Last night I came to the conclusion that the awesomeness of
what I’m doing is inversely related to the amount of blogging I do. Case in
point: it’s been over a week since the coolest adventure of my life and I’m
just now sending it out for your perusal.
When I say coolest I mean that literally; it all began with
a jump into frigid water that, by the feel of it, hadn’t felt sunlight since
the ancient Mayans waded through it. Luckily, summers in Marshfield had
prepared me for such a situation, and I recovered quickly from the chill. This icy
H20 sits at the mouth of Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM), the three-mile long cave
system located in San Ignacio, Cayo District.
So into the cave I went, in all my helmet-, headlight-, and
tankini-clad glory. After only the first few yards of clambering for footholds
and sliding down craggy rocks, spelunking had already become my new favorite
activity (overtaking sitting on a dock and eating queso). As we went deeper and
deeper into the cave, the darkness became something I could actually feel. We
stopped at one point and everyone turned off their headlights, engulfing us in
the thickest blackness I have ever experienced. Not being able to see my hand
an inch from my face became quickly disorienting, and gave me a sliver of understanding
about the Mayan customs. The ancient Mayans used to come into the cave for
rituals, ingest some type of hallucinogen, extinguish their torches, and listen
to the voices that spoke to them in the darkness. Something tells me, however,
that you would start hearing voices even without the aid of drugs; it was an
extremely primordial and spooky place. We continued the rest of our trek taking
advantage of our 21st century battery packs, shining our lights on
the broken pottery and human skeletons that give a calcified history of those
who braved the cave before us. The whole tour took approximately three hours,
but time could have easily stood still as we squeezed our way through the maze
of the Mayan underworld.
I hiked back to the bus laden with soggy sneakers, a feeling
of having experienced history firsthand, and an ardent desire to find a million
more entrances to the cavernous world beneath us.
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