Going Underground

Having plunged the depths of the sea, it would have been rude not to have ventured underground to investigate the fascinating Mayan sacrificial cave at Actun Tunichil Muknal. The Maya believed in spirits of the underworld and revered caves as portals of the spirits. Still it is astonishing to discover that they explored up to a mile and half underground through caverns chest high in water to reach the enormous and haunting Cathedral Cavern, where human victims were ruthlessly sacrificed to the gods. It's quite an adventure getting to the Cavern even today with the aid of torches, and it's an odd feeling to be walking through an archaeolgical site at the end of the journey, watching your step in order not to tread on thousand year old human bones and pieces of pottery.

Archeaologists posit some sort of natural catrastrophe which hit the Mayan World in the 10th C and brought their great urban civilisation to an end. Perhaps a drought made feeding vast urban populations unsustainable. Whatever it was, things must have got pretty desperate for believers to venture quite so deep into the underworld to appease their gods with human victims.

Across the border in Guatamala is perhaps the greatest of all Mayan sites at Tikal. Its series of steeply stepped pyramids soar upwards above the jungle treetops to create an arresting image of a lost civilisation. The site is immense and wonderfully atmospheric at dawn as the sun rises through the jungle mist to light upon the stonework. As you wander jungle paths from one temple to another, you share the ruins with toucans sitting in the tree branches and tarantulas skulking in earth holes below your feet. Howler monkeys roar out their calls from up in the forest canopy like spirits of the dead wailing over the demise of a city that was once so great.

Guatamala is a country rebuilding itself after more than 40 years of civil war and political unrest. It seems a surprisingly together sort of a place considering its history. Still, you notice that life is markedly less affluent here than in Belize. Driving southwards through the beautiful jungle clad eastern mountains there is plenty of evidence of slash and burn agriculture taking place as people irreversibly damage a unique ecological environment in order to eke out a living. Eco-tourism is making inroads here though, as elsewhere in Central America, so it remains to be seen how things develop in the future.

And so I find myself at the end of another leg of this trip, sitting by the sea in the Carribean coastal village of Livingstone, home to Guatamala's only significant black community and a place that can only be accessed by boat. It's a last chance to gorge on seafood and reggae music before crossing the continent to end up in the old Spanish colonial city of Antigua. It's a strange thing to be able to drive across a continent in just a few hours.