Bizzaro World

After the cenotes at Cuzama and Chunkanan we felt all cenoted out. We also felt like we had seen our share of ruins after Uxmal, Chichen Itza and Mayapan for the time being. That left us with grutas. There are probably all kinds of grutas on the peninsula that we don't know about, but only three major sites to our knowledge. Since we had already been to Lol-Tun and were planning to see Balankanche on our way back to the Cancun area (tomorrow), that left us with Calcehtok. Like many of our other activities here, we weren't sure of what to expect at Calcehtok nor did we know what we were signing up for.

First we stopped at this cenote (although we would probably call it a small lake or pond) on the way to Calcehtok since we had time. It was nice. We took some pictures and walked around.

We finally got a good picture of one of these twitchy yellow birds that hardly ever hold still long enough for the camera to focus properly. The cenote is called Chen-Ha.

We have gotten turned around many times down here. After a while we finally figured out that it wasn't all us. Many of the maps we have to go by are conceptional at best, and the road signs are often counterintuitive. Sometimes the maps and signs all match up though and it's just our problem. This was one of those times.

We took this hairy dirt road thinking it was the way to the grutas.

But all it did was dead end way up high at these weird radio towers loaded with birds. Most of the landscape here is very flat, so it was a bit of a treat.

Here's the sign to the correct turn-off. This is where this becomes the most difficult post for us so far. What happened to us over the next few hours would be hard to describe in its entirety in person, let alone online. If the pictures and narrative here land on our blog readers as kinda "more of the same," we think that would be a reflection of, again, how difficult it is to describe where this event ranked on the coolness scale for us. It is definitely the capstone activity so far.

The grutas of Calcehtok should only be explored with an experienced guide. We doubted this information a little at first, but now we're believers. You would have to be an extremely experienced spelunker or a moron to go in there without the help of a walking, talking map like our guide was. Speaking of, our guide was a Mayan man named Manuel. His great great grandfather "discovered" the grutas in 1850. Calcehtok has only been explored a few kilometers in and deep. Manuel told us that this discovered area represents only tiny fraction of the caves' reach.

The caves were home to some kind of Mayan community anciently. Very little is known about this community because the caves have only received one visit from archaeologists since being discovered in modernity, and that visit was in 1950. They dug up and piled some pottery and some bones, poked around a little, and then left. That's it. Karina and I took an Ancient Anthropology course together in Spring 2008, so seeing a virtually undisturbed archaeological site like this was a real treat for us.

The whole experience was like a movie (and it's kind of sad that that's the best simile we can come up with to describe it) where you hire some guide out in the middle of nowhere to take you down some dark, creepy place as he tells you all kinds of scary, creepy stories about the dark, creepy place while you're still in it. Manuel explained that there were three different passes to take, a tourist pass, an intermediate, and an expert pass. He charged by the hour, and since the caves are so hot and humid (especially the further down you go), he leaves it up to his guests to tell him when they've had enough. We chose the intermediate path, and we're so glad we didn't choose either of our other two options. He must have been giggling to himself inside when he saw that we intended to bring our backpacks loaded with supplies and our nice camera.

The air in the caves became too humid and loaded with "floaties" to safely operate our camera after about a quarter to a third the way through our tour. We were always struggling to keep up with our lizard/cave-spider guide, so we didn't always have the best opportunities to take good pics. Plus, the only light in the caves was that produced by our headlamps and our guide's hand-held fluorescent. The point is that the pictures here are only a fraction of a fraction of what we saw, breathed and traversed, and they're a mediocre fraction at that.

This is actually the second major opening after climbing down another make-shift ladder to the first. Try to imagine what the sound reel would sound like to these first few images if it were a movie and you'd hit it on the head. It had Indiana Jones and Laura Croft: Tomb Raider all over it.

These next two are from inside the third major opening, right before you descend into the dark cave.

There were several mysterious dates carved into the stone of these first few rooms. One date, that of the year "1947," was already carved there when Manuel's great great grand pappy found the caves in 1850. Weird huh? Only three years before the date when the archaeologists showed up. They don't know why.

Leading out of that last opening where we geared up to go inside.

Everything from here on out felt like a seemingly endless sequence of experiential double-takes. Right about here we started registering that this would be a little more amazing than we thought it would be.

One last glance back at the land of the living.

Here Manuel is pointing out some formations and lending explanations. These caves were 100% dark. We stood in one larger room for probably 10 minutes and mostly in silence to absorb the corporeal feeling of being so swallowed by Mexico. Not surprisingly, we still couldn't see our hands in front of our faces with all that time for our eyes to adjust.

So, Manuel led us into larger rooms like this to show us cool stuff. However, each large, leisurely walk inevitably lead to some kind of craziness. Usually it started with having to walk hunched over through more cramped areas, then crawling on hands and knees, then dragging ourselves on our stomachs as we pushed our backpacks in front of us or somehow hauled them behind.

We only got pictures of the first couple tight squeezes, and these ones were cake walks. This kind of space felt luxurious after long fits of dragging.

See that hole to Karina's right? Yeah, we had to go through that. We're not trying to over-inflate this or anything, but these tight squeezes went on for 30 to 50 meters at a time (or "yards" roughly), meaning 10 to 15 minutes at a time before you could crawl or walk hunched over again. Spaces so small that they would be impossible to get through without taking our backpacks off for the majority of them, with limited visibility in an increasingly hot and humid/smelly cave that more and more gives you the feeling like it's trying to digest you with its cave enzymes or something. It was so sweet. We went through about 10-12 squeezes like this of varying difficulty, ascent and descent.

To simulate something like this at home you would have to line up about 30 to 50 meters of bar stools laid on their sides and in twisting patters, then squeeze through the middle openings while imagining all the space around being filled in with soaking wet limestone for kilometers in at least three directions, and several hundred meters in the fourth. Nutty-putty caves comes close to the same idea, but they would be a silly little warm-up for this kind of spelunking.

Like this one with that rope leading up to the little hole up there.

Watching Manuel go through this cave was like watching a dance. The only parts of his person that touched the floor, ceiling and walls of this cave, even in the tight places, were the pads of his hands and the bottoms of his flip-flopped feet. His body talked to the contour of the gruta, and it responded by showing him the easiest way through. We looked less graceful. Manuel came out almost exactly as dirty as he went in (practically clean).

Here Karina is taking her turn to be birthed out one of these tiny openings.

Suddenly the entire cave fell on her, but she held it up long enough to make an escape!

There was never an absence of impressive rock formations to look at. Definitely the best we've ever seen. The caves were a palace of huge, fragile, almost completely undisturbed icicles.

Now here's some shots from that fraction of the mediocre fraction of photos we told you about.

The yellow stuff in the next few pictures are fool's gold.

This is just the first of a few dozen formations like this that take on the resemblance of something. Can you see the Virgin Maria?

Here's a closer one.

Inspiration for that statue outside of Lol-Tun?

This one.

There were so many face in the walls and ceiling that Manuel didn't even point all of them out...

This formation is called "The Little Theater" for obvious reasons. It is very delicate and small. You can see it in the background of the picture of the larger formation that contains it two photos above.

A piece of authentic Mayan pottery. This is the stuff you usually only see behind ropes or glass at a museum.

This portion of the cave was composed of quartz. Manuel put one of his smaller flashlights up to them and they glowed.

You can see that it was getting warm.

See all that "dirt" on the ground? The camera is even focusing on some in the air on the left side of the picture. Not dirt...

This is one of the slender spots where another face was looking at us.

Ok, coolest room of all and about where we had to put the camera away. This was the center of the Mayan community that lived in the gruta. This was the largest single room and it had a naturally domed ceiling. That mound in the middle was a sacrificial alter where Mayan bones can be seen (not in this picture, but in person). It was disturbed by the archaeologists who came in 1950, but they left everything. This room had many creepy formations.

For one formation, Manuel prefaced pointing it out by going into the Mayan version of Alien Ant Farm Theory (the theory that maintains that the appearance and/or disappearance of advanced ancient civilizations was the result of extraterrestrial involvement, kinda like the movie Stargate with the Egyptians). Then, of course, there was a perfectly formed alien in the the domed ceiling of the ceremony room. Other formations throughout the cave were a medusa, a clown, a bull, several faces and goblins, snakes, a crocodile, skulls, an elephant, a beautifully formed jaguar, a lion, one of the Mayan gods, and more. He turned off his fluorescent light and highlighted them with a soft flashlight. He was very patient.

You can see a large face in profile on the facade of the right wall of this room even though the picture is dark and crummy.

More pottery.

This shell was found inside the cave and believed to be used for communication between the Mayans. Good thing they had a system like this too.

Some over-confident explorers went into the caves by themselves sometime in the last 20 or 30 years or so and got lost. After the batteries in their flashlights ran out they began tearing and burning their clothes for light as they tried to unlose themselves. After they ran out of clothing to burn they sat together in the room where they saw their last illumination for three days (naked) before being found. Unfortunately, they came out of the cave too quickly in the joy of their rescue and were permanently blinded by the sun as their eyes did not have time to adjust. Name your price Manuel!

Here the camera annoyingly focuses on all the crap in the air that made it so we had to put it away. Plus, the climbs got harder and harder.

Later, after we descended to the lowest point we achieved that day, the air became instantly even more humid and hot. Bugs began to swarm all over, and the sickly-sweet cave smell increased dramatically in its intensity. Manuel explained that to continue from that point would mean descending into even hotter and more humid air. The flying bug population would increase such that we would have to cover our mouths in places to not swallow several hundreds of them. There would be so many bugs that we would actually be stepping into and through about 25 cm of liquid bug turd in some areas. Oh yeah, and that stuff on the ground, on our clothes, and in the air (and therefore our lungs) that wasn't dirt, that's guano (bat doody doodie doo!). The amount of that on the floor and in the air would increase as well. We opted to turn back around from that point. In then end, we lasted three hours inside there.

These are original Mayan wash basins used in these caves that they would place under drippy place where beautifully stone-filtered water would fill them up. Conveniently, Manuel and his family placed some at the exit so we could clean up a little.

Not as clean as Manuel, are we? And yes, again, the large majority of that on us is guano.

We were glad we spent as much time as we did down there so that the light could change in this chamber as we left (although we didn't expect it to). Karina took several photos of this spectacle before we moved on. Coming out of the cave into the regular hot and humid air felt like opening an enormous freezer door and being blasted by cool air.