Swimming with blind fish. Tiny grubs shine like crescent moons under my battery-powered beam. Out there a tropical sky sweats 11 AM, but here it's darker than night. Deeper we go into this windowless palace of limestone, constructed by that most tireless of architects. The river flows underground for untold miles before bursting down an exposed cliffside at Cascada el Aguacero in Chiapas, Mex. We hire a guide to enter the void first, to say "cuidado" at reassuring intervals. A drip from above lands in my mouth. Follow a thin nylon rope upstream -- two waterfalls meet in a milky pool, then the way becomes too narrow for humans still corporeally confined.
Bats buzz my head. Reaching for silken rocks, fingers stick in crannies like cake icing petrified mid-swirl. I think of Mr. Jennings, my seventh grade science teacher. Searching for familiar shapes I imagine the bloodspots on his hands as he writes CAVE FORMATION on the whiteboard before dispatching us to lab stations equipped with coca-cola, egg shells and tupperware. We pour, wait, watch Bill Nye. Meanwhile the egg shells, which like limestone consist of calcium carbonate, turn brown and dissolve in the acidic liquid. While not as rapidly corrosive as Coca-Cola, water flowing over calcium-rich rocks also does this trick. It's just a matter of time.
Out of the cave and back on the road. The landscape thickens and we mere tourists suddenly become ecotourists, staying at ecohotels and ecocampgrounds, driving past ecothis and ecothat enroute to the archeological site at Palenque. Like the cave, this Mayan ruin impresses the profundity of time with waterfalls and limestone, rock formed mostly from the skeletal fragments of ancient marine organisms. Palenque's temples are backed by the steep, forested hills characteristic of the Chiapas' highlands while its labyrinthine central palace faces an open plain stretching some 60 miles across the lowlands to the gulf coast. The history keepers ditched Palenque 1,100 years ago -- the end of time for its modeled stucco and celebrated bas reliefs. In all the centuries of grandeur preceding this mysterious demise, nothing references the daily lives of commoners, save the ruins themselves. Unless of course, gods built it all.
King Pakal the Great is entombed under the largest temple, a nine-tiered pyramid crowned by hieroglyphic inscriptions. Some glyphs reference events a million years in the past, others foretell 4,000 into the future. Nine guys were buried alive with this king, "regents of the nine levels into which the underworld was divided," according to Mayan belief as told by the museum's placards. We're still a couple of millennia shy of the future as told by the Temple of Inscriptions, where ecotourists hold iphone cameras up to the sun. A grassy flat surrounding the temple is littered with souvenirs, little girls hustling bracelets and Mayan calendars. Their pitch begins: "When is your birthday?" Merciless underselling ensues.
Wending through the surrounding jungle, Palenque feels anything but abandoned. Life is everywhere. Ants battle ants and more ants, schlepping stones, bodies, prisoners, what may come -- building an empire one unrealistically heavy object at a time. Fierce, fast-moving red ants run single-file. Black ants equipped with their own personal back hoes fan out. Spiders untold. On ruins near the exit a baby graboid looking thing devours a snail, its armored back wriggling greedily.
Time to move on. We take a rough road out of town, which archaeologist Ronald Wright describes as "a living thing that shakes its coils and sheds its skin according to the seasons. The pavement is fragile, discontinuous, buried under landslides, cracked by subsidence, held together with strips of gravel and clay."
This description dates 1985, though not much has changed. Banana sellers pull strings across the road as we approach, part of an insistent sales pitch. If we just keep driving its only a string being torn from someone's hand, but the psychological effect is pretty powerful. The look on one woman's face slows me just long enough for her to step in front of the van. She refuses to move, bag of banana chips held high. We insist, "No, gracias." But the baby nursing at her breast breaks me. I roll down the window, take the bag of chips and pass her 10 pesos. She cracks a sly smile, asks: "Want another?"
A plan is afoot to build a toll road in place of this living, shaking thing; to turn the indigenous territories of the Lacandon Jungle into "a world class tourist destination," replete with golf courses, resorts and an elite lodge overlooking a waterfall, accessible only by chartered helicopter. Opposition is fierce. As I look out the window at river after river, at still smarting clear-cuts and mountains spilling their guts into semi-trucks, at the nursing plantano seller's little smile -- I get the faintest inkling why.
The Palenque toll road is a facet of the MesoAmerica Project and its predecessor the Plan Puebla Panama, mega-schemes backed by the federal government and development interests, which in Chiapas have led to the construction of another toll, two massive bridges, a deep water port and an international airport, all since 2008.
Once over the mountains we turn away from San Cristobal, the colonial capital of Chiapas, and instead head towards Comitan, Zapatista territory. Through a pastorale valley of pine, oak and sweetgum, past homes and ranches tended by impeccably dressed men and women. With all the embroidered blouses, combed hair and clean shirts it looks like Sunday, but it's not. On local signage the date "17 de Noviembre" and the words "communidad autonoma" become almost as ubiquitous as the Coca-Cola insignia.
Near Comitan 50 or 60 men gather around a square at the center of a communidad autonoma, each wearing a clean shirt and a very serious expression. No one waves back. Three days earlier young Zapatista Jose Luis Solis Lopez killed in La Realidad, Las Margaritas, near Comitan. According to a blog post from the Frayba Center for Human Rights, a melee involving 140 people, many reportedly members of the political parties PAN and PVEM, and 68 Zapatistas. Guns, machetes, sticks and stones. A school and a clinic badly damaged. Five injured. Lopez brutally killed: shot in the leg and head, face split by a machete. The clashing parties and unions assembled for ongoing talks called "Towards Hope and Good Government, Together."
The fringes of Comitan. Chasing the sunset to Lagunas de Montebello on the Guatemalan border, stopping for dinner at a roadside comedor -- informal restaurants that serve whatever the lady of the house is cooking. Mole. Two little boys poke at enormous beetles peppering in the gravel. The principal decorative motif is as usual, coca-cola. Coca-cola fridge kept at 4 degrees celsius, coca-cola chairs, coca-cola clock, flat bottles of coca-cola as centerpieces on coca-cola tables. In exchange the dona fills her quota, probably not that worrisome in a country that consumes more coca-cola than anywhere else in the world.
Number one for coke, Mexico is number two for bottled water, much of it sold by coca-cola companies. Interestingly, it takes at least 3, some say as much as 9 liters of potable water to make one liter of Coca-Cola. According to reportage from Casa Collective, a social justice org. for Chiapas and Oaxaca, the Mexican government granted 27 water concessions to Coca-cola's mexico affiliate between 2000 and 2008, drawing on 19 aquifers and 15 rivers. In 2003, the company paid USD $29,000 for these rights, countrywide. In 2004, it reported $40 million in profits at the Chiapas bottling plant alone.
Meanwhile, coca-cola says it aims for "water neutrality" by 2020 and that its currently "helping (the Mexican government) develop financial mechanisms to promote a sustainable water economy."
A cold coke helps pretend away nausea, rally through the last leg of driving to the Guatemalan border,where an emerald lake and an ecohotel await. We make it to Tziscao, an ejido (collectively run village) within the Parque Nacional de Montebello. Delighted to feel fog and wear a jacket. The lakes of Montebello are collapsed limestone caves, sinkholes filled with crystalline waters that connect via underground streams and exhaust my interest in describing nuances of green and blue. There's 59 lakes in the 15,000 acre park, most of them inaccessible except by foot or horseback. Mayans of yore purportedly threw in precious objects, gold, children. Survivors were believed to bring a message from the gods about that year's harvest. I keep my eyes peeled for anything portentous as we snorkel across Lake Pojoj. We forget to ask the local guide about crocodiles, but think of them later, when the inviting shallows turn an all-encompassing deep dark blue.
It's my birthday. Back at shore one of the guys who ferries people across the lake on lashed wooden rafts asks us to help him search for a cell phone dropped by a long-gone tourist into about 20 feet of water. Alessandro swims over and points it out, also points out that its not likely to work anymore. He is assured that "no, it will work, it's an expensive phone."
We make a few attempts, though nothing gallant when confronted with the head-splitting pressure. Then the other raft operators start stripping off clothes and calling dibs. They take turns wearing our masks and fins, diving boldly down and jettisoning straight back up. "Slower!" we warn, but something macho is happening here. Few go more than once. Finally, the last man still trying nabs it. A hell of a dive. He comes up dazedly, takes a couple of seconds to grapple and slowly raises his prize: one dripping iphone.
