somewhere in the san ignacio cayo

so what's more fun than seeing temples used for human sacrifice? caves used for human sacrifice, of course. on monday, we joined a little group of 8* to head to the actun tunichil muknal, or "cave of the stone sepulcher**", discovered in 1992 by people who truly had balls of titanium, as you will see in a moment.

as i commented to the brother, this was ecotourism at its best, and possibly one of the only tourist attractions i've been to so far with no gift shop. that's really saying something, if you think about it. even the killing fields had a gift shop. back when i was doing my study abroad in beaufort, i took a class on ecotourism and sustainable development, and have since been dying to see whether praxis and theory really do converge, or if like so many other things the whole operation is already fatcats and neon signs. well, it seems like for once my cynicism was unwarranted -- our guide made a huge deal about taking only photographs/leaving only footprints, down to forbidding us from using sunscreen because of the dangers of it washing downstream into water used for crops and human consumption. my one small beef was that mayatour, the outfit that we used, was a little more of a large-scale operation than i thought it would be. still, all the guides were local, and do seem to be benefiting from the deal -- our guide was an active part of the academic community doing fieldwork in the caves, and had pretty much doctoral-level knowledge on what the heck was going on.

in the jungle

cave entrance. this picture really doesn't do justice to it. the water going into the cave is an almost surreal shade of blue, cold and deep.

so they warn you (a little bit) before hand that going in isn't really your typical tourist piece-of-cake, and you're like, ya sure, and then they're right. the cameras all go in a waterproof bag while you traverse the 0.5km to the dry chamber, which is something of a pity -- the wet chambers were eerie but spectacular, strangely alive as the scant light from the headlamps caught minerals sprinkled like glitter over the rocks and formations. the water level fluctuates by season, and at its deepest was chest high, sometimes very suddenly. narrow openings we could barely get through led into chambers 50 feet tall. it took a good hour, possibly more to navigate the 500 meters (although to be fair we did stop a fair amount for the guide to talk about everything from stalactite formation to mayan mythology). apparently the maya used to walk into this pitch blackness -- believing they were entering the underworld -- by the light of a single lit torch, something i can imagine was the very definition of No Fun At All.

rock formations in the dry chamber

oh, yea, and as i said in the beginning, human sacrifice:

spot the skull. creepy.

very creepy. also, overexposed, in more than one sense. wokka wokka.

anyway, next time you feel like you hate your job or your life, feel glad that at least you weren't brought into the "underworld" at the age of 11 to have your head bashed in.

one last pic and i'm out:



oh, 2 more things:

1. for the wikitravel page that we created like nerds, go here.

2. the brother's take on the experience.

* a yiddish woman from israel and her daughter who lives in manhattan(?), a strapping guy born in england and now residing in charlotte, NC, his girlfriend, and a middle-aged european couple who said more or less nothing at all.
** seriously, there was a mayan transliteration of 'sepulcher'?