A good trip down the tube

Here on the Intrepid trip, we don't stay in any one place for more than two nights. Some of these places have limited internet access, some have none whatsoever. Furthermore, the days are packed full of stuff to do. Point is: there just isn't much time for a nice, leisurely blog post.

Except tonight, because I've decided, like many others, not to stay out for after-dinner drinks this evening. I think many people - though I hasten to add not including yours truly - learned their lesson this morning when, after a hefty night yesterday which saw almost everyone get some kind of drunk, most of us had to endure the delightful combination of hangover, dirt road and caving. Totally worth it though, I'm sure. The Mayan Actun Tunichil Muknal cave was used as a place of ritual sacrifice and, after wading/swimming/climbing through the maze of rocks and water with nothing but a headlamp and a lot of wet clothes, one eventually meets an entirely intact human skeleton. I studied it carefully, and concluded that it was almost certainly not alive.

The western side of Belize seems to contain much more jungle than the eastern side. Here in San Ignacio one has to trek through the jungle for forty-five minutes before reaching the aforementioned cave, and oh my are there some lovely surprises in there: poisonous snakes, spiders, jaguars. I would have been quite happy to have met a jaguar, but even the guides who do this all year round never see them. Instead, we were reliably informed that all would be within spitting distance of a snake around thirty percent of the time. Can't these tour guides prioritise the animals more effectively?

As it happens however I did not meet a snake on the way to the cave, nor the previous afternoon when we each grabbed a rubber tube and floated down the river. A key piece of advice to all of you: when you go over the rapids, bottoms up. Those rocks are sharp, and whilst one only makes that mistake once, it is preferable not to make it at all. Here's another tip: try to avoid getting stuck with your tube over a protruding rock, like some kind of fairground ring toss game.

I should probably mention the group with whom I am travelling. We started numbering fifteen persons, mostly Australian folk and some English. A small number of people have been on this trip all the way from Mexico City for a couple of weeks beforehand, but most started at the same point I did. However, many people arrived a day early to settle in before we all met up. Of these, three people had serious sunburn before the trip had technically even begun. By day three, we had lost Lee. By the next day, Jools and Rebecca had gone. Then to top it off, a couple of girls decided to stay behind in Caye Caulker, and claim they will catch us up later. This leaves us at a cosy number of ten people, ranging from early twenties to one man somewhere around sixty. All good.

But special mention has to go to our tour guide Sammy, who to my total and utter delight is a Guatemalan. Sammy is lovely, but the joke at the moment is to question how many people will be left by the end of the trip. Coincidentally, a Swiss man named Chris who is the manager of Intrepid tours in this region has been trailing us for the last few days, and whenever he turns up Sammy has to tell him that we've lost a few more. I think Chris has gone now, so the curse may be broken. Though if we continue to drink a cocktail here which has the entirely accurate name of 'Bucket of Death', the numbers may well dwindle further.

This night is our last here in Belize. Tomorrow morning we ride to Guatemala, where we shall stay for nine days and is thus the longest leg of the tour. I can actually hear my heart singing; it's a very special place.