I experienced another unusual Friday night this weekend just passed. While walking a friend to the bus station I passed some couch surfers whom I had met in San Cristobal. They had just arrived and were heading to a hotel situated right next to the ruins. They held a hand drawn map which showed how to get into the ruins from the back of the hotel, through the jungle. We decided to try and find the path that night. We set off around 9 pm with torches in hand. Passing under a barbwire fence which had been somewhat pulled up, we were suddenly in the jungle. We followed what seemed to be a path with animal noises all around us adding a sense of reality to where we were. The blair witch project definitely entered my mind a few times while walking in the darkness. In one instance I spotted some glowing eyes in a bush, which ended up being a bandicoot, scared off by four sets of eyes gleaming back at him/her. Ten minutes into our journey we spotted lights in the distance that seemed to be heading towards us. We turned off our torches apart from one which was a red sensor light and attempted to tread quietly over the crunchy leaves and fallen branches in our way. Several times the path ended and we hastily searched for a different way that would take us in the right direction. We had to go back on our tracks several times to follow a different fork that we had come across. At one stage we were attacked by ants who crawled up our legs and bit hard into our skin (probably getting me back for eating them!). The lights that we had seen heading towards us, we discovered after a while, were fixed lights from the street, not at all coming for us! After walking for around an hour and arriving at yet another dead end, I was ready to head back to camp, not believing that we would find our way there. One of the guys in the group pleaded for us to wait and set off scrambling up a huge rock. After a few minutes he signalled for us to come up. Reluctantly we followed through. He had found signs that other people had been through the same way – rubbish on the ground. A few more minutes of climbing over very large branches that had fallen onto the path, we arrived at a very small wall that resembled some of the ruins that we had seen. Looking over to the right of the wall was a cleanly laid gravel path. I couldn’t believe it, we had made it in! It felt like we were on the yellow brick road, heading for a mysterious adventure. The next few hours were surreal. Wondering around the ruins, climbing pyramids
and tunnels, being attacked by bats that were hidden in some of the rooms of the pyramids (seemed like a scene from a horror movie!), scorpions scattering across the rocks of the ruins and looking up from the top of pyramids into a brilliantly lit sky with thousands of stars shining down on us. At around 1am we were all starting to feel the effects of sleep deprivation and headed back out of the ruins, along the same path we had come on. Half way through we started to hear the amazing sounds of the Howler monkeys up in the trees above us. It’s an impressive sound to hear the cries of these monkeys so close. One was extremely close by and sounded like what I imagine a jaguar to sound like when attacking its pray. We decided to head onto the road where guards were sure to be but where ferocious sounding monkeys would not. Almost reaching the hotel, a guard saw us and stopped us. He made us empty our bags and pockets and seemed to be searching for drugs (sneaking into the ruins and taking mushrooms is a regular occurrence). He questioned us asking what we were doing wondering around in the jungle at night and did we know that it’s a prohibited area at night, etc. We mumbled something about being lost and he let us go saying that next time he would take our passports (for those of us who weren’t from Mexico). We headed back to the hotel, content with our nights adventure.Picture thanks to Josh Metzger
