharp overhead rocks.
I was always at the front of the single file line, because I wanted to learn as much as I could. Tour Guide told us all about how caves were the entrances to the underworld in the Mayan religion, and how as the droughts became more and more damaging to their crops and way of life, they became more and more desperate. The Mayans did not like going into the caves. They were afraid, and believed that bats would fly in every time they entered to warn the Gods of their arrival. If they did not have a sufficient offering for trespassing on the God's turf, they would pay the price. The deeper they went, the more expensive the price. Therefore, most Mayans were high off their asses on hallucinogens and carrying gifts as well as torches when they did the same path we did. I can only imagine what a horrible trip that must have been.
About a half mile into the cave, in a pretty large cabin, Tour Guide came around and turned off all of our headlamps. He wanted us to see just how dark the inside of a cave is. And fuck yeah, it's dark. In fact, there is no way I could have seen a hand three inches from my face. There is literally nothing to see. When a hand grabbed mine, it took me a second to realize it was Tour Guide's hand. He kept talking, squeezing every now and again to emphasize his point. Okay, I thought. Weird, but harmless.
We turned our headlamps back on and continued into the cave. In a moment before the rest of the group caught up, Tour Guide told me holding his hand had made is heart beat so much faster that it turned his watch on in the dark. Uhh... But he continued to tell the group a story about hearing is own heart beat so loud in a cave once that he thought it was drumming and was so freaked out he left. I tried not to think too much about it.
Artifacts were always behind a bright orange line of tape on the floor, but I was surprised at how little was actually separating us from them. More than once I reached out to gingerly stroke the lip of a 1,500 year old pot. When we finally got to a large, internal cavern with a floor that looked like marshmallow cream, I looked down at my feet to see a human skull calcified to the floor. Tour Guide pointed out more human bones, so overgrown with crystal they were almost unrecognizable. The further back we got, the more human remains littered the ground. At one point, Tour Guide picked up and passed around a modified human tooth, filed down to sharp points on two ends, and still feeling very tooth-like.
We reached a part of the cave where we could only have socks on to continue. We shed our wet shoes and slipped into what was obviously a dry riverbed covered in broken pottery shards. We hiked up what would have been the falls to a very narrow opening. Tour Guide said we would each go one at a time to look. I was the second in, and he showed me the handholds to climb up and look over a boulder wedged between the narrow sides of the cave. On the other side lay a pile of small bones, a child, with a significantly small skull on top. The bones were covered in a fine layer of crystals, but still very recognizable. And very sad. It looked like his tiny body had just been dumped in the crevasse below to rot away in eternal silence.
I climbed down the boulder and started toward the opening to send the next person in, but Tour Guide grabbed me from behind and pulled me into a very awkward hug while kissing the back of my neck.
Standing a mile into a pitch black Mayan Cave in the middle of the Belizian jungle with the body of a child on one side of the boulder and getting accosted on the other, I wondered again at how strange life can be, and how extreme cultural differences can get. I was also forced to consider just how big a deal I wanted to make out of this. We did still need to get out of the cave, after all. In the spilt second I had to decide, my brain ended up going with a high pitched and slightly panicky sounding, "Oh, hugs!" before I high-tailed it back to the group. I stayed at or near the back for the rest of the trip.
The last stop of the cave was the famous Crystal Maiden, which we actually learned is the skeleton of a 17-year old boy who was the victim of human sacrifice. He was disemboweled, and several of his vertebrae were taken from his body. Sacrifice victims were also doped to the gills before they were killed, but it's hard to imagine he didn't suffer. His left hand is placed over his stomach as if in pain and his right is over his head as if reaching for something.
Afterward, the hike out went much faster, and when we reached the parking lot we were given lunch and a beer. We came back to the hotel where Coston read and I entertained the youngest child of a weird couple from Seattle. He made me lots of origami, and told me about his book of sea monsters.
Tomorrow we're hitting the local market in the morning, and hiking some Mayan ruins in the afternoon. Sunday, more caves. Caves really are so amazing.
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