I had read about the ATM caves tour in our guide book, but wasn’t sure whether we should do it or not. First, it said that you had to be relatively fit to do the tour…Derek and I are fairly fit for our age, but we have been fitter….hours of sitting in a truck, you know…and younger…years of living, you know. Second, it was pretty expensive compared to other tours where you might, say, float on an inner tube through a cave. Then we talked with a fellow tourist at another campsite, and he had said that if you are going to pay for one tour in Belize, that it should be the ATM cave, so we signed up. We later were told that National Geographic listed the Top Ten Sacred Caves in the World, and the ATM caves was named number one. Sold.

After a bumpy ride into the country side, we hiked along a nice wide trail in the jungle and swam and waded three different water crossings before reaching the gaping mouth of the ATM cave. We walked and crab crawled over slippery rocks where the light still caused algae, then lowered ourselves into the water at the cave’s entrance and started swimming. Twenty or thirty feet into the cave we were able to stand up and started wading into the darker regions of the cave. Welcome to the Mayan underworld of which they were very afraid. All tour groups were nine in number (8 people and a guide) as this is the number of levels in the Mayan underworld. Similar to the 13 levels of heaven that we tapped into and referred to in the beautiful restaurant in San Miguel de Allende, in a previous post.

We all had helmets and head lamps, but not far in we were instructed to turn them off in order to see just how very dark it was without additional light…and it was dark…. actually black.

We continued along, with lights, the guide telling us about how the Maya thought that caves were entrances to the underworld and were therefore very afraid of caves. But the rains stopped coming, so, in desperation, they began to enter the cave to leave offerings for the gods. Deep in the cave we saw pots that dated back to 850 A.D, left to appease the gods and to ask for rain. When that did not work, they performed blood letting ceremonies in the cave…still no rain. Deeper into the cave were the remains of human sacrifices, some decapitated, some with large holes in skull, some, archeologists determined, were likely disemboweled or had their heart torn from their bodies. The most famous skeleton in the cave was dubbed the “Crystal Maiden”, because the bones appear to be crystallized due to calcification. We climbed up a ladder to a high shelf to view the skeleton where it has lain for the last 1300 years or so…

So, apparently, it is now understood that it was drought that caused so many of the mayan cities to be left to ruin in Mexico, Belize and Guatemala and to be abandoned around 900 AD. The population in the area was huge, maybe 30 million people, maybe more, and wood was used and consumed through many purposes: cooking, slash and burn agriculture, ceremonies, wooden structures, but the most extensive use was to make stucco and mortar for the many pyramids. It took about 7 tonnes of wood to make 1 tonne of lime for mortar and wall plastering. The Mayans had cut down so many trees that the rains stopped coming, and the lowland sites were abandoned as the people moved to the highlands to begin anew. The rainforest we see in the area today is only a little over a thousand years old. They believe the people moved to lands to the south and north and indeed, subsequently, there were notable changes in other tribal societies as far south as Peru and Chile and as far north as Arizona and the Mississippi basin.

We returned out of the cave the way we had come in. At one point we all turned off our lights, joined hands and waded through the cave in complete darkness.

It was a great tour. It felt adventurous swimming through the caves and manipulating our bodies through small spaces. The interior of the cave was filled with stalagmites, stalactites and crystals. Our guide gave us a deeper understanding of the maya people and their beliefs and traditions. You could almost feel the presence of these people and their desperate need for rain, which I guess is suiting given we were truly walking among skeletons.

The following photos were provided by our tour company. Cameras are no longer allowed in the caves after a tourist tried to get a close up of one of the ancient skulls and dropped their camera onto it, leaving a large hole where there was once a fully intact skull.