Day 22 01.08.15
I started the day off with a yummy breakfast burrito, bought straight from the place where all the locals get their breakfast or at least their burritos, tacos, quesadillas or enchiladas. It was great and relatively cheap too! With a bit of orange juice that made a great start into my day.
Energised we met up at the place where the tour take us to the ATM cave. The ATM cave, (or the Actun Tunichil Muknal cave as the Mayans would call it), is a cave that has been in use for hundreds of years for the Mayan culture, and now has been turned into a tourist attraction.
We drove up to the cave over first somewhat paved streets, and then turned to take a dirt road up to the start of the hike to the entrance of the cave. Even though the transportation was quite comfortable and even had air conditioning, the ride was quite bumpy, and catching up on some sleep was rather uncomfortable. Nevertheless, we got to the meeting point in one piece and that is all that counts.
We got presented our gear, a helmet and a flashlight / torch attached to it. After that we started marching along enjoying the little stroll of about 2 kilometres, crossing a total of 3 rivers, ranging from wading through ankle-deep water, to nearly swimming part of the way as it got too deep. We reached the next gathering point before entering the cave and dropped our waters and insect repellents there and started off into the cave.
Even just the entrance to the cave was impressive. You could find a blue water cave pool guarding the entrance of the cave. And sure did it guard its cave. The water temperature was freezing! We swam about 20 meters and then took off into the cave. Getting into the cave was a mixture of climbing over rocks, wading through water, pressing through tight cave passageways and admiring the geological part of it all. At one point the rocks got so close together, that the locals call the passageway “the guillotine”, where two cuttingly sharp rock edges are aligned in such a way, that the only way to pass through is to tilt your head to the side, and solely move along like a short game of buzz wire - if you touch the rock, it will hurt. After that it was just a bit of climbing and wading and climbing and wading, until we got to a part of the cave that had much higher ceilings. These opened up the view to some impressive stalactites and stalagmites that had formed over thousands of years and were still just dripping away.
Some had developed with special minerals causing the formations to shimmer and glitter when shown on with a torch or sported different colours such as black, orange, white or a light blue. At one point our guide stopped to show us how a black light laser could leave behind different markings on rocks. It looked like the rock had some sort of light memory. One of the teachers from our group however guessed that it had something to do with the human eye not really adjusting well to the darkness and to the blue colour from the laser on the white glittery stone. Anyway, for us it looked like plain magic :). Some of the rock formations were so developed that they were just massive, humongous stalactites that were formed not through dripping water but through cascades and cascades of water that would flow through the cave after heavy rainfall. Some of the stalagmites and stalactites even conjoined in certain places to become columns, also quite an impressive site!
So we wondered and wondered through the cave, turning off our torches every once in a while to experience the eeriness of the cave when it is engulfed in complete darkness and to get a feel of how the Mayans might have felt coming into the cave. The Mayans would have entered using pine wood torches and the flickering of their lights will have added to their experience. We never got that exact feeling, as our torches didn’t produce a moving light, but more of a steady one to observe the geological formations better. I can’t imagine how afraid some of the Mayans must have felt wading through water and seeing something move around everywhere. Back in the days the Mayans experienced 3 major draughts that hit their agriculture, hunting and therefore livelihood hard. They therefore turned to religion and with that came the sacrifices. The Mayans believe that there are 3 entities that define the life of a person. One is Earth, with the ground, the corn and just normal agriculture, one is the Heaven or skies, with the stars, the moon and the sun, and the last one is the underworld equivalent to hell, where the dead go through several steps to then return to the heavens. Unlike in other cultures caves represent the holy places forming passageways between the underworld and the earth, leaving space for their gods to live, so that they could worship them at these sacred places. As from the dead comes life, the caves are considered as the wombs of the earth. So as the Mayans faced these draughts they resolved to religion and made offerings to their gods in the caves. Only designated priests could come into these caves and perform their rituals. They would drug themselves to be closer to their gods, enter the caves, see flickering lights, have hallucinations, and pray to their gods and making them offerings to stop the draught and have the water return that was what was keeping the Mayan civilisation going. As these draughts continued, the rituals the Mayans did would increase in intensity.
They would bring in different offerings such as pottery, jewellery, arrowheads, etc. to sacrifice the soul of these inanimate objects to please the gods and give them presents in the underworld. In order to do this, the Mayans made specific pottery that was then blessed and brought into the cave.
The pottery was then used in their ritual and then parts of the pottery was broken, either just a small piece was broken off or the pottery was completely smashed, in order to release the soul of the pottery, and also terminating the role that was given to the pottery for that ritual. The termination of these processes were really important to the Mayans, as for them their tree of life and their three stages of life (heaven, earth and the underworld) were all related, in order for souls to move from one to the other, their time in one stage had to be terminated. The draught still didn’t stop and so they went to more and more radical rituals such as sacrificing animals or even humans. In the cave they found remains of a turtle shell, bones of a baby jaguar and some monkey bones too. These animals were brought into the cave, were part of the ritual and then killed right there and then, releasing their souls to the underworld or the heavens. The same happened with the humans. These must have been some important people in the Mayan culture, as at this point the draught was getting quite severe, and a proper sacrifice is only one that you would miss in order to obtain something greater. In the cave even the purest of all sacrifices was found - little skeletons of babies.
At one point we got to a couple of rocks in the middle of the cave stream onto which we climbed to reach a part of the cave that was higher up. Here we took off our shoes and entered in the main cave in our socks. This part of the cave was where all the rituals were held. No other Mayan artefacts were found further into the cave, but most of them accumulated in this higher part of the cave. The cave is absolutely enormous. It is basically like a geological cathedral, filled with broken pottery and skeletons. Everywhere you go you have to watch your step as to not step onto archaeological findings. Our guide also pointed out to us, that in a drugged state, with the intention of seeing their gods, the shadows would have looked like gods flickering in their torchlights. Screaming babies, whistles and drums add to this trance and intensify the ritual. One can only imagine how these rituals took place in these sacred Mayan halls.We were lucky as we didn’t meet many groups along the way, and so only on our way back out we saw some groups, making it quite an individual tour for us. We waded and climbed back out of the cave, and took the same hike back to the vans as on our way to the caves.
Here we enjoyed some lunch – some beans and rice with lovely chicken and coleslaw. On our way back to San Ignacio everyone fell into a well-rewarded sleep and got off the van ready for some drinks.I quickly threw in some laundry and got ready for dinner, writing a bit of my blog in the meantime. For dinner we went to a Belizean place, since this was our last night here, and I had some pork chops with rice and stewed beans with some salad.
It was really nice, and even though I opted for an early night to pack and get some blog writing in, it was a good way to end our lovely trip through Belize. I have really enjoyed Belize the people seem very laid back. However, they do do a lot of swearing throughout their whole day, sometimes making them not seem too friendly or very hot headed at times. Especially Caye Caulker was a highlight, which I thoroughly enjoyed and will cherish for a long long time.
