Central America Adventure Peace be the Journey

From Caye Caulker, we hitched a ride with some locals to San Ignacio to go to the Actun Tunichil Muchnal Cave.  This is a pretty intense tour of a newly discovered Mayan sacrificial site, set deep inside a spooky cave.  In Belize 95% of caves (and there are hundreds) have some artifacts left over from the Mayan culture as caves where thought to be the gateway to the 9 levels of the underworld.  We followed our Garifuna guide, headlamps and all, as he led us into the river and through the cave.  We were swimming, climbing, slipping, squirming and squeezing our way through stalagmites and stalagtites for 2 hours before we reached the artifacts.  Sometimes we were going through spaces so small that only our neck and heads would fit while the rest of our body was submerged in water.  Quite an adventure.  The artifacts themselves were haunting as well.  You had to watch your step as to not crush pottery left over from thousands of years ago. The culmination of the trek through the cave was a crystallized skeleton of a woman and a young boy.