A despedida and a couple of caves

Saturday night we had our despedida, which is our farewell dinner with everyone in the program.  All of the students, the families and the teachers are invited to come to a dinner/dance/farewell to our time in Mexico.  This year marked the 30th year of OU's Programa Mayab so we had an excuse to celebrate a little more.

It was really nice to get together for dinner with the whole family and to see everyone from the program.  You can tell how much the families enjoy getting to spend time together.  I also enjoyed getting to see my mama and papa from last year, who I don't get to see nearly enough.

We spent Sunday by our newly filled swimming pool with all of the relatives.  We ate a picnic-style lunch and baked in the hot, hot sun.

Today (Monday) was a national holiday, which means no school or work in my case.  We decided to spend the day going to the caves of Calcehtok, which is Mayan for serpent's neck.  There are about 30 caves connected by intricate passageways, making these caves the biggest in all of the Yucatan.

The caves are located in the middle of nowhere, only marked by a small handwritten sign.  A guide can be found near the entrance and they are completely necessary if you want to make your way both in and out of the caves.  (Our guide told us a story about three guys that thought they didn't need a guide and ended up spending 3 days in complete darkness, during which they went crazy.)  We were certain to get a guide.  There were only 5 in our group so we joined up with another group of people to make 14 in all.  The guide

asked us which route to take: easy or extreme.  We chose extreme.

The first decent was pretty easy and very beautiful.  We took some before pictures to remember how clean we were going in because we knew we would be dirty after 3 hours in the caves.  If only I had known then how dirty we were about to get.

After getting further down into the caves, we lost the sunlight of the entrance and had only a flashlight each to guide our way through the complete darkness.  The guide took us deeper and deeper into the slippery cave system.  The further and further we got into the cave the more difficult each passageway between caverns became.  

At many points throughout the trip we had to squeeze between rocks, army crawl under passageways, climb up ropes and slide down muddy slopes.  It was certainly an adventure.  There were a few times where I didn't think I was going to make it through some of the

 passages. However, I would squeeze through only to have the guide tell us that the next passageway would be even smaller.  

All of the caves were really beautiful.  We saw cavern after cavern where our guide pointed out shapes formed by the naturaleza.  We also got to see many bats - some of which were vampire bats - a lot of their guano and a bunch of things left behind by the mayans who once inhabited the cave. 

Our guide also told us a lot about the Mayans who used the cave and the rumors of the Aluxes who still reside inside.  We weren't lucky enough to see any of these Aluxes, but who knows if they are out there.  

After 3 hours inside of the caves, a lot of our group was ready to head back up to sunlight.  The guide gave us three options:  1. we could take the tourist route  2. we could take an easy route OR 3. we could take the macho route.  Guess which one we took?

The macho route was also the quickest so we picked it.  It involved having us squeeze through what was the smallest passageway thus far.  And I mean squeeze through.  I really didn't think any of us would make it through but low and behold, we did and from there we could see the light at the end of the tunnel.

My Lesson of the Day: I am definitely not claustrophobic.