We’ve been on kind of a lot of cave tours.  But now that we’ve toured caves in Belize, there’s no going back to the tame U.S. versions.  Unfortunately, cameras are not allowed in the ATM cave because several numbskulll tourists apparently dropped them on priceless artifacts.  However, you can check out this link to get a sense of the place.  Or try this video:

My family had a great time at the ATM cave. The cave has a much longer name in the Mayan language (Actun Tunichil Muknal), but everyone calls it ATM cave.

To get there, we had to walk about thirty-five minutes through the jungle and wade through three rivers. The park we walked through was beautiful. When we got to the cave mouth, we took a break for a few minutes to get ready for our hike in the cave. Our guide told us not to take pictures in the cave because people had damaged artifacts in the past by dropping their cameras or knocking pebbles onto to artifacts.

I liked the cave so much better than I liked the caves we toured on our cross-country trip. It was in the middle of the jungle and was so much more natural and much less changed by humans. The other caves had huge, built up entrances with gift shops, and paved walkways inside the cave. They had blasted away bigger passageways for people to walk through. In this tour, we climbed, swum, and squeezed our way through tiny passages. It was so fun!

At the cave mouth, the first thing we had to do was swim to a ledge about ten feet into the cave. The water was deep and freezing. We turned our headlamps on on the ledge. We walked for a while into the cave. We walked and swum through water and over rocks. Near the end of our hike through the cave, we climbed a rock face. At the top, we took off our shoes and walked in our socks so we wouldn’t damage artifacts and formations.

Our guide showed us lots of ceramic Mayan pots. A few were almost whole but none were complete because the Mayans would break them to release their spirits. Sometimes they smashed them and sometimes they only chipped them. We came to a large chamber. The floor was eroded away in swirls. As we walked across it, our guide showed us formations and told us about Mayan history.

At the end of the chamber we climbed a ladder. In the cavern at the top was a fully preserved skeleton of a Mayan sacrifice. Our guide told us that the Maya had gone through a time of drought. As they got more desperate they ventured deeper into the cave to pray and started sacrificing humans. Eventually they moved away. After that we made our way back out of the cave.