Sunday, April 22, 2012

Spelunking


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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