San Ignacio daytrip – to ATM

One of the locals in Aktun Tunichil Muktal

What is this – do you need to do a daytrip to find an ATM ("Bankomat" in Swedish) in San Ignacio? No, it’s not that type of ATM... In this case ATM stands for Aktun Tunichil Muktal, which means Cave Rock Holy or something like that in mayan – quite a descriptive name.

ATM is part of a system of caves and underground rives stretching at least 6 km underground – some of the locals even claims that it goes all the way to Guatemala and that it is the way that the bandits (see security post) comes, but experts say that they don’t go that far.

The system has been closed to tourists until quite recently – archeologists didn’t discover the area until 20 years ago, and it has taken them quite some time to get done!

The cave is a one-hour drive plus 45 minutes trek from San Ignacio – just enough to prepare yourself mentally for the experience to come! Or you could just do like the couple in the back seat of the van and totally make out back there. To each his own I guess! :-)

During the excursion we did not go further in than 500 meters or so, but it still took around an hour to get in. There is a lot of water so sometimes you swim. There are large caves, so sometimes you almost don’t see the roof of the caves despite strong flashlights. There are narrow passages, so sometimes you pull in your stomach and squeeze. And there is generally a very magic feeling with excellent stalactites, stalagmites, and other rock formations that I don’t even know the name of.

One of the coolest rock formations on the way in must have been a curtain-shaped one that you could play xylophone on! I don’t know if it was hollow or not (I’m pretty sure it wasn’t however), but if you hit it at different places you could get at least one octave of notes out of it!

After 500 meters of that magic (took an hour, remember?), we had to climb six or seven meters up to a small small entrance to a whole other cave system – and here is where the “Holy” part of the cave’s name comes in. In front of us an enormous cave system opens up, used as a holy place by the Mayans for hundreds of years, from before BC to around 900 AD!

That means that it is full of offerings to the gods, mostly it’s pots (and shards of pots, evidently the shaman broke the pots to release the energy of the food) that contained food offerings, but there’s also a handful of skeletons left behind after a human sacrifice to look at! And of course the wonderful rock formations continues all the way inside also, and so dresses these archeological gems in the best of gowns. Stalactites, stalagmites, yes, but there’s also the stone curtains hanging from the high ceiling and the walls covered with glittering stones (which in my imagination of course are diamonds!), and, and...

The archeologists has in some cases removed the artifacts for preservation, but if so, they have put them back in the same place as before, so when you go in there, it looks exactly the same as it did when the last Mayan shaman left there more than a thousand years ago...spooky!

Well, there’s really no way to describe it. It’s like a museum, a church, an architectural masterpiece and a nature’s wonder at the same time. And it’s just...really really fantastic.

One of the best times in there was when we turned off the lights completely and just sat there in complete silence. Raquel and I had done that in another cave (see Blue Hole blog entry) before, and the sudden silent effect was eerie this time as well (isn’t it strange how LOUD your own body becomes at those times?), but there was definitely something else as well. Everyone who knows me knows that I pretty much don’t believe in anything that don’t show up on an instrument, but I definitely think that there was some sort of energy that I could not quite touch but still feel somehow...

On the way out, I think everyone was touched by the experience, since we pretty much kept quiet all the way, just enjoying the scenery, and hurrying before the lights on our helmets went out!
What a day it was. Although there is a special certification for guides before they are allowed to take people to ATM, I can highly recommend Gliss from Snooty Fox Tours. Gliss gave us lots of information on Mayan history in general and on this site specifically the whole time, and he has been making the ATM tour right from the beginning in -99. He also knew what he was doing with regards to the caving, which is not completely unimportant – we saw a couple of bad examples from other guides we met on the way in and out.