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Paddling Into the Mayan Past

Wet Caving in Belize

By Jim Jamieson

“I get the wheels re-aligned once a month – and while I’m at it I get my bones re-aligned.”

Dave Simpson, owner and operator of David’s Adventure Tours, gears the Isuzu Trooper down into second gear as he carefully avoids a pothole that looks deep enough to swallow us whole. We’re bouncing down a boulder-strewn, rut-infested excuse for a back road a few miles out of the Interior Belizean city of San Ignacio. No wonder Dave needs his bones aligned if he makes this trip every day. I’m thinking I’ll need that and maybe several major organs put back in their right orientation.

We’re on our way to Barton Creek Cave, a 45-minute journey from San Ignacio and Dave’s phone booth sized office across the road from the open-air bus depot at the edge of the small but busy town of 8,000. The cave is well known for its waterways that meander deep into the mountain. Dave is one of a number of tour guides who make regular trips inside, but he may be the most colourful.

“Yeah, I’m takin’ these guys down to Barton Cave,” he cracks to one of the locals while filling up at a gas station just after we set out. “I’m going to demonstrate human sacrifice”

Funny, Dave, real funny. My wife Nancy, our 12-year-old daughter Hannah, our friend Crissy, who’s living and working as a volunteer in Belize City, and myself all ignore the crack.

Dave says he has been doing the cave tours for 13 years. A former Belizean schoolteacher, his mother was of Mayan descent, his father Jamaican. He says he speaks five languages in the melting pot that is Belize: official English, Creole, Garifuna, Mayan and Spanish. He does the tours, he says, because it’s part of his heritage.

About halfway to the Caves, Dave pulls off the hardscrabble road and onto a cutoff to the left, through a stone gate.

“An Amish village,” shouts Dave, above the thump of the bottoming out shocks and the bleat of the Trooper’s engine. Sure enough, the straggly jungle begins to morph in to ordered orange groves and neatly manicured fields. Around a bend we come upon a group of small children by the side of the road. Aged from about six to 12, they are dressed so identically it’s hard to tell them apart. The boys, all blue-eyed with their blonde haircut in a close-cropped bowl style, are dressed in denim bib overalls and meticulously pressed long-sleeved collarless shirts. The girls wear long dresses and bonnets on their heads. It’s as if we’ve stumbled upon some secret cloning experiment – set inside a time warp. All appear oblivious to the sweltering heat and return our waves shyly.

An Amish village in Belize is definitely a little surreal. As we drove on we encountered men (also in bib overalls) driving horse-drawn wagons and tending crops in the fields with hand implements.

The Amish and their Mennonite cousins came to Belize in the 1950s from Canada and the U.S. via Mexico. They brought with them their European farming skills and are so efficient and hard working that they have come to dominate the agricultural sector in Belize and supply much of the country’s produce. Speaking mostly in High German, they staunchly maintain their religious beliefs and keep their culture insulated from the rest of Belize.

Then we’re at Barton Creek – or at least a clearing about 50 yards from it. Nancy, Hannah and Crissy go on ahead while Dave and I carry a car battery and a set of floodlights and cables each behind them down the trail. Within minutes we’re in Dave’s two canoes and are paddling slowly down the gently moving waters of Barton Creek.

“Here,” says Dave, and we make a right turn into a dark shadow on the side of the mountain.

Inside, with the aid of a flashlight, Dave quickly hooks up the batteries to the floodlights. The 15-foot-wide waterway inside the cave is bordered on either side by sheer rock walls that at times reached 100 yards in height. The catacombs are like cathedrals, with shimmering crystals and multi-coloured rocks reaching high into the upper cornices.

Right away, Dave cautions us not to touch the walls of the cave. The acid in the oils on our hands will dissolve the limestone – just as the resident population of bats is doing. The bats, sometimes startled by our presence, take flight in droves as our island of light approaches. There are even schools of fingerling fish that follow our canoes into the depths of the cavern.

Dave points out skulls, bones and pottery shards from the ancient Maya – high up on natural shelves in the cave. He talks for almost the entire two hours we’re inside, lecturing on things as diverse and the ecology of the caves to the spiritual life of the ancient Maya. At one point he stops us paddling and turns off the lamps so we can experience the utter darkness and velvety silence of the cave. It’s not hard to see why the Maya considered the caves a sacred place.

Then there’s a shaft of light up ahead and suddenly we’re out and into the shady afternoon on Barton Creek again. Dave says we traveled about two miles into the mountain. It feels so different outside that the time in the cave seems like a dream now.

Through some complex calculation that gave a discount for Crissie (a resident) and Hannah (a child), Dave charged us $200 Belizian ($100 US) for the trip. Considering we’ll keep the memory of that afternoon with us forever, it was incredibly cheap.

(There are ample opportunities to book many types of Eco-tourism adventures with companies like Dave’s in San Ignacio. We recommend it highly.)

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