Lovely Weekend

The girls just left my site this morning after a lovely Halloween/Todos Santos weekend. We spent Saturday and Sunday nights in a rustic hostel in Semuc, right near the Semuc Champey reserve. Semuc Champey is Q'eqchi' for "Water that comes from beneath the rocks," and refers to the natural spring pools that are one of the park's biggest attractions. The river flows down into the rocks, which filter and clean the water and push it back up into pristine blue pools. We hiked up through the jungle to get a birds-eye view of the pools…absolutely beautiful. We spent the morning swimming through all the pools, but on one dive I snapped my newly-fixed glasses in half, losing one half to the pool, and had to hike the rest of the day with a monocle. Our guide was highly amused by this, and called me "one-glass" for the rest of the day.

We spent the afternoon in the Las Marias Caves, on a candlelight tour. Now from the information we gathered from the hostel, this so-called "Candlelight Cave Tour" would be a nice, relaxed walk/wade through the caves' shallow waters to see the caves, bats, etc. Wrong. This tour would probably rank about a 7 out of 10 on the "most treacherous amateur nature trek" scale. Before the tour we each received a candle, and those of us wearing flip-flops received a piece of twine tied around each ankle to keep the flip-flops secure to our feet. No consent forms, no briefing, just candles and twine. So into the pitch-black caves we went with our Guatemalan cave guide, a 4-foot 8-inch man with swim trunks and a headlamp, whose only real guidance involved proudly showing us a particularly phallic stalagmite and exclaiming "penis" in English. We soon found out that the better part of the caves are filled with very deep water, thus requiring us to swim through the small caves' cold and pitch-black waters, one-handed (our burning candles/only light source being in the other), in the dark, with bats swirling above, dodging the jagged stalagmites and stalactites as we went. About midway in we had to scale a waterfall on a slippery wrought-iron ladder that had been tied to some rocks over head, shimmy through crevices, swim some more…you get the idea. It was amazing and a total blast, however terrifying. And something we could never do in the States. Just thinking of the paperwork that kind of cave tour would elicit back home gives me a headache. And luckily, our whole group made it through relatively unscathed, although I fell and banged up my knee pretty bad on the way in and had a golf-ball sized goose egg by the time we got back out into daylight…I blame it on my lack of depth-perception caused by the monocle, which I proudly managed to keep on my face for the entirety of the trek. Once we were out, we all had a well-deserved warm can of Guatemalan beer to celebrate our survival. All in all it was totally worth it…I'd do it again for sure. Probably won't bring Mom and Dad, though.