Las Marías makes the best coffee in Central America. I rounded out my morning cup with a PB&J sandwich and a pack of M&Ms.
On the front porch I met up with three jóvenes and our guía for a tour of Las Marías’ private cave called K’an Ba. Since it’s not commercial it has no lights or stalactites named after Disney characters. The cave is actually a channel for a river, so I decided against bringing my camera. (My other camera, the one that takes movies, is really most sincerely dead.) But here’s a picture of the cave’s mouth.
Julio, our guide who is Q’eqchi’ Maya, gave each of us a slender candle and the instruction to step into the water, which immediately started to get deep. “Just wait till it gets to your nuts,” called the guy in front of us. Even nutless I found it extremely cold. Seconds later we were neck-deep and doing our first one-handed swim, candles aloft, through winding four-foot-wide corridors. In the bowels of the black cave we waded through rapids, climbed a slippery, handmade ladder next to a fifteen-foot waterfall, slid down mud banks and scrambled over jumbles of rocks. It was a blast.
In the lead, Julio kept belting out strange chants and whoops. I don’t know if it was in fun or for a more mystical reason, but the other three joined in. At one point the guy with nuts crouched down and started to sway around the cave floor on all fours like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. We paused at a bank of clay where Julio dug out a fistful and gave each of us a little. In flickering light I shaped a most excellent mud pig and set it on a subterranean altar with objects that others had made. I noticed an odd sensation, almost as though someone was throwing globs of clay at me over and over. It was Julio. I got him back. Next thing I knew, everyone was decorating themselves with clay designs.
It’s important when in a rocky cave to know your derecha from your izquierda. If I had, I would have understood the commands about where to swim and thus avoided smashing my knee on a submerged rock. I’m glad there aren’t sharks in this water or they would have coming galloping, as sharks are wont to do.
The grand finale of our gruta (aka cueva) adventure was a two-kilometer float down the cold, green Rio Cahabón, into which the water from K’an Ba feeds. As Julio and I drifted we used Spanish to teach each other words in our respective languages. My mouth didn’t want to cooperate on the gutturals and mid-syllable pauses of Mayan language, and he chuckled at my attempts.
For variety, I had a quick PB&J sandwich for lunch, followed by a pack of M&Ms, and then started hiking across the river and up the hill to Semuc Champey. It is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever, ever seen. I kept gasping in disbelief as I approached the shelves of emerald pools. My pictures can’t even begin to capture the magic of the place; you’ll have to take my word for it.
At first glance, this stretch looks simply like a wide, slow spot in the river. Water tiptoes downhill in demure little steps. But there’s more than meets the eye. Unseen until you go a few hundred meters upriver, a frightening volume of water plunges into a hole and runs unseen under the pools until it bursts out the other end. Not a good place to slip. Some people haven’t lived to regret it. The first picture shows the view looking upriver, and the second facing the other way, into the hole.
So the pools on top aren’t fed by so much by the river proper as by creeks running down the canyon walls.
A sixty-something park employee named Antonio offered to guide me to a good viewpoint. There, I sat entranced by the water for a while until I heard him ask in Spanish, “How much did your watch cost?” Though startled, I mumbled out a solid preschool-level reply: “My watch? How much it costs? It was my father’s. When he died my mother gives it to me.” Aren’t you impressed with my fluency? And I’m getting better at working around words I don’t know. Unable to summon the word for “breath” I came up with “wind from the mouth.” “News” became “things in the newspaper.”
Here’s a panoramic view of Semuc Champey from the mirador, access to which required a grueling half-hour climb, as you can imagine. While struggling up the wet slope, left knee cracking and right Achilles tendon aching with every step, I realized I’d better do more trips like this while I still can.
I hiked back to Las Marías, gathered my things and hung out near the side of the tiny road, waiting for a truck on which to grab a ride to Lanquín. I ate M&Ms while I waited.
A naked boy about eight years old walked past me, a bright red jug of water on his shoulder. An hour later a truck appeared, and I climbed in back with two local guys. They stood, I sat, and we all bounced our way to Lanquín. I tried to snap pictures of the amazing scenery, without success.
The truck dumped me in town and I walked a quarter mile down the road, dropped my stuff at a hotel and ran to the Grutas de Lanquín further down the road.
You have to get to the caves before closing time at 6:00 if you want to see the mass exodus of bats at dusk. With minutes to spare, I settled onto a bat-guano coated ledge inside the narrow mouth of the cave.
Right on schedule, a smattering of bats (a battering of smats?) flew within a foot of my face, and then a score, and then hundreds. My camera didn’t want to cooperate but I fooled it into taking these.
As it happens, there was no need for the bats to leave the cave, since all the mosquitoes they could ever want for dinner were right there on my legs. However, I didn’t know that at the time. Only an hour later in my stark room did their nasty, itchy little poison start to do its work. My remaining M&Ms did little to soothe my discomfort. Neither did the familiar sound that soon registered in my consciousness as that of another evangelical revival. If there was a God, s/he wouldn’t let mosquitoes and electric revivals happen.
What conceivable purpose can mosquito venom possibly serve?
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