5:56pm
Today we went on the Actun Tunichil Muknal cave tour, and it was nothing short of incredible. We went through the Hun Chi’ik Tours company, who we were impressed with from cave tubing yesterday. Unlike yesterday, today we were not the only people on our tour. An adveturous couple from Hawaii in their late 50's named Kellie and Liz joined us. When we got back from cave tubing yesterday, they were actually there in the park enjoying a bottle of wine, chatting with our driver. They travel all over the world, and had some very interesting stories to tell. However, this story is about caving, and not them.
The requirements for this tour were as follows:
1. Bring a spare dry sent of clothes to change into afterwards.
2. Bring socks.
The drive to our destination was about an hour, and included driving 7 miles on a rugged gravel "road." On this "road," we had to drive over a river twice, which reminded me of the Unviersal Studios tour where you go through the parting of the red sea on a train.
When we got there, we started on a 45 minute hike to the cave entrance, which included wading through the Roaring Creek river three separate times, one of them being up about halfway to our knees.
When we got to the mouth of the cave, we put on our helmets and lights, got into the pool, and swam into the mouth of the cave.
(Note, this isn't us swimming into the cave. We didn't get any good shots of the cave entrance, so I snagged this from a google search)
Inside was absolutely stunning. There were tons of natural rock formations everywhere. The entire cave system is always flooded with water, but most of the time it was just up to our ankles. There were a few places it was up to our waists, and a couple of spots deep enough that we had to swim across. The goal of the hike is that when we got deep enough into the cave, we did some light climbing up some rock walls, tour our shoes off, and entered a set of chambers almost completely preserved in calcification, fillwed with Mayan artifacts, from pottery to bones (from human sacrifices likely), and finally one completely in tact (preserved female skeleton known as the Crystal Maiden (who was erie, yet beautiful at the same time). This is the point where it was necessary to have socks. I got two different explanations as to why we needed socks, and I'm not sure which was true. One was simple, which was that since we had to take our shoes off, having socks on would give us a small amount of protection against walking on bare rocks. The other was that they wanted to protect the cave as much as possible from the oils in our skin which could have an effect on the rocks we were walking on.
The Crystal Maiden (Once again, taken from google because none of ours turned out)
At this point, we back-tracked out of the cave (I think taking some shortcuts because going back only took about 20 minutes). We entered the cave around 10:30am, and got back to the mouth of the cave around 1pm, spending close to 2.5 hours underground. At this point we had some bagged lunches we brought with us (some people's got invaded by ants, but mine seemed to be fine), then hit the 45 minute hike back to t our van. When we got there, our driver was waiting for us with freshly cut watermelon, pineapple (I think, I didn't actually have any), chips and salsa. After the refreshing snack, we changed into our spare dry cloths, got in the van, and headed back to Trek Stop. Having left at about 7:45am, we got back at 4:30pm. I can't stress enough how incredible this experience was!!! With two positive esperiences with the company, we are hiring Hun Chi’ik Tours again tomorrow to be our guides for our tour of Tikal in Guatemala. I can't wait!!! Well, I'm wrapping this up at about 10:53pm, and I think I might be calling it a night. 6am will get here too soon, and I want to be well rested for tomorrow. After Tikal, we spend one last night at Trek Stop, then head to San Pedro for some much-needed (after 4 days of compost toilets and rain-water showers) touristy resort-style relaxation.
Goodnight me,
Ryan
2 comments:
Both reasons for the socks are valid. Mammoth caves asks you not to touch the rocks so you don't leave your grease. People do it anyway, of course.
Ryan:
The cave trip sounds like the most spectacular adventure of your trip so far. I'm very impressed that you met a couple my age on this trip. I don't know that I could handle everything you did on this day.
You were very wise to stick with the same Touring Company on all of these trips. It sounds like they really give their customers their money's worth.
Dad
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