San Ignacio lies just near the western border of Belize and Guatemala up in the hills. Our tour guide hails from Cayo as it is locally known so we were lucky enough to be treated to dinner at his grandfather’s house, along with a large slice of his extended family and the resulting party was a great night. First though was exploring the ATM cave…
The Actun Tunichil Muknal cave is reached after an hour or so drive out of San Ignacio, some of it over miles of bouncy rutted gravel road through corn and bean farms tended by the local Mennonites. Then a pleasant hike through lush jungle with three river crossings where I managed to fall over twice on the moss covered rocks. At the entrance we stowed lunch and donned helmets and head lamps before descending into the pool to swim into the darkness.
For the next four hours we crawled, swam, shimmied, slid, climbed, scrambled, waded and at times barely scraped through the cave system reaching 600 metres into its 5 km depths. Along the route we encountered huge chambers billowing out above us after we squeezed through a narrow crack between the limestone. Crystals shimmered in the feeble light of our lamps, shining back at us from curves on the curtains of stalactites spearing down from above. It was my first adventurous caving experience and it was one of the most amazing experiences of this trip to date.
As we made our way to the furthest reaches of our journey we did our best mountain goat impressions climbing up a large rock onto a ledge and taking off our shoes to continue in socks into the dry chamber. This opened up into a diorama of Mayan history as Erin, our guide, shone his torch over countless scenes of sacrifices to gods. Pottery fragments in their original positions lie in piles, purposely broken after they had done their job in each ritual, in order to let the spirit out. Food was cooked as sacrifice to the corn god, fire pits with ash and the three stones, along with black smoke marks on the walls from fire torches show evidence of this.
Baby skeletons, of about 4-6 months of age were found in another chamber and it’s believed these were sacrifices to the rain god. A baby’s cry was the offering to the god so the more the baby suffered, the more the baby cried and the greater the scale of the sacrifice to appease the god. Babies were left to cry till they died.
Skulls showing the features of nobles are also among the artifacts. The skulls of noble born babies were deformed with boards bound to their heads to give them taller foreheads and from the profile, show an ear of corn. Teeth were also filed to points and drilled to insert pieces of jade. Usually captured in war and sacrificed to the gods by the winning “tribe”, a noble brought a high price in rituals. Only important nobles, royals, shamans etc made the journey into the cave for rituals and usually after days of cleansing rituals which would bring on a hallucinogenic state…interesting conditions to enter a dark cave. You’d want to hope you didn’t drop the flame torch in the water on the way, or your heavy pot with offerings while scampering over the terrain and all while passing formations that they believed were for the fertility god since they exactly resemble genitalia and drip with water. I’m so glad I’m not a noble born Mayan. About as close as we’ll ever get is the red ochre face paint we were decorated with by Erin rubbing two stones together.
Up the top of a decidedly non-Mayan metal ladder, through into a cramped crawl space were the final two skeletons, one in a pile of bones with a skull on top…that was broken by some tourist’s camera (and is the reason why I have no photos – no camera allowed anymore). The other skeleton is complete, lies on its back with the right arm up above the head, spine broken in the middle and feet splayed outwards. Theories come and go, girl or boy, probably young teens, spine broken to paralyze before cutting out the still beating heart to show the victim just as their last breaths leave them. As the dried pools used to hold water the bones are completely calcified and the crystals shimmer in the torch light. It’s an eerie, silent and sombre atmosphere.
We took a slightly different route back to the entrance which included going neck deep, dropping your right shoulder down, turning your head to look over your left shoulder and crabbing backwards to get through the crevasse.
Back into the daylight and lunch was delicious before the hike back out to the van, and I again fell into the water on the river crossings. Rum punch in plastic cups on the bumpy road home was hilarious too.
