Lanquin Caves

When I was at Tikal, I started chatting to a woman who gave me a recommendation to stay at "El Portal" when I went to Semuc Champey. The hostel was full on the day I arrived, so they put me in a sister hostel for the night and drove me out to Lanquin caves for free. The caves are deep and have electric lighting for something like the first 400m, just as well as I managed to leave my torch on my bed in a fit of absent mindedness. (Frightening to think what would happen without a torch in the event of a power failure; too easy to get lost in the labyrinth!) The stalactites and stalagmites are incredibly dramatic, and with the difficult light quite hard to photograph....

A stalagmite that appeared to me like a crouching jaguar on a pedestal.

Deep in the cave and dripping with sweat before making the return trip to the cave mouth. The rocks were incredibly slippery and hazardous, making progress slow. Another group came into the cave, the girls coped with the heat by removing their T shirts which of course enhanced the experience on the way out. Their guide had this talent for blowing down the handrails which were on the sides of some of the cat walks, making these moaning monster noises that echoed around the cavern and which were at first quite scary.

One of the highlights of the visit is to wait for it to get dark outside, and sit at the mouth of the cave. Some of the bats (and there are many, many) were already streaming out of the cave, but when the internal lights were switched off, it turned into a flood of bats moving so fast above our heads. All we had to do was to point our cameras in the dark towards the the cave roof to capture many of the bats. They are such fast and talented flyers, I loved the whooshing and high pitched squeaks as they swept by and how they were able to evade each other, us and rocky outcrops with rapid darting changes of direction. Didn't witness even one wipeout! A really lovely experience, although I couldn't help feeling a bit relieved to be outside again. The idea of being trapped and lost did not appeal, although the girls might have helped mitigate it.