Today we start are Jungle adventures with the Actung Tunichil Muknal or ATM for short. We meet our guide for the day Abraham and Sara, John, Meredith and I go on a very bumpy offroad ride to the trailhead. This ride gives us our first quote of the day from our guide Abraham,”“The other road is like this but a little more bumpy” – the road we were on was way bumpy so I can’t imagine the other one!
Our journey starts with a two mile hike into the jungle to the trail head for the ATM..notice how the shelters posts are live tree’s – pretty awesome!
We get on our gear – Helmet and headlamp to prepare to get started, the entrance to the cave is to the right of us
We enter the mouth of the cave in a pool of water and go into the dark of he cave and start doing what we would call underground bouldering
It starts out pretty easy walking along an underground river with beautiful cave walls..
However at some point Abraham said he was going to take our group, “The no chicken way” and then it continued to get more challenging..
More narrow…
More climbing…
And more wet…
Before we climbed up some rocks and made it to the chamber where the sacrifices and tributes to the Mayan gods were done deep under this mountain. After we climbed up Abraham told us to take off our shoes and put socks on to walk around this underground cavern; and then he started to tell us about what went on here..
As we moved in we started seeing amazingly preserved cave pottery – I mean this stuff is 1000 years old and we are less than a couple of feet away from it
and after walking and climbing again the path opened up into a huge underground cavern where there we beautiful rock formations – stalactites and stalagmites..
Those sights were amazing enough but what came next we were not prepared for…
Skulls…
and Skeletons of people who were brought into the chamber for human sacrifices to the Mayan gods. This skeleton is female and was completely preserved by being covered by setement; Looks like something out of Halloween doesn’t it?
While moving to the skeletons chamber we have another phrase for the day, our guide said as we started climbing over some sharp rocks in our socks, “Now we are getting into the land of Ouch” – Ha that was and understatement! When is the last time you went Bouldering in your socks…
After we made our way out, we came to the Cave entrance again and got to swim out
Looking out from the waterfall at the entrance the jungle looked amazing, so lush and green, especially after being underground for a couple of hours..
Now we were famished so it was time for lunch and then the hike back to the car. Every meal pretty much has some fresh tortilla’s and hot sauce involved and man did they taste good. In addition the vegetables were always fresh and available..check out John and Meredith and our great lunch to fuel up…
On the hike out we were keeping close watch on the trail and saw a huge anthill and asked Abraham what was the deal with it…
He said that this was a leaf cutter ants home and looking at the trail we could see their parade across the trail and up a tree to cut and carry their leafs back. I had only seen these on the discovery channel…such a trip how they can carry such huge objects and be so small..
On the hike back we had three stream crossings which felt great…
And Sara snapped this picture of some German tourists that we were talking to at the trailhead…not quite sure what is up but we had a good laugh about this pic 😉
If you thought today was cool wait until our Jungle hike on day 3….
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