Those old Mayans, man...
Trip Start
Dec 31, 2007
1
9
12
Trip End
Jan 15, 2008
San Ignacio,
Belize
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Since we were already up, we wandered around town in the mist, first trying to locate a French bakery (again, still existent, but not where the map said), then trying to find anything else once the "chocolate croissant" I got turned out to be something very, very far from being in the croissant family at all, and they didn't have anything in the non-sweet category for Sarah to have. As we ambled back up to the main intersection in town, we ran into Kate and Jason, the English couple from the Lamanai tour, who'd gotten to San Ignacio several days earlier and were able to recommend a good place to us. Hanna's was quite close to the center of town, and served a good variety of breakfast food including fryjacks (me), porridge (Kate), eggs (Sarah), and pancakes (Jason). The art on the walls was mostly from an artist living on Caye Caulker, and before we left, they purchased a picture they'd had their eye on to send back home. It depicted a shell-shocked white tourist dumbly staring up at a chicken bus full of exuberant black Caribbeans and Mayans with a massive pile of luggage on top, while passengers and children milled around him.
"That," said Jason, "Was me."
After breakfast, there really wasn't much else to do in San Ignacio, unless we felt like taking a hike out to Cahal Pech. (We decided against it.) Instead, we dropped our dirty laundry (at this point, 96% of our clothes) off with Martha's laundry service, checked our email at Tradewinds, and napped until it was time to go find our tour to the caves. All of that "getting up at a reasonable hour" had to catch up some time.
We didn't have time for lunch before we headed out to Eva's Restaurant to meet our guide, so we packed the old foreign-country stand-by, peculiarly-flavored cookies. Mine were mango. After a few minutes of waiting at Eva's, we found we were the only ones going out to Barton Creek, so Sarah and I had plenty of room when we climbed into the bed of an old pickup truck encased in metal bars with our guide, Clifford. I still don't know the name of our driver. After they stopped for gas (actually cheaper than in the States), and we stopped for water at one of the corner stores that is so small you don't realize it's actually a store, they let us know that we were headed fourteen miles out of town. Seven of this was on "fairly good" road, and the other seven was going to be "a little bumpy."
The seven miles of "good" road we covered in pretty good time, and within about twenty minutes we were turning off onto the "bumpy" portion. We hadn't gone a mile when we came upon a turtle by the side of the road that the driver and Clifford gleefully tied up in a towel and threw in the back of the truck. Clifford assured us they were going to take it to a nice pond back in town, but the driver had said something a little too cheerfully about stew.
The entire trip was through lovely, green, rolling hills and orchards, and the sun had come out while we had been napping, burning away the fog and casting a soft sparkle on everything. After we turned off on the "bumpy" road, the countryside got even more picturesque, with carriages giving us right-of-way on the rutted dirt road and the foliage becoming denser as we headed into the forest. The Amish who live in the San Ignacio region are a stricter sect than the Mennonites at Shipyard, and after I deliberated for a bit, Clifford stopped me from taking any pictures, as they would indeed not have welcomed it.
Lovely though it was, the road was also rutted, bumpy, and muddy from the recent rains. After an hour or so of bouncing along, we came to Barton Creek, which was, at this point, impassable by the truck we were in. While the driver and Clifford were deciding if the engine was going to get ruined if they tried to cross, Sarah and I held a quick conference about the best way to rescue the turtle. "It escaped before we could stop it," really just wouldn't work. Before we'd come up with a plan, Clifford came back, announced we were going for a hike now, and hussled us away from the truck into the woods, where he said we were going to find the bridge. Sure enough, we found the bridge, and forgot the turtle for the meantime. An ancient looking rope affair hung over the creek, with the bottom made of a single-width of 2 by 4, pounded and tied on with rusty nails (still protruding) and bailing wire. You reached this bridge by climbing some equally ancient boards nailed to the tree. I got to go first (did I mention it also swayed alarmingly?), and blessed my tetanus shot the whole way over the bridge, across a field, and under some barbed wire on the other side.
We were met at the other side by some folks whose truck could actually ford the stream, and we hitched a ride the remaining mile to the lodge at the cave. Clifford got us set up with a canoe (evidently there wasn't tubing here, no matter what the books said), a car battery, and a couple of high-beam flashlights, and showed me how to connect them to the battery to turn them on. Then we were off. The canoe drifted from the cool, still spot at the crack of the cave's mouth, into the dark at a leisurely pace. Sarah and I were warned to sit very, very still so as not to tip over the narrow canoe. (In Clifford's words, "No shakey shakey or we all get wet.") Very soon we were far enough in to use the flashlights to see the stalactites, stalagmites, and columns of limestone, along with the tiny holes the fruit bats lived in right by our heads. Many of these holes still contained bats. The lights were strong enough to get a few good pictures, along with a few pictures that Clifford made me take of absolutely nothing but a wall of rock. The ceiling of the cave was twenty or thirty feet up, and the space the canoe was passing through measured about fifteen feet across. You were welcome to touch the walls and formations, with the caveat of possible guano.
After awhile, we got to the areas where the Mayans used to have rituals - sacrificial or not was unclear, but there were definitely skeletons found - and Clifford pointed out pots, potsherds, and, at one point, a skull that had gotten embedded in the limestone. He also pointed out the circuitous route and footholds the Mayans took to get from the water up to the ledges these items were resting on. In a few places, the cave narrowed to a crack a couple of feet wide that the canoe drifted through, and at one point Clifford joked that we were going to have to limbo in the canoe to fit under a low-hanging bridge before we slipped through a hidden sliver near the edge. When we reached the end of the easily toured part of the cave at a wall of rock, he had us turn off our lights and sit in the pitch darkness for a few minutes. It makes me uneasy enough to be without light in caves that I don't think I will ever take up spelunking. Just the possibility of being in such darkness with tons and tons of impenetrable rock above my head makes the whole sport unappealing.
Shortly, we heard another canoe coming, so I reattached the lights to the battery, and we were on our way out. We were going with the current this direction, so the trip out was a good deal quicker than the trip in, and we reached the swimming hole in no more than half an hour. The water was very chilly, if not officially icy, and I had no plans to go anywhere near it, but Sarah attempted wading before she decided it was too cold even for her. I spent my time taking pictures of some orange animal rustling in a tree high above us, because Clifford told me to. He might be happier with his own camera.
We hitched a ride out with the same truck, and stayed in it for the crossing this time. I fully understand why the other man did not want to drive his truck across thirty feet of rushing river. Once across, we met back up with our driver, who, while were gone, had spent the time napping and shoving the turtle underneath a spare tire for safe keeping. Despite all of their assertions, Sarah and I do not feel the prognosis for that turtle looked good. "In a nice pond in town with ten other turtles we've rescued," just sounds like way too much of a fable to shut up silly tourists. The scenery on the way out was just as beautiful as earlier, and we passed a troop of Amish children making their barefoot way down to the swimming hole. Though the Amish are stricter about picture taking, they seemed to be more open to modern clothes than some of the Mennonites we saw, as the little boys were dressed in pretty current business-casual, and the girls' short-sleeved pastel dresses ended at their calves rather than the ground. The Mennonites in many places had the girls in floor-length black dresses with sleeves to their wrists. Right before we turned off on the "good" road, we passed a carriage trying to carry a mattress. The team of horses shied at our passing and were clearly already about to bolt, and it took two men to keep the mattress from falling off, probably not for the first time. All of the other carriages we saw had calm, placid horses who paid no mind to the constantly passing vehicles, but those two had just gotten pushed too far.
After we made what seemed to be a faux-pas by tipping Clifford, we fetched our laundry, now neatly cleaned and folded for less than the cost of a mid-sized lunch. This impressed me so much that I have resolved to find out if such a wonderful thing exists in the States. I hate laundry.
As we hadn't eaten much since Hanna's, Sarah and I headed out to Cafe Sol for dinner. Though we were the only people in the room, it still took over an hour for us to get food, quite enough time for me to read through several elderly Newsweeks and get a good way into a Patterson novel. My fries were actually okay, and the chicken I ordered had a nice pineapple ginger sauce, what I had actually been expecting with the barracuda the day before. It took such a long time to get our check and change, that it was past eight when we finally left (we got back from the tour around five). On the way into Martha's, we stopped at a table out front, where people were selling jewelry. I got a couple of souvenirs and gifts (again avoiding the coral) and finally got to see the Mayan month of my birthday. (They had been strangely sold out of just that month everywhere else I had checked.) My birthday is in late November, and the symbol, most peculiarly, is the sign for "summer." The Mayan lady selling the charms shook her head when I pointed that out and said, "Those old Mayans, man, they were crazy."
Comments
Run, Turtle, Run!
I'm trying to picture you guys selling the 'turtle outran you' story. Have you read any Terry Pratchett? This makes me think of the one I just read: Small Gods, where the God is a snarky tortoise.