Viva Latin America!

Rarely do the Belizeans put restrictions on places in the name of preservation of culture.  The exception is Actun Tunichil Muknal Cave, familiarly known in Belize as the ATM cave.  You can imagine how many cash point jokes they can get out of that.  Only two tour companies are allowed to visit ATM, and only then in groups of no more than nine to a guide.  As we were in the low season, we were fortunate enough to be in a group of five.

ATM is a vastly long cave that ends up deep under the mountain rock, and in it have been found the most incredible remains of Mayan sacrifices.  But here’s the thing: you don’t just walk into this cave.  You have to swim.

After a jungle hike that involves sloshing through rivers and streams, and being shown all the incredible plant life around and being told what everything is used for, you swim into the cave, in trainers and helmet with a headlamp, and start the long wade/swim/hike into the darkness.

This is demonstrably not a walk in the park.  You climb up wet and slippery rocks, wade up to your shoulders, squeeze yourself through tiny gaps – at one point we turned up the lamps and walked single file through the pitch blackness.  And finally, after some brief climbing up vertical rock faces that have been helpfully eroded into hand and footholds, you end up in the first of the series of caverns that contain the Mayan offerings.  Broken pots, all the better to release the spirits, are arranged artfully around.  Nothing is properly roped off; the floor around it has been taped, but more to alert you to the treasures you’re about to stumble over than to properly stop you going near them.  Further up, you wander through a gigantic cavern that one member of our group accurately observed would be “amazing for a rave”.  And then, as far as the tour takes you but certainly not as far as the cave stretches, come the human sacrifices.

A complete and intact skeleton of a twenty-two year old woman lies positioned on the ground in a high chamber, the only sign of her death given away by the couple of crushed vertebrae of her spine.

There are several other bodies within the cave, and the best guess that the experts have is that they were sacrifices made to the Gods in an attempt to assuage a drought.  But I have to say I felt more than a twinge of sympathy for the unknown woman – as much as we were assured that all the signs indicated that she was a high-born woman and this would have been a great honour for her, is crushing of the vertebrae really the only way?

The tour spends three and a half hours in the cave – gets kind of chilly, what with being soaked head to foot – and it was definitely three and a half of the most amazing hours of my life.  To see this site, untouched to the best of the experts’ knowledge for over a thousand years, and to be able to get so close to it, was unbelievable.  If you ever find yourself in Belize and have to decide on the one thing you should do, this has to be it.

Sophie Carville