20: the final adventure (part 3)

I woke at some despicably early hour to the sound of someone stamping up and down the hotel stairs wearing a pair of giant concrete boots. After a lovely cold shower (just what was needed after two days of hiking and no sleep) we headed down to breakfast, where Fernando was already there nursing a cup of coffee, also having had no sleep.

The bus took us on a winding road from Aguas Calientes up to Machu Picchu. The site was breathtaking. Fernando gave us a pretty comprehensive history of the site as we sheltered from the sun, before taking us on a walk up to the famous viewing point. Somehow, after this, I got lost.

just some llamas and an old wooden bridge...

I could have sworn Fernando said that we would now be walking to the Inca Bridge, and I trundled up some steps after him and the others. As I looked behind me, I saw the rest of the group preparing to set off, and carried on, taking my time to get up the steps. When I got to the top, no one was there. It was almost as if aliens had landed and taken everyone away. In the hope of catching them up, I followed the signs to the Inca Bridge, telling a lady along the way that I had lost my group and had she seen them. "They went that way!" she said cheerfully. So I continued on, on my own, on a narrow path round the side of the mountain. I saw a few people along the way, but nothing like a group. I realised I had reached the end of the path. There was no one there, apart from three llamas. I realised that it had been nearly an hour since I had lost them, and so I turned back.

I returned to the place where I had last seen everyone, and sat on a long flat stone overlooking the view. As places go to wait for someone, it wasn't a bad one. I sat for another half an hour, looking over the site and thinking about my trip; where I had been, who I had met, and what would happen when I got home.

After a while I found them, using my zoom lens as a telescope, and we walked back to the cafe at the site entrance for an amazingly expensive lunch, before heading back into Machu Picchu for some free time. Amy took me round the bits I had missed and we climbed back up to the viewing spot. The light had changed as the afternoon wore on, and it was the golden hour for photos. Pete appeared from behind us, having climbed up to visit the Sun Gate, and we all walked back down to the cafe for Pisco and passion fruit cocktails.

cuy!

That evening we celebrated in a local restaurant, all warm and aching and pleased with ourselves for having made it. This far, at least. There was still the small matter of getting out of Aguas Calientes with no transport, as the trains were now on strike.

High spirits meant most people had hangovers the next morning, so we enjoyed coffee at a late-ish hour at a street cafe while Lola inflicted on Mark some punishing stretches. Our only option for getting out of the town was to walk down the train tracks, so we set off at about 11am and followed them along the river, stopping very occasionally but basically marching as fast as we could. By this point, we were really very tired, I could hardly lift my boots; but we carried on, buoyed by the scenery: the roaring river, the butterflies and the giant smooth rocks.

After a break on a bridge to eat our sandwiches, we finally came to our destination point, where we were to be picked up by bus and taken back to Cusco. There was some sort of mix up with timings, and we waited for what seemed like hours for it to turn up. Lola suggested we play a game, so we all wrote names of famous people on a piece of paper and stuck them to the forehead of the person next to us. The idea was you had to guess who you were: I was Michael Jackson, which, for reasons I won't try to explain here, brought me down a bit.

the terror begins

Finally the bus turned up, clearly too small to take all of us, but somehow we all crammed in, with Fernando and Henry jumping on the top with the bags. Now, I'm usually quite relaxed when it comes to taking risks and throwing myself down holes etc, but this was to be the beginning of what I can only describe as one of the most hair raising journeys I have ever been on. The roads were blocked along the direct path back to Cusco, so our only option was to take the mountains, round the back and to the north of where we were.

Our tiny bus shuddered along a mountain path hewn out for lorries, teetering on the edge of a giant, thundering chasm, at the bottom of which seethed an enormous river. The road was still under construction, and at one point we found ourselves passing a JCB at a non-existent passing point. We eventually made it to a small inconsequential town where we changed buses for a larger and much more comfortable one.
We eventually got back on a mountain road, sometimes not much better than the quarry one we had begun the journey along. There were occasional signs denoting landslide danger, and a few points where the weight of our bus caused rocks and dry earth to come tumbling down the mountain walls that were very close to the road.

For six hours we wound up and down the mountains, at our highest point reaching Abra Malaga at 4,300m, into and above the clouds. The moon was full, and it created a very strange atmosphere, being so high up, and so far away from everything and everyone else. As we neared the end of the journey and passed from the mountains on to a flatter road, we passed through roadblocks made of giant smoking tree trunks and boulders. The mountainside at Ollantaytambo was still on fire.

our last, happy, day in Cusco

After the longest shower ever taken, the rest of our time in Cusco was spent eating giant late breakfasts, shopping for alpaca hats, and treating ourselves to a massage. We said goodbye to everyone at an appropriately Irish pub (specifically chosen for Amy) and headed back to Lima, where we visited the Museum of the Inquisition, to get us into the spirit of coming home.

Amy and I settled in with the lovely landlord and his lady in Lima, who looked after us brilliantly for our last couple of nights. As a treat, we took ourselves to the Rosa Nautica, a posh restaurant at the end of the pier. Sadly, while the food was good, the service wasn't - which was very surprising given our impression of the people in Peru until that point.

It's hard for me to work out how to finish this blog. I've written it more for me to remember everything I did rather than to go on to everyone about the wonderful adventures I've had. I needed to go away, to get away from problems I can't solve and to give me a chance to re-set myself. I can't promise it's worked, and I can't say I know any more now about where I'm going next. But I've reminded myself that I'm actually a bit of an adventurer... and you can travel down any uncertain path, as long as you've got a good pair of boots.

19: the final adventure (part 2)

It was an incredibly bad night's sleep. When we woke, everything outside of our sleeping bags was crispy with the cold. I put my walking clothes inside my sleeping bag to attempt to warm them before I put them on and got up before we were woken up. There was frost on everything, and all the dogs that had been hanging around the night before were still there to greet us in the morning. As Fernando came round and woke everyone with a cup of hot chocolate, the clear morning disappeared and we were enveloped with a cloud.

We had breakfast of omelette and coca tea and got packed up. The journey in front of us was to be approximately 3 hours uphill. Luckily my headache had disappeared, and I realised that the day before I perhaps had descended down the mountain too fast. Chris was not so lucky, having been sick in his tent that night and was feeling very ill indeed.

I felt I had learned something about pace from the previous day, and went very slowly, discovering that it was easier to shuffle rather than try and push yourself only to feel exhausted every few metres. Chris was really sick. He was shaking and couldn't warm up. Jasmine luckily had a heat pad which we stuck on his back, but everyone was pretty worried about him. Fernando gave him a rehydration drink which he insisted he was drinking (but didn't), and we ended up putting him on Kiki.

at the top, looking back over the path we had climbed

We walked from camp to the pass at Wacaywasicassa (4,600m) in 2 1/2 hours, and it was still a hard push, but much more manageable. There was also something psychologically helpful about the clouds hanging on top of us; it meant that we were unable to keep looking upwards at our destination and could only put walking goals as far as we could see them.

We spent half an hour at the top, eating floury red apples and cheese sandwiches, and our guides played some pipes which echoed through the mountains in an eerie but inevitably rather cheesy way.

Ahead of us was a beautiful glacial lake, and a path wound down the other side of the path towards it. I took a much slower pace to avoid the headaches of the day before. Beyond the lake, the landscape began to change from the rather barren dirt we had been used to to a mountain forest, cut through with rivers and waterfalls. We wound down the forest path to Miskyuno, our final camp (4,100m) for a delicious lunch of pasta and salad. By this point, Chris was really very sick, and he lay on the tarp with our bags almost unconscious. Luckly Lola was a doctor and kept an eye on him, but there was no question that we needed to get him down the mountain as soon as we could.

The final part of the journey felt endless. We wound down a very rocky road through the forest, endlessly twisting backwards and forwards down through a crack in the mountains. The rocks on the path were ankle-twistingly, neck-breakingly huge, and the impact of crashing your feet between them was, after several hours, painful. We finally reached our destination: what appeared to be someone's front garden in Yanahuana (2,900m) and lay on the grass playing with dogs and puppies. The cooks prepared a final meal for us and, and as Amy was poised to eat her well-deserved chocolate pudding, she looked over to see the big male dog peeing on her bag. Given this, she was surprisingly good-humoured!

Due to the strikes going on we were going to have problems with transport, so Fernando asked us to separate out the clothes we would need into our rucksacks; our larger duffel bags going back to Cusco that night. Beginning to freeze again, we finally got on our bus back to Ollantaytambo, where we boarded a train to Aguas Calientes. Because of the strike there were queues of people trying to buy tickets and to get on the train before everything stopped. There was a weird sense of Blitz spirit going on, and we found ourselves crossing the tracks with crowds of people, onto a train with no lights. The journey was slow, the power (or at least, the lights) kept going off, and the train stopped for long periods. I slid open the window to see what was going on and each time was treated to a thundering river dotted with giant boulders; a man wandering up and down the outside of the train shining a torch into hidden places. Aside from random lights inside the train and at various tunnels and wooden huts along the track, there was no light other than the moon, and the light on the river and the boulders was a weird sort of silvery grey.

When we finally arrived at Aguas Calientes, it was chaos getting off the train (not helped by the fact I forgot my walking sticks and got separated from the group as I went to retrieve them). Fernando had frantically tried to get us into a hotel and we sat in the lobby waiting to get our keys and desperate to have a shower, which, when we finally got into it, was cold. The next day would be our final adventure: Machu Picchu.

18: the final adventure (part 1)

the beginning

We had breakfast of a semi-warm pancake and some dry bread at about 5.30am. Some new members of our group, Mark and Lola, joined us for coffee, and our minibus hopped round a few more hotels to pick up a few more. We drove up about another 1,000 metres to Patacancha (3,900m), and hung around in an old football field while our donkeys trundled through the gates to be loaded up with our bags. Amy had brought some boiled sweets and we all bonded whilst attempting to suck the altitude out of our brains.

We set off, up what appeared to be a gentle incline at a gentle pace, only to be overtaken at speed by the donkeys and the porters. One donkey, Kiki, stayed behind with us, ready to help if anyone had any mishaps. We made our way up, stopping off at regular intervals to take a sip of water. On occasions small children with raw red cheeks and long trails of snot hanging from their noses would run up to us, and go away again satisfied with a piece of fruit or a biscuit. Our bodies didn't quite know what was going on. At points in the sunshine I was boiling just in a t-shirt, and then a cloud would roll in and I would scramble to put on a fleece.

an acceptable location for lunch

What had appeared to be a gentle slope was now presenting me with problems. Large strides were impossible, and it seemed I could only go a few metres without having to stop and catch my breath. The Korean ladies and Chris were racing ahead of us at the front and seemed not to be affected by the same physical constraints we were suffering from.

At 4,200 metres we spied in the distance a tent. As we approached, we saw that they had set up a tent for us to have lunch in. I had been ready for us to just sit around on the grass and eat sandwiches, but as I looked through the plastic window I saw a proper table, with cutlery and napkins all laid out. The chef even had a big white hat on. Given the circumstances, lunch  of spaghetti and vegetables was pretty amazing, and we had a very satisfied rest in the intermittent sunshine. We also had the pleasure of experiencing the toilet tent for the first time. The less said about that, the better.

After lunch we walked the remaining distance to Ipsaicocha pass, the highest point we would reach that day at 4,450 metres and 7km from where we had started. Pete and Chris decided it would be a good idea to climb up the hard way and scaled what I can only describe as a cliff face, while the rest of us ambled up the gentle way. Chris and Fernando raced each other the last few metres - something that Chris would live to regret.

Amy at the top of Ipsaicocha

At the top of the pass it was freezing. We raced to take some photos and headed a little further down to rest properly on a bit of flat green land. It was rather a magical place and reminded me of the lush mossy landscapes imagined in a fairy tale. The green was not grass, but some other plant that looked like thousands of tiny green flowers embroidered to the ground. The only problem was that when you sat on them, tiny unseen needles stabbed through your clothes, so people rolled on to the ground and then squealed as they were stuck with pins. That said, it was a lovely, peaceful few moments, laying in the sunshine and finally warm. I couldn't have felt further away from commuter trains or problems left behind.

Fernando promised us that most of the remaining day's journey was downhill. Going downhill was much more fun than going uphill, especially with walking poles, which essentially meant you could launch yourself downwards at speed without the fear of falling over. The earth on this side was very loose, and each footfall was at risk, as I found when a landed on my knees and nearly slid down the side of the mountain. We stopped to rest and felt the onset of dismay as we realised we were not as near camp as we had thought. We travelled a total of 3.5km from the pass to camp, the last part of that uphill. The atmosphere changed a bit between us, people becoming quiet and tired, and it was as we reached camp at Sandor (4,200m) that I started to feel the onset of altitude sickness in the form of most amazingly bad headache.

almost at camp

We all flopped into our tents to rest and warm up; I think I put on three layers of clothes. The food tent had been put up again and we crowded in to eat a dinner of trout, play cards and drink coca tea. My headache got so bad I could barely see, so I got into my sleeping bag, putting on more clothes, and attempted to warm up. Amy and I attempted to play Phase 10 but as she pointed out, I was "shit at altitude" so we attempted to get some sleep. It was about 7.30pm.

17: climbing in altitude

overlooking the Plaza in Arequipa

The night bus from Nazca to Arequipa was a long one. I slept pretty fitfully and woke at around 5am thinking it was earlier. I couldn't help thinking about various people at home, 6 hours ahead, and wondering what they were doing. Most people were still sleeping, although Amy woke up around the same time I did, and we sat watching the desert as the sun rose. Something was glinting in the sand, creating an effect that made the ground seem to sparkle, and it was only as the sun got higher and stronger that you could see that it was actually due to the light reflecting off a sea of thousands of plastic bottles. This rubbish went on for miles and miles.

Monastério de Santa Catalina

Arequipa is a pretty (in its centre, anyway) colonial city - the second largest in Peru. It's 2,400m in altitude and we were starting to feel it: shortness of breath, and for me, weirdly sensitive sinuses. Our tiredness combined with getting used to the thinner air meant the day was pretty much written off; we managed a bit of light shopping and lunch, and by the time I'd faffed around trying to confirm our later flights from Cusco back to Lima, we'd knackered ourselves out.

The following day we visited a shop specialising in alpaca garments, and were taken round the back to see some of them sitting around in a field, and then on to see how the wool was sorted, spun and dyed - something we would see a few times in different places! We spent a lovely afternoon wandering round the Monastério de Santa Catalina, a beautiful nunnery-turned-museum with peaceful streets within its citadel, and I ate a truly enormous jacket potato, which was perhaps the best I think I have ever eaten, anywhere.

That evening we climbed aboard the night bus to Cusco, where I'd booked us VIP seats at the front on the top floor. Amy was not impressed, and spent most of the beginning of the journey in trepidation of the driver's actions: "He's not really going to overtake here, is he? Oh, yes. Yes, he is." Despite our alleged comfiness, the road was awful, and windy, and neither of us slept much at all. The temperature seemed to range between "off" and "on", which meant wearing all your clothes inside your sleeping bag, or trying to take everything off to cool down. Needless to say everyone was pissed off on arrival at 5.45am. I had visions of us sitting on our rucksacks in the cold outside the hotel, but as soon as we got there a guy came and took both our rucksacks, brought us in, and sat us down with a cup of coca tea until our rooms were ready. They couldn't have been kinder.

We slept for a good few hours, waking up again with the feeling of a massive hangover, and after a long shower walked into Cusco to have a massive breakfast at Jack's café (literally called "Gordo" or, "Fatty"). The rest of the day was spent getting bits and pieces needed for our trek: walking poles, flasks etc. That night we met with our tour group for the briefing for the next day. It was a bit unclear about exactly what was happening; due to a road being rebuilt, we would be doing a completely different walk to the one we thought we had booked on, albeit apparently higher and colder!

We had a very early start the next morning. Our group consisted of a couple of Aussie girls called Carly and Amanda, a guy on his own called Chris (his friend was in hospital with salmonella) and two Korean girls, as well as some Brits and some French Canadians doing another walk the following day. Our bus wound round uphill past the ruins of Sacsayhuaman, and we got a good view of the terraces from the road as it rose above the town. Our first stop was a project village sponsored by GAP (the tour company), where we heard more about the spinning, dying and weaving process. I always find the setup of demonstration and then being expected to buy a little awkward, but bought a little woven llama to give away as a present when I got home.

Following the village we visited a llama/alpaca project, where we entered the pens of different llamas and alpacas and were given leaves to feed them with. They were amazingly soft - especially the juveniles - and luckily I didn't suffer the same irrational fear of them that I experience with sheep (this isn't a real fear, just a dislike of being ganged up on with no means of escape).

our guide Henry drinking strawberry chicha

After sampling chicha (beer made from corn) and playing a game with frogs in a local bar, we headed to Ollantaytambo, where we would spend the night before climbing. As we approached the town, the sky disappeared behind a smoky veil, and I noticed that the mountain was on fire. The flames formed an almost straight line, as though it had been set deliberately, but nothing else about it looked in control.

As the sun set, we climbed the Incan ruins as Ollantaytambo. It was quite incredible to see the size of the massive blocks of stone which had been lifted up the hill. Before dinner we were told that the plans for the walk had been changed. Farmers were going on strike some time in the next couple of days, and that would mean roadblocks and no trains from Aguas Calientes, the town near Machu Picchu. We would have to do our walk in two days instead of three to make sure we got back to Cusco in time. Everyone felt a bit annoyed about this, having spent quite a lot of money on a trip that wouldn't be as long as we had thought!

We all gathered together to have dinner in a local restaurant, and our guide Henry drank about five cuba libres. The final part of my trip was about to begin.

dusk over Ollantaytambo

16: darkest Peru

When I arrived in Lima, the first thing that struck me was the strange fog that covered the city. Over the winter months, a thick grey mist hangs over everything at a low level, making it feel like its shrouded in a sort of dirty cotton wool. I had a day to kill before Amy arrived, so I took a walk down to see the travel agent to sort out our trip to Nazca.

Wandering round the quiet suburbs of Miraflores, I can't quite explain the the peculiar sense of affinity I felt with Lima. This was where I came from, 30 years ago, and the streets oddly reminded me of places I had visited and lived in with my family years before: I almost kept expecting my Mum to appear from round a corner, waiting to meet me in some shop or restaurant. I walked down to the coast and took the cliff path toward the centre of Miraflores. The sea was full of hundreds of surfers (the water must have been freezing) and gliders were climbing into bodysocks and jumping off the edge of the cliff into the circular air currents swirling about above the path. I headed back toward the hotel via the Artisan market. Not having bought anything up until this point I wasn't keen to fill my already full backpack with too many bits before the last few bits of travel we had ahead of us, but it was worth a look - full of beautiful alpaca products, silver jewellery and intricately carved gourds.

over the Panamerican highway

After picking Amy up from the airport, the next morning we had a quick look round the market and stuffed ourselves with empanadas before getting a taxi to the Cruz del Sur depot for the bus to Nazca. The landscape was totally different from what I had been used to: dusty roads, barren mountains and desert plains. Nazca was a bit of a dump, but the sites we had gone there to visit were worth it.

After waiting ages at the aerodrome to see the Nazca Lines, we took off in a four seater cessna. The little plane bounced along the tarmac in a way I can only describe as rather like a heavy bumblebee taking off from a fruit cake and we were in the air, soaring over incredible desert mountains. We wore headphones but they seemed more to protects our ears from the noise than for communication, as every now and then the assistant pilot would turn to us, point at his map and shout "monkey!", at which point the plane would turn sideways and the windows would face the ground in order for us to see and try and take pictures.

the spider

The Nazca Lines are weird. They were discovered when the American professor, studying from the air what he thought were remnants of ancient irrigation, saw the tracing of a huge hummingbird measuring 110m in length. In 1946 a German mathematician-turned-archeologist called Maria Reiche began studying them, an occupation which would take up the rest of her life. My parents lived in Peru in the 70s and recalled meeting her when visiting Nazca: they said she was "...strange".  There are hundreds of huge shapes and figures marked in the desert, from straight lines to a monkey, a spider and a whale amongst others. Maria decided that the lines were astronomical; they centred on the summer and winter solstice and pointed to the horizon in line where the sun and stars were at particular and important times of the year.

Being in a small plane is much like being in a small boat for me, so it wasn't really a surprise when I had to stop trying to take photos, and after the final lurching turn to see the last figure, I had to be sick. Amy tried very hard to ignore this, but no one could miss the telltale signs of her tapping her mouth repeatedly as she said to herself: "don't be sick, don't be sick". I prayed no one else would chuck.

visitors approaching from the desert

We headed from the aerodrome to Chauchilla cemetery, discovered in the 1920s and over 1,000 years old. It was a peculiar place, stretched out on a flat piece of desert with a small one-roomed building serving as a museum. Rows of stones have been laid out to denote a path, and simple straw huts on wooden stick have been erected over the burial areas. The graves are open, and many of the human remains still show skin and hair. Our tour guide told us that archeologists come back occasionally to clean and preserve the remains, but other than that very little study has been undertaken, no DNA analysis; they don't even know whether these remains are male or female. The weirdest thing about the place, and it's something I only noticed halfway through the visit, is that the remains are not just contained to the grave pits. Years ago the cemetery was plundered by grave robbers looking for valuables, and they literally ripped the remains apart. Tiny fragments of bone litter the sand, so small that at first your eyes take them in as part of the natural bleached colour of the sand. But when you look closely, you see bone in every square foot of the ground; some just tiny shards, some rather larger.

As we got back into the car, the air grew thicker and eventually the sky disappeared under a cloud of sand. We had dinner at the hotel Maria Reiche used to stay in and visited her planetarium to hear about the astronomical theory behind the lines. At the end of the lecture we were invited to look through their high powered telescope to look at jupiter and the moon.

15: the last of the Mayans

sunset from the wooden bar

We said goodbye to our Aussie friends, who were heading back to Roatan (the sister island with an equally large if not potentially more affluent number of divers) and on our penultimate day on Utila, went diving with Dec. Dec took us to Black Hills, a coral mountain to the south east of the island. This was the most impressive site we visited, and were treated to seeing toadfish, trumpetfish, black triggerfish, big eyed jacks, blue wrasse and ocean-going triggerfish, as well as many juveniles. The volume of marine life was much more impressive than any we had seen in Honduras so far, although it still felt lacking compared to the Red Sea and further north in the Caribbean.

The rest of our time in Utila was spent reading books we didn't want to carry, sunbathing, and drinking rum. We took a very early ferry to La Ceiba back on the mainland and got a fancy Hedman Alas coach to San Pedro Sula, where we treated ourselves to a carb-loaded and very cheesy pizza in the cavernous shopping centre. After that it was a long journey to Copán through amazing lush scenery. Traffic was delayed along the road, and as we approached a bridge we realised it was because part of the road making up the bridge had fallen away. We crossed it anyway.

Copán stela with jungle vines hanging behind

The next morning we were woken in Copán by rythmic drumming from the nearby school. After doing boring things like dropping laundry we took a tuktuk up to the Mayan ruins at Copán. We managed to team up with some American missionaries to cover the cost of an English speaking guide, and wandered through the site, almost managing to avoid the site. It was the last Mayan site we visited, and an impressive one to finish on.

amazingly intricate stonework

We climbed over huge tree roots that were breaking up the stones to the top of the main structure overlooking the plaza and sat enjoying the view for a while. On our way out the peace was interrupted as there was a massive influx of teenage schoolboys, whose teachers were apparently blind to the fact that they were blatantly taking photos of us (not that we looked interesting?) and making hissing noises - a particularly unattractive trait of Latin American men. Now normally it takes quite a lot to annoy me, but for some reason it really, really pissed me off - to the point where I shouted "a little respect!" in Spanish (nearly followed by "you little fuckers", but I wasn't certain on the grammatical structure to follow) and looked around frantically trying to identify their teacher so I could relay my thoughts on the matter. Luckily for Clare, he wasn't easily identified (probably the fat guy on his mobile smoking a cigarillo), so we headed out toward the museum.

The museum was probably the best we'd seen. It was large, airy and well lit, and had a huge central reconstruction of one of the central pyramids in the ruins which we'd declined to pay extra to see. There was some beautiful stonework, particularly involving animals and birds, and we enjoyed the respite from the heat, until we were chased out by the hoardes of schoolboys arriving.

We jumped on another tuk tuk to Macaw Mountain, a nearby bird and butterfly sanctuary, where we drank beer in the pouring rain, and a large parrot destroyed the top of my hat. That night I switched on our lightswitch and the power in the whole street went out.

The next morning I didn't feel too good, probably because of the badly microwaved burrito I'd been served the night before, but we packed up and got the bus across the border towards La Antigua in Guatemala. The journey was rainy and foggy, and we could hardly see the mountain roads as we wound through them.

We arrived at the Black Cat hostel in the rain, squeezing into the heaving bar for shelter. Clare went off to find about rooms while I waited with our backpacks, and managed to get one bed there and another at the sister hostel round the corner. We had a quick beer in the bar and then headed our separate ways. That night at the Black Cat put the final nail in the already decaying hostel coffin for me, when I was woken at midnight by an American girl who decided that the courtyard in the middle of the hostel was an excellent place for her to have a three hour shouting match with her boyfriend; only to be woken again at 4am by people sleeping through their alarms for getting up for buses.

rainclouds cover the volcano

I was in a pretty foul mood the next morning, surprisingly enough, and Clare and I managed to find another room near the market. Antigua is full of churches, many of which have been destroyed in various earthquakes shuddering through central America. We wandered round visiting the grounds of all of these, hoping the next earthquake wouldn't hit while we were there.

There were lots of weddings going on, with participants and guests dressed in various shades of shiny synthetics. The weather changed quickly between sunshine and thundery showers, and we escaped from the rain into Casa Santo Domingo, a beautiful hotel created in the grounds of an old monastery and containing ruins and some interesting galleries and museums.

The next day, we discovered the Bagel Barn, where we had a four hour breakfast. The afternoon was spent dodging the pouring rain and going into some really crap museums. Clare was leaving the next day; she went to get her hair cut and, pissed off with the rain, we went to a cafe and talked about her experience of Peru. As the rain cleared we headed down to see the last church ruins at Capuchinas and La Récolecion. Slightly out of town, this felt more isolated than the other ruins, and as the sky darkened we were anxious to make our way back. That evening we headed back to Casa Santo Domingo and celebrated our trip with a bottle of prosecco and probably our most expensive meal.

I felt sad when Clare left the next morning, headed for Rio to meet her friend Sarah, but we'd had such an amazing time and neither of us wanted to prolong the goodbye. I wandered to the adventure tour place, where we'd already enquired about trips up the various volcanoes surrounding the town, but they were still not running any trips due to the heavy and persistent rain, and there were few people interested in signing up. This was disappointing as I had a few days to spend in Antigua and this had been my plan, partly to warm up for Peru, but the weather had caused many problems around Guatemala, with mudslides and death, and I wasn't about to screw things up by being swept down (or into) a volcano. So after a few days of updating this diary and eating many bagels, I took a 4am colectivo to Guatemala City, and boarded a plane to Lima.

14: rescue diver (part 2)

The morning of the practical I was feeling pretty nervous. We'd gone over everything but I hadn't had time to read through all of the manual from cover to cover and I was concerned, being the square I am, that I would have missed something. We weren't meeting until later in the morning, so I tried to have a good breakfast and flicked through the book, but I'd reached saturation point.

a typical cause of diver stress

There were three of us doing the practical exam, me, Marie from Canada, and Natalie. Jimmy was our course instructor, and helping him were two other divemasters, Sophie from England and Guillermo from Ecuador. We´d been warned that as part of the course we´d need to be vigilant on safety, so we had to check over the boat, which had been cunningly stripped of first aid equipment, oxygen and life vests by the wily crew. We ran about gathering all the bits we needed and I gathered all the names of everyone who would be on the boat to give to the office in case of emergency, and formed a roll call. While we were getting set up, Jimmy and Guillermo seemed to be having a spat (see manual section on "signs of diver stress"!): Guillermo was drinking 'beer' and Jimmy was muttering profanities in his direction. Aware that this was a (quite well acted) set up, I approached Guillermo, who was near the oxygen room and appeared to be hammering crooked nails into a piece of wood (as you do), and asked him should he really be drinking and perhaps he could please put away the hammer in case there was some terrible accident that required EFR personnel. None of it was real of course, but we were primed for tricks, and there was an air of drama about, particularly among the students doing their open water course who wondered what the hell was going on.

Once we we'd set the boat up, we sat up on the wooden deck for the briefing. Jimmy had told us the day before that he was pleasantly surprised at how well we had done on all the skills in the water, and that while he normally had comments, he'd had nothing he felt he needed to point out to us. I knew he had tricks up his sleeve that day, and told him I didn't trust him one bit. He did give me a strong travel sickness pill though, as I'd told him I was worried about getting sick again.

I was getting my kit together and chatting to Sophie when there was the crash of an air tank behind me, and suddenly Jimmy was sprawled face down on the ground halfway down a ramp, with his legs twisted awkwardly half in and half out of the tank room. Guillermo was doing a good job of playing the anguished attacker, shouting "what have I done?" and rocking backwards and forwards slightly madly. I told him to shut up, and held Jimmy's head while Marie tried to roll him awkwardly over down the ramp. As he turned I saw that he had blood (or, ketchup) all over his face. I started to simulate CPR, when Guillermo screamed "I can no longer live with myself!" and ran over to the dock where he dived into the water and started to drown himself. I told Marie to go and sort him out. I had to press my mouth to Jimmy's cheek to simulate CPR, and after a few moments, he was "awake"! I had succeeded. I then turned my attention to Guillermo, where Marie was getting him out of the water. As I walked down the deck, a girl looked and me and gestured as if to say "you've got something on your face", and I couldn't help laughing, because I knew I was totally smeared in ketchup.

our boat. No, really

We weren't going far to the dive site where we would do our practical scenarios, but the minute we crossed the reef I knew we were in for a challenge. The waves were crashing so high there was surf on top of them (Jimmy later told us 6-8ft waves), and I knew that this was prime hurling conditions. We anchored a little way off shore and immediately got in the water to practice towing an unresponsive diver back to the boat. The conditions off the dock had been flat and calm; the only thing we'd had to worry about were the skills we were concentrating on. Here in the open water, the waves were crashing so high that most of the time I could barely see the boat: Marie was the 'victim', and I towed her back to the boat. Next we did panicked diver. The first bit of this went ok, but my mask was slipping and I'd swallowed a lot of water and got it in my eyes. I felt the rush of nausea coming over me and a huge frustration that it was just too hard, and my confidence in myself wavered. Jimmy and Guillermo were both on the boat and knew something was up. The ladder to the boat was being pulled out by the waves and every time I tried to climb it crashed into me and bashed me hard in the stomach. Jimmy, who'd threatened he was hard as nails, said "don't worry honey" in his southern drawl and helped me up. Within seconds Guillermo had got my BCD and weight belt off and got me some water, but I just felt so upset at feeling sick and needing to get out. After a while I was sick and felt better. Jimmy told me later he didn't think I would get back in the water. I started to put my kit back on.

Jimmy decided we should immediately focus on the underwater skills, to get away from the waves and surface current. We all descended about 10-15 metres into a sandy pit between some coral walls, where immediately the instructors started dismantling everyone's equipment. They started taking off their BCDs, undoing the BCD inflator hoses, losing their masks, loosening their air tanks so they floated away... and it wasn't just them. My tank was unhooked, and various bits of my equipment were detatched by stealth. The whole point was to present a problem solving exercise: prioritising what needed to be sorted first, and being alert to problems. It went on for ages, it was a bit like a circus - just chaos everywhere, fins floating about, masks in the sand - but it was fun and my sickness abated a bit. We then moved on to underwater rescue exercises; I had to bring one of the instructors to the surface who had a ´hand injury´. Of course, she started to struggle, and as we reached about two feet from the surface, I realised Jimmy had turned my air supply off (which I knew might be coming at some point), so I turned to her and gestured 'out of air'. He turned it back on immediately and as we surfaced said I'd done exactly the right thing, but was bemused as to why it had taken nine metres for me to realise my air was out, as he'd turned it off at the bottom.

that's me, hanging from the helicopter

At the surface, we tried again the rescue of an unresponsive diver, that I'd been unable to do earlier. Sophie was the victim. I swam out to her and went through all the actions required: checking for breathing, simulating CPR and kicking to get her back to the boat, while at the same time starting to undo her equipment. After a few moments, the instructor who was monitoring me said "you'd better start swimming soon", and I turned and realised that I had gone nowhere, despite swimming as hard as I could. The conditions were awful; the waves were crashing above us and I was trying to shield the water from getting in Sophie's face, and swallowing a lot of it myself along the way. The rules are: if you can get back to the boat in under 5 minutes, continue CPR; if you can't, just get swimming. So I swam, pulling Sophie along as I went. As I neared the boat, the back of it was rearing up about a foot out of the water, and it was impossible to keep hold of her and get her equipment off at the same time. The only way I could do it was by dragging her hair, because if I held on to her equipment, she would just start to float away. She was still playing unconscious, but I kept telling her how sorry I was I was hurting her. She had some awareness of where we were, and had to hold her head out of the water a little, which was good because we were so near the crashing stern that it would have broken both our necks if we got underneath it. Jimmy was watching carefully from the boat and as I got Sophie's equipment off, I called to him and said could he please help with her hands. He held them as I struggled against the bastard ladder and got out, asking the captain to help get my gear off, and together we both hauled Sophie on to the boat. As I turned her over and did another check, Jimmy clapped me on the back and said well done.

We went for a bit of a leisure dive after that, although I was a bit on edge as I was expecting more tricks, and by the time we got back on the boat I was sadly feeling ill again. Jimmy said the conditions were too bad to stay out there, so we headed back to the marina, and as soon as we got off the boat I puked my guts up. I wobbled back to go and start rinsing kit and putting it away, when suddenly the spat between Jimmy and Guillermo began again. This time, they were so convincing it really looked nasty: they hit each other and fell to the ground, rolling into the water off the dock. There was ketchup everywhere. The final trick. We eventually got them out of the water and sat up on the raised deck with cokes to go over it. Jimmy's top was stained with salsa. He was very proud of all of us, and said that the conditions were the worst he's ever done the Rescue Diver course in.

The next day I took the written exam, and Clare called me a loser because I got 100%. So now it's official, I can rescue you from any water based emergencies, but as I've already told Helen, I'm afraid my skills will only go so far: I believe she's still stuck in the bath, wrinkling up, looking more like a dried fig every day.

13: rescue diver (part 1)

divemaster Dec

Now I don't have many photos to accompany this post, mainly because I spent a lot of time in the water for the rest of this week, so some of them will be random, and I'll nick some more of Clare's. As part of signing up for courses, Clare and I got two free dives, which we took on the Monday morning. Utila is meant to be one of the best diving locations in the Caribbean, but I have to say both Clare and I were a little underwhelmed. I've been diving in Brazil, Mexico, Belize, the Virgin Islands and the Red Sea and all of them had richer coral and aquatic life than I saw off Utila. Admittedly, the reef has suffered hurricane damage, but it was disappointing nonetheless. For some reason, I felt sea sick during our dive (I am prone but not usually when the sea is calm) and I had to be sick underwater, which is an interesting experience. I swam away from Clare to find a spot away from any coral, but she kept swimming towards me... even though I think she knew what was about to happen. She wasn't going to leave me! You have to be quite technical: your regulator is set up so that you can puke through it, so you really have to time breathing carefully. Reassuringly for me, I didn't panic, so all was well. Our dives were directed by Irishman Dec, who helped me out of the water and kindly got me water and out of my kit. He used to be a corporate banker in London and then decided to become a divemaster in Utila, where he and his wife Sarah have built a house. The two of them were a fab pair; both bleached blonde by the sun and with an air of cheerfulness that comes with living on the water. It turns out Sarah was from Bexleyheath, very near me, so we had a moments of nostalgia!

That afternoon Clare started her course, so I met up with her on the high rise deck at the dive centre that evening, where I got chatting to Dan, an army officer on leave who would be going to Afghanistan later in the year. We sat chatting and drinking beer in the warm evening air, watching the sun slip away beneath the horizon, and headed across to an Italian restaurant to top up our carbohydrate intake, which I'm sure was at perilously low levels.

I had a quiet morning the next day while Clare was continuing her course. As part of doing the Rescue Diver course, I also had to do the PADI-endorsed Emergency First Responder course: basically first aid. I spent the afternoon in the dive centre watching the EFR video, amused by all the staged scenarios where the responder just happened to be carrying latex gloves and a pocket breathing mask. There were just two of us doing the course; our instructor Jimmy came in and introduced himself after we'd finished watching the videos, and I sat chatting with him for a while when we were on our own. Jimmy was a heavily accented "ex law enforcement official" from Tennessee, and he was keen to let me know that this would be an incredibly hard course, and it was likely that I would cry at some point, which I found pleasing. We started the EFR part of the course early the next morning, talking about all the usual first aid stuff like breathing and CPR, as well as things like administration of oxygen etc. It was Clare's birthday, so that evening we headed out with the boys to a Mexican restaurant and the treehouse bar at the Jade Seahorse.

probably good that this is small and blurry

After finishing EFR the next morning we started the theory of the Rescue Diver course. I`d been lent one of UDC's manuals and needed had to read the whole book in about two days; we would get in the water the next day. That afternoon, Clare had finished her course, so we celebrated by lazing about in the pool drinking beers from the pizza restaurant, and the longer we stayed, the more and more people seemed to join us. It turned into a bit of a crazy pool party, mainly where Clare, Dave and I tried to drown each other, and Aaron bought us (me? I think I ate most of it) pizza which we ate sitting in the jacuzzi. Eventually we drank the bar out of beer and that sort of put a stop to proceedings.

We got in the water off the dock the next morning. I was ready to be burned alive by the sun, so was attractively geared up with a long wet suit and a headscarf to protect me from getting fried. If you've never had to get in or out of a full wetsuit: imagine being in a changing room in a shop, trying to get on and do up a pair of trousers that are slightly too small for you? Well, it's like that, but less dignified, and in public.After several hours, I had got it on, and we were in the water.

bad photo of divers practicing off the dock

We started off with basic surface skills: how to drag a diver back to a boat; how to manage a panicked diver. The first was pretty easy: pull them back by their tank or using an arm lock. The second was a bit more taxing, as a panicked diver is likely to try and climb on top of you or pull you under, so you have to swim under the water, creep up behind them, grab their tank and inflate their BCD. Of course, the instructors made it as hard as they could, so they would immediately start struggling even more, which meant getting hit in the face and them trying to pull out your air supply.

We continued skills under the water, doing buddy breathing (where you breathe from your buddy's alternate regulator) and rescuing unresponsive divers from the sand, and later moved to rescuing an unresponsive diver from the surface, which involved combining giving CPR and dragging them back to the boat - a bit harder than I thought it would be. Tomorrow we would go over all the skills we had learned, and head out into open water to do the practical part of the exam. We were promised that surprises would be in store.

12: from Belize to Honduras

Clare and a tube

The ATM caves were a hard act to follow, but the next day we went on a cave tubing trip. This basically involved a bit of a walk through a forest carrying a large rubber ring, after which point we jumped into the river sitting on said ring.

Sadly our tour guide didn´t seem as interested in us as the ATM guys were, so we didn't get the same sort of helpful narrative about the surrounding area, aside from him serving up termites. I can't remember if Clare ate any, but she certainly knew that they tasted "minty". Unfortunately the idea of eating live bugs straight from their nest didn't really appeal, so I passed.

The site was much more set up for tourists than the ATM caves were. There was a big reception area with  picnic tables and a restaurant. The walk to the river entrance had steps put in and rails where the ground was a bit uneven; where the ATM caves were so raw and rough, this felt almost a bit Disney-fied. It was fun though. After we had launched into the water, we floated down under a giant cave roof in virtual darkness and past giant formations. After a while, as the river got faster, we all had to link up and float as a group. The guide pulled us in the right direction using a rope, and all I can say is that he must have had incredible strength to do so in the weight of the water. We went over mini rapids and under a swarm of bats, and it was enjoyable, but rather sedate. One of the more exciting moments came when one of the more adventurous boys decided he was ready to go the rapids alone, and popped his tube.

The next morning we teamed up with Kim and took a couple of buses to Placencia, right on the south east coast, the intention being to take the boat from there to Honduras. Placencia is known as a place "for US retirees", and sure enough, the building happening along the road down the thin strip of land was astounding, a bit like being in a sort of mini-Florida. We managed to get ourselves set up in a decent hotel right on the beach, and spent the next day doing absolutely nothing but lazing on the sand (Kim went diving but I passed as I still had a cold). Clare went down to the office to get our boat tickets and came back empty handed: our boat had engine problems so we would have to go back to Dangriga, further up the coast, and catch our bus from there.

refugees?

After an evening of very rich coconut shrimp curry and various quantities of rum, we got back on an early bus heading north. The driver changed CDs, and soon we were listening to Dolly Partons Christmas Classics; I don't think I need to explain the incongruity, but it was very very funny, and the driver himself was laughing so hard he was almost crying. Kim left us along the road to Dangriga to visit the Jaguar ecology centre.

I'm not sure what I imagined the ferry to Honduras to be like, but as I sat there waiting for Clare to get her passport back and get on, all I could think that there were an awful lot of people, queueing for a very small boat. Eventually the boat got so full that people, including Clare, were sitting on the floor. The guy sitting next to me was a prime example of why travellers should have a shower as often as possible; at one point he stretched his arms up and I was nearly sick. It was a good three hours to Puerto Cortez in Honduras, a lot of it spent bumping up and down, but at least I had a seat; poor Clare was sitting on the floor unable to lay back due to the risk of squashing a small sleeping boy.

The boat arrived to chaos: taxi drivers touting for business crowded the boat so much that we were practically being pushed back into the water, but by this stage we had teamed up with a couple of doctors called Huw and Lowrie, so we stood our ground and walked up to the main road to get a cheaper taxi to the immigration office. It's always a bit nerve racking not having your passport (especially not being "officially" anywhere), but we soon had them back and jumped on a colectivo to San Pedro Sula. Along the road I was struck how developed Honduras is; there were loads of great shiny shopping malls and restaurants lining the road, and the bus station at San Pedro Sula was simply huge. Just when we thought we would not be able to catch a bus that evening, we decided to try the posh bus company Hedman Alas, and managed to get on our way to La Ceiba.

spot the shrine to bananas

The next morning we took the ferry from La Ceiba to Utila. It was a proper ferry, with proper seats, which was a bonus. On arrival we met up with Utila Dive Centre and they showed us the hotel we would stay at: a leafy pleasant place with a pool and pizza restaurant called the Mango Tree; then took us down to the dive centre to talk about options. Clare signed up to do her Advanced Open Water again, and I signed up to do Rescue Diver - more about that later! We weren't starting for a couple of days, so explored the island and did boring things like laundry. There is a curious place that's a bar and hotel called the Jade Seahorse, and it seems to be a sort of outdoor art gallery too, with all sorts of weird sculptures made out of bottles and bits of tile and coloured glass. Hanging everywhere were big banana spiders (not sure if they're called that because they eat bananas or look like them; they're yellow, anyway).

... aaaaah ...

The open air pizza restaurant at the Mango played movies a couple of times a week, and so we relaxed over pizza and pasta whilst watching Shutter Island, a sadly disappointing DeCaprio/Scorcese production, sitting with who were to be our friends that week: Aaron and Bryce (Aussie), Dave (US) and Marina (Aussie). We all bonded over a kitten, which seemed to be wandering round ownerless and I succeeded in getting to sleep in my lap for the duration of the film. Clare didn't bond over the kitten of course, she just rolled her eyes and sighed, but didn't go quite so far as saying she wanted to kick it.

11: underground

We left Caye Caulker the same way we had come in, on the chunky speedboat back to Belize City, and found our way to the rather run down bus station to catch a bus to San Ignacio, in the west of the country. A lot of the regular buses in central america are old US school buses, some of them still the trademark yellow. They're bouncy, and the seats have probably more than seen their last day, so you end up being bounced into the metal frame. This is OK for a short journey to the shops, but it's a bit of an arse cruncher when you're travelling across country. That said, Belize is pretty small, so getting to San Ignacio took about three hours or so, and it was interesting to see the country pass by through the windows. Central america is unbelieveably lush and green, blessed with rolling hills and tropical plants dripping with flowers. On arrival at San Ignacio we faffed about a bit trying to find a place to stay, eventually settling on J&R hostel, run by a kindly elderly man. We told him we were interested in visiting the Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM) caves and he told us we would get a deal if we mentioned his name at Mayawalk Tours down in the town. We'd already decided we were heading there anyway, and I guess it wasn't too much of a surprise to hear that his 'deal' was not exclusive and every other hostel and B&B in town were offering this discount! We booked the cave trip for the next morning and decided on doing cave tubing the following day. At the tour office we made friends with the lovely Kim, an ecologist from home who`d already visited the caves that day and said they were brilliant.

The next morning broke to one of the most amazing experiences of my journey so far (so sorry, but this might be a bit of a long one). Our bus (an old school one of course) headed back on the road to Belmopan, stopping to pick up our lunch, rucksacks and helmets along the way, finally turning off on to a bumpy muddy road leading down the tracks towards the cave. As the bus lurched in and out of the ditches, our guides pointed out the various crops being grown in the fields by the road in neat rows: mahogany, oranges, and the very odd looking cotton tree, that had a ring of thorns round its base like a giant rose. Throughout the day our guide were great, highlighting plans and animals and describing their function in the jungle.

whatever this was, it was rank

We started our hike through the jungle - it wasn`t long or strenuous, but it was interesting and fantastic fun. Within a few metres of the start of the trail we were waist height in water, crossing quite a fast moving river. Luckily we had known what to expect and we were both wearing pretty much just swimming gear. We`d managed to borrow some trainers from Mayawalk, which was great because the only closed shoes either of us had were hiking boots, which we didn`t fancy getting wet. Our guide Carlos told us he used to work for the British army (still stationed in Belize in areas) as a tracker, and as we hiked he pointed out tracks of big cats in the mud, and did slightly odder things like coaxing a tarantula out of its hidey hole. We were given leaves to taste and told of their medicinal properties (some were more pleasant than others), and crossed the river two more times before we reached the base camp area.

eel first aid with a machete

We stopped for a rest and got our stuff together for entering the cave. We would leave our bags here, and Carlos would take cameras in his dry bag - although Clare had her waterproof one too so we kept that ourselves. After eating some suspiciously orange crisps, I rinsed my hands in the river, and then, struck by all the silvery fish, wondered whether any good photos would come out, so I borrowed Clare`s camera and stuck it under the water. Needless to say they were crap, but a few moments later Clare thought she would have a go.

There was a shriek from behind me, and I turned to see Clare looking a bit surprised, with blood running down her fingers, exclaiming "some fucker bit me!". Carlos rinsed her finger in drinking water, exposing the (quite deep) bite marks, and exclaimed it to be an eel. After iodining and wrapping her up, he took the camera back to the water and managed to get some photos of the attacker, which was sticking up and holding still as though it were a stick. But I won't post them here, they're simply too horrifying and evil.

After getting over the shock of this vicious, unprovoked attack, we let the other group go first, and climbed over the rocks to the right of the cave into the deep pool immediately under the cave entrance. It's quite hard swimming in trainers, you know. We climbed up quite a steep ledge and followed Carlos round into the river flowing out of the cave.

As we moved away from the light of the entrance, it was clear how dark it was inside, and the light from our helmets barely penetrated this darkness. The water was a constant roar in our ears, and we moved up the river in pairs, passing on warnings to the pair behind us if there was a sharp ledge or a big rock under the water. I stayed at the back, and occasionally I would turn and look behind me, half expecting to see something or someone else. We climbed up through the river for maybe two hours, clambering over massive boulders and up slippery ledges, all the time wading through the rushing water, which was at points sometimes so strong it felt as though it would sweep you away. There were lots of ways you could get hurt, and it was pretty important to be sure footed and not let yourself slip, as if you do there are lots of sharp rocks under the water waiting to stab you. It was striking to think that hundreds of years ago the Mayans had climbed up into these caves with only firelight, and at points Carlos told us there were little grooves where fires would have been lit along the way. At points we were swimming again, the bed of the river at some untold depth.

Clare and I swimming through the caves

Clare and Carlos in the cathedral

Along the way Carlos pointed out to us the natural formations of the rock; where the lime was active and slimy like some sort of cave troll snot, and where it was inactive, sparkling like thousands of microscopic gemstones. At one point along the river there was a patch of earthy ground where, inexplicably, there grew a cluster of green and healthy looking plants in the darkness. There were holes in the soft ceiling above us that had been dug out by bats, but sadly they were not to be seen any more, kept away by the noise and lights of human visitors.

We reached our destination point. There was a large rock to our right, and above that a very steep incline of about 15ft of rocky earth that looked climeable. Carlos directed us how to climb the rock, where to put our feet, and we navigated round it onto the ledge above. It was a bit of a scramble to the top, but then we were away from the river crashing below. Carlos told us to take off our shoes and walk in our socks, to avoid damaging the fragile floor but keeping out the oils and bacteria from our feet. Both were full of river grit. All around us, half buried in the earth, were bits of pottery and little orange ribbons denoting the areas where we should not step. Carlos told us a little about the cave, which was believed to represent an entrance to the Mayan underworld Xibalba.

Pot with monkey detail

We climbed up through a small entrance and found ourselves in the 'cathedral', a giant cavern decorated with massive stalactites and stalagmites millions of years old. Everywhere beneath our feet were Mayan artefacts, thousands of years old, some smashed and in pieces, some whole, all calcified into the earth. We took a lot of photographs, but many of them have not come out well due to the flash catching the tiny droplets of moisture present in the air. Carlos told us that 98% of the artefacts were untouched. It's incredible that they have not been removed to a museum, but it seems that there is nowhere suitable to take them, and here remains the safest place.

This was a place of sacrifice. Archeologists have recorded the remains so far of 14 humans, the majority of which are children. On ledges, out of reach and away from our sight, were skeletons of babies that were sacrificed by the Mayans. Carlos warned us to keep our cameras away from the artefacts to avoid damaging them, and at one point threatened to take away the (very nice) camera of one of our group as the lady insisted on placing her camera so close to the remains. As if to highlight the point, we later came across a smashed ulna, and when Clare asked what had happened to it, Carlos shrugged and said "a tourist dropped their camera on it".

It is clearly very sad to think that such precious remains could be destroyed by someone behaving so carelessly, but this strengthened something that both Clare and I were already feeling: should we be here? Not just anybody is allowed to come into the caves; the Belizean tourist board has only granted licenses for a small number of tour companies to conduct them, and the groups are small. To prevent any further erosion to the site, it seems obvious that it's only a matter of time before the caves are closed to tourists for good. To have any higher number of visitors enter the caves would equal destruction of the site. That doesn't address the fact that it's a sacred area, and having it as a tour site doesn't sit well with many people of Mayan descent. We both felt a sort of selfish catch 22 about this: on the one hand, we felt privileged to be able to see such a place, but on the other, we felt that we didn't want anyone else to go there or to threaten what remains.

We picked our way carefully through the cathedral, coming to an area where a 20ft ladder had been erected. Two of our group, including Clare, have a real problem with heights, so it was a case of pacing it and going slowly. As we all gathered at the top, Carlos asked us all to turn off our headtorches and sit for a few moments in silence. After a minute or two, he asked us each to say a few words about how we felt coming into the caves. It could have been cheesy, and anywhere else it would have been, but it wasn't.


We moved on and climbed a little further down, until we reached a chamber that led no further, and here, sprawled on the floor, lay the Crystal Maiden.

the Crystal Maiden

Carlos told us that he thought she lay exactly in the position that she died; there are apparently cracks in her spine, and she lays in such a way that it looks as though she were pushed backwards. Of course we will never know exactly what happened, or why she was sacrificed.

Coming back down the ladder was a little more traumatic than coming up, but we made our way back to where we had left our shoes and negotiated our way out of the cave, hiking back down the river the same way we had come in. Carlos had obviously judged our temperaments by this stage, and decided it would be funny to hide from us on top of ledges and take our photos. He deliberately took us back the hard way, squeezing through tight areas that only our necks would fit through, sliding down ledges into whirlpools where the water was so strong it almost took my shorts off.

I've had many adventures so far, and clearly the whale sharks and the manatees are up there as experiences of a lifetime, but I will never forget our trip to the ATM caves, which is probably one of the most fun, interesting and exciting things I've done in the last ten years.