Belize Because I Can 1: First Day and Actun Tunichil Muknal

A few months ago I found out that I had two free weeks between one phase of my job and another.  Technically I was still expected to show up, but I would have nothing to do.

So I said fuck it, used all my vacation time, and bought a ticket to Belize.

Why Belize?  A few cool sights, a few nice beaches, some cool Mayan ruins, and a cheap-ish plane ticket.  Obviously.

All planes to Belize go through Houston, except that now a few go through Denver.  It was a red eye flight to Houston which sucked, and meant that I would get to Belize both jet lagged and ridiculously tired.  An ideal situation under which to begin a journey, really.

As the plane descended into the Belize airport, lowering itself incrementally through the sugarless cotton candy clouds, I noticed on the landscape a river so long dried that a road had been built through it, running right over its bed, permanently disturbing its slumber.  The plane descended quickly, as though diving into the river that bordered the airport, missing the water at the final moment, its belly almost tickled by the palm trees at the water’s edge, civilization in the form of a runway emerging suddenly, thankfully, from the jungle.

I was immediately assaulted by the oppressive weight of the air.  The airport in Belize City was small and dingy, with few windows at customs and a confusing line for declaring goods.  There was one main line and then another guy inspecting people.  He had no one and the line was long so I went over to him and he started yelling at me “What are you doing?  Why are you here?” pointing at something written on my paper, giving no pause or time for an answer.  He sent me over to have my bags inspected.  The girl there was nice and said “I don’t even know why he sent you here.  You can go,” without digging through my stuff. 

After I changed into more weather appropriate clothing (shorts and sandals) I went outside, hoping to find a cheap way to get to the bus station.  The only way to get there was a $25 taxi, which I didn’t want to pay for.  So I went up to drivers waiting for people, people with vans and mini buses, and asked if they had extra space and were going that way.  The second guy I asked offered to take me for free, and wouldn’t take any money, which was amazing.  He and his female business partner just kept saying they wanted to help me.  So I basically hitchhiked for free to the bus station where I now know I waited too long to catch my bus going west to the jungles near San Ignacio.  I missed a few buses going that way because I didn’t ask and thought that a bus would come saying “San Ignacio” but instead they said “Benque”.   The city buses were colorfully painted old school buses, which was kind of cool.  I somehow didn’t take two buses that would’ve gotten me to San Ignacio fairly quickly and instead waited two hours for the slowest bus.  Clever girl. 

And yet once I finally got onto the bus, I found the journey had still only just begun.  I had managed to miss the express and so the bus stopped at every station, and also at various points along the side of the only road.  The woman I was sitting next to asked me to hold a plastic bag filled with food while she shuffled around to get her bus fare (a 3 hour trip cost only $4 US) and then either forgot about it or took advantage of my being too shy to say anything and I ended up holding her food for the first hour.

But not everyone was rude.  Another woman helped me out the whole ride long by pointing out various seats I could switch to so I could stay out of the sun.  “You’re the only one on this bus gonna burn honey” was her reasoning, which was quite nice of her to consider.  All the Belizeans I met were extremely kind.  The bus driver and attendant even spent 10 minutes helping an old woman off the bus and to her door.  Quite kind.

As we drove we passed several controlled burns, land left behind charred with only the strongest trees still standing tall.  The flames approached the road but kept their distance, a few feet of grass interrupted by a ditch all that separated us from the fingers of flame greedily reaching toward the air, as if, with enough oxygen, they could set the whole blue thing alight.  Slash and burn agriculture is still big in some areas of the world, if more than a bit shortsighted. 

We also passed some pre-teen boys riding horses.  Some rode tandem, some trotted, and some were shirtless.  But every one of them was united by a seemingly boundless self-assurance, as if the place in the world where they best belonged was on their horses.

The ride, though interesting, was punishingly long, seemingly without end, until finally we arrived in San Ignacio, one of the last towns before the border with Belize.  It was a new kind of hot.  I, who have lived in Bangkok for a year and spent many nights with nothing but a fan, who came from Portland where the weather was in the mid-90s a mere month before, was dying. 

I stayed that first night at a hotel called Casa Blanca.  Mistake.  Too expensive and no air flow.  I finally broke down and dropped $15 on my room’s air conditioning remote, which effectively doubled the price of my room.  Everything here is more expensive than I’d anticipated.  I’m too accustomed to SE Asia prices for those sorts of things.  Day trips for the places I wanted to see in Guatemala would have cost $270 not including accommodation for the night between the two trips, or dinner either night.  I decided to do it all myself.

More on that later. 

I’ve decided that this trip is going to be too long for one entry as I would like to be a bit detailed for once.  This first entry is about that first night and then the first day trip I took while in Belize, a few days later.  I’ll write another entry about the Mayan ruins I visited both in Belize and Guatemala, and a third entry (that will be much shorter, I’m sure) about the days I spent laying on beaches.  Relaxing, yes, but eventful and blog worthy, not so much.

The first trip I took in Belize was a day trip I took with a few people I met at my second hotel, the Old House Hostel in San Ignacio.  I opted to stay there because it was far cheaper than Casa Blanca, and also because hostels are always good places to meet people.  I met Alice and James that first night, a young British couple traveling South America together.  They had already booked a trip to see Actun Tunichil Muknal, known locally as ATM, a cave that was the site of many Mayan rituals and sacrifices.  It was at the top of my list and a must-see for me, so I went to the travel agency and added myself to the trip.  Then the three of us went to the grocery store and bought what we needed to make dinner, pasta with cheese.

I did most of the cooking while talking to a girl from Canada who was doing an internship at the hostel.  Alice helped a bit, but not too much.  Then the three of us ate at the large table in the central room of the hostel.  Soon after other also started eating and we befriended three others, all of whom were travelling alone.  Ian was from Switzerland, Angelica was from the Czech Republic, and Julia was from Arizona.  Julia and I hit it off immediately and we found out that she was also going to ATM the next day, though with a different tour company.  We kept talking about our trip plans and discovered that we basically wanted to do all the same things, had already done the same things, and were on the same flight home.

My new travel partner in place, I was ready to take on the caves.

The first thing they had told me when I signed up the night before was that there were no cameras allowed, and that we wouldn’t need sunscreen or bug spray, and were in fact deterred from wearing it as it would wash off in the caves and the chemicals could harm some of the artifacts and rock.  Cameras weren’t allowed because a few years ago a tourist had dropped his camera onto a skull and left a huge hole in it.  Instead the company would send us some photos from past trips afterward.  We met the other people on our tour and set off for the cave.

Our guides were two funny guys, one of whom spoke more clear English than the other.  The language of Belize is officially English, but they really speak mostly Kriol.  It’s based on English, with some Spanish and a little slang thrown in for good measure.  I made a note to pick that guide so that I would get more out of the experience, but people in the other group enjoyed the trip greatly as well.  The final drive took us through a valley where tens of thousands of Mayans once lived.  The Menonite population living in Belize (weird, I know, but there are a lot of them) had bought up the land intending to plant there, only to accidentally run over many ruins with their farming equipment.  Eventually they just planted orchards and called it a day.

Once we arrived, we first had to hike through the jungle for a while.  Our guide pointed out a jaguar paw print along the path, though I didn’t really buy that as there were too many shoe prints for it to be really believable.  However, I did hear sounds that a guide at a later trip told me were jaguar noises in the jungle.  Apparently there are a decent number of them remaining in Belize, though I didn’t get to see any.  We had to wade across the same river three times to get to the cave, but it was well worth the trek.

The river itself emanated from the cave, and we had to wade in to get to the mouth of the cave, where the depth made swimming necessary to get further in.  The cold water was a welcome break from the heat, and at first we were all glad of it.  

 

Of course we were all a bit cold by the end (the cave has a constant temperature of 21 Celcius, which helps preserve its treasures).   The swim was short, as the water’s depth became more manageable a little way into the cave.  From there we waded and clambored over rocks, squeezing ourselves through small crevices and holes to get further back into the depths.  

At one point there had been a cave in, which provided the last natural light before we had to switch on our headlamps.  Our guide rearranged us so that the couples were in the back and the single women in the front.  I was the only woman alone under the age of 50, and as such our guide took a strong liking to me, calling me “my peach” and talking about how he never wanted to stop holding my hand as he helped me over rocks.  By the end he was talking about buying me my first Belizean beer over dinner that night (I declined politely).  He showed us how to determine what was present in the water and rocks along the way, from iron and magnesium to calcium and sulfur.  He showed us various rock formations and how to tell where the high water line was.  

We walked through a gigantic cavern, stepping on the outside edges of what used to be pools but were now merely dips in the rock.

Basically, it was an average cave trip in the beginning.

Then we got to the first of the artifacts.  There were two rocks standing tall from the top of the rock formations making up the walls of the cave.  When one wall dipped back and provided a high up flat spot, the two rocks stood up tall, one with perfectly smooth edges and the other with jagged edges.  The smooth edged rock was meant to represent obsidian, which is a volcanic stone the Mayans used in their blood-letting rituals.  The jagged edged rock was representative of a sting ray’s tail, which they also used for blood-letting.

Just past that we came to a large rock that blocked most of the path.  Just next to it, tucked partway into a crevice in the wall, was a wolf spider.  Our guide took us to the side of the rock and showed us how to climb on top of it.  Once we got up onto the rocks above us, we took off our shoes (the tour provided crocs to wear) and proceeded barefoot or in socks, to preserve the pathways, which undoubtedly had pottery buried beneath.  Just after taking off my shoes I found a scorpion spider by almost stepping on it.  Good thing I’m not scared of spiders.

We walked into a large cavern and everywhere we looked there was pottery.  Some of it was almost entirely whole, some of it was shattered into pieces so small they would seem impossible to piece back together.  Often the mouth of the pot remained intact.  These pots had once been filled with wine, beer, water, food, or even blood as sacrifices to the gods of the underworld.

The Mayans had a large number of Gods, some of whom were from the Upper World (Heaven), some from the middle world (Earth) and others from the Underworld (hell).  The ceiba tree, sacred to the Mayas, was supposed to connect the three worlds, with them believing that stalactites were the roots of the trees, which carried messages up the trunk and through the branches to the sky.  The sacrifices in this cave were made to one or many of the Underworld Gods, which was why they were left underground.  The prevailing theory is that they were for Chaak, the god of rain.  Many archaeologists believe that a drought contributed to the end of the Mayan civilization, and that the people came to this cave to pray for a rain that would save them.

There were also some stalagmites that they had formed to look like their gods, particularly like Ixchel, their jaguar goddess of medicine and midwifery.  They would sit at her feet, light fires, and get drunk or do mushrooms and perform rituals to her honor. 

Farther back even, was evidence of human sacrifice.  There were several skeletons and skulls that existed either in total or in part.  Some showed evidence of being bound and left to die, others had been dumped into the water that had once flowed.  The end of the cave was a complete skeleton, of indeterminate gender, whose rib cage had been ripped open and back broken, a sign of human sacrifice.

On the way out, once we were back in the water and off the rocks, our guide had us turn off all our headlights and walk through the water holding hands in a line in the pitch black, so dark there was no adjusting your eyes.  We all walked along following our guide, which I noted took a lot of trust.  “Are you saying you trust me?” He asked.  “I’m saying you didn’t give me a choice,” I replied sending titters down the entire line.  When we turned our lights back on we turned them red, rendering everything a night vision look straight out of The Descent. 

The way home was fast, and Julia beat us there, though we’d seen her often in the cave.  She and I then changed and walked to a cemetery I had seen on the road into town.  The graves were all above ground and brightly painted, blues, pinks, teals, and reds everywhere.  

We took some photos and got to know each other a little better, then headed off to eat dinner at a local spot her guide had recommended.  While eating I realized that while I knew a decent amount about her life, family, and education, I had yet to ask her name.  She only knew mine because she’d seen it written on my water bottle.  I only knew hers because over dinner she included it in a story.  I’ve noticed that happens often when traveling abroad.  Other things are more important because this is not a person you will see again after leaving their side.  The only thing that matters for that relationship is the moment you’re in, the story you’re telling, the ones you’re living.  Names and dates and personal histories won’t matter once you’ve separated.