The night was pitch black. My hand thumped on the bedside table clumsily grasping for a flashlight, and instead sent a glass of water flying onto my soft mattress. Damp, cold, and somewhat annoyed at myself, I cursed and gave up my search, listening with awe to the piercing sounds which had woken me from a deep sleep. It most definitely was a jaguar. A blood curling roar, and another, and then another, poured into the small wooden cabaña where I lay in the dark. Even the cicadas hushed their nightly chorus in reverence for the beastly cries.
Or so I thought. In the morning I grinned sheepishly at the guide when he told me that the roars had belonged to howler monkeys, not to jaguars; and when I eventually spotted one of these rowdy monkeys later on hidden amongst the forest canopy, I felt even more ridiculous. They’re very small, and even kind of cute with fuzzy black fur, slinky tails and quick darting eyes – not really matching up to the vicious howls that had echoed across the heavy, humid night.
I was exploring Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state which skirts the border with Guatemala, and was spending a few nights at an eco-lodge perched on the banks of the iridescent Rio Lacantún. The day before, I had soared up the broad Usumacinta river on a narrow, chipped turquoise boat, admiring the sweeping view and tropical winds that licked my face and made my dress billow out behind me as Guatemala flew by the right and Mexico on my left. I was going to discover the ruins of Yaxchilan, a powerful city state of the Mayan empire whose fortuitous location along the river had granted it control over the region’s trade and taxes.
Today there’s little left to betray Yaxchilan’s glorious past – only around one tenth of the original city has been uncovered and the rest still lies buried, waiting. As I made my way through stout hanging vines and ancestral mahogany trees, climbing hills littered with dozens of rocks, I realized that I was actually walking over submerged temples overgrown with centuries of forgotten time. I ached to bury my hands into the soft earth and uncover the stately tombs, stone effigies and obsidian treasures underfoot.
All around Chiapas the story is the same. Hundreds of sacred temples, royal palaces, astronomical observation towers and ceremonial pyramids hide amongst the last remaining swathes of protected Lacandon jungle. It makes your skin tingle. Earlier on in my journey I climbed the Temple of the Sun in Palenque (another mystical site further north) and watched dumbstruck as a light grey mist rose from the jungle canopy and melted up into the clouds. It looked as if the spirits of the jungle were feeding and being fed into the sky, one breathing into the other in a great celestial sigh. Trees spilled out and blossomed into a kaleidoscope of shapes, the wind whipping up the leaves a frenzy, and as the thick clouds above me swirled and condensed they began to rain down big delicious warm drops that poured down my face and drenched my skin.
Later that day I took a leap of faith, trusting the temples to take me where I needed to go. I knew the night’s sky would be graced by the harvest full moon, who would trace her slow dance across the stars and enter into a lunar eclipse. Our atoms are intricately tied and swayed by the cosmos, and no race on earth knew this more than the Mayans who built entire cities and lives upon the movement of the stars. I had an overwhelming urge to moon gaze but not from the comfort of my hotel – I wanted to worship the moon from Palenque. Driving towards the site after dinner, I naturally expected the security gates to be closed. I couldn’t believe it. The first gate – open. The second gate – open. I parked the car hidden by trees on the side of the road and saw that the small entrance hut was left unguarded. I crept across the chain and literally strolled right in on the stroke of midnight.
My heart pounding in my chest, unsure of whether I should be more fearful of night sentries, jungle animals or angry spirit guardians of the temples, I climbed up the slippery steps to the roar of tumbling waterfalls and emerged in a clearing to the sight of jagged pyramids reflecting ivory moonlight. Softly padded footsteps, gentle steps up one of the smaller temples, a copal and sage offering, and I sat down, utterly silent, utterly alone, utterly devout. Who was I to be the only living soul amongst these sacred stones…? I sent my grateful reverence out to the moon, hoping she would hear me.
In my dreams that night I wandered through the labyrinthine wombs of temples that resonated with strange chanting and I woke up disoriented but filled with a new joy. My drive down to the eco lodge was one of those simply glorious trails, only two lanes coated with a tunnel of thick trees breaking out into open swathes of glimmering countryside with straight undulating pastoral hills, meadows of maize and avocados and grazing cows. I raced past bright villages with packs of stray dogs and chubby grandmothers stroking grandchildren under the cool shade of ceiba trees.
As I entered the Lacandona nature reserve though, another reality hit home. Beside the highway I spotted vast palm oil plantations, a cash crop that plagues rainforests as farmers choose cut down plants that makes ecosystems thrive in order to grow the oil to sell to multinationals. Many other fields were barren, cut down for firewood and livestock farming and now baking infertile in the hot southern sun. Ghostly wisps of dark smoke blew into the air. One of the problems, I was told, was that during the 70s the government relocated families from all over the country to this remote part of Chiapas. Because the new settlers didn’t have a good understanding of how to work the land they instead cleared out the jungle, parcel by parcel.
Today only about ten percent of the original jungle remains. Hopefully we can help farmers to understand the intrinsic value of their lands and offer them alternate revenue streams, for example through tourism or alternative agriculture. As for the original inhabitants of the forests, the Lacandon tribe, they’ve all wandered out and the 1,250 or so that remain now run small camping sites and ecological tours near Yaxchilan. Some still don their traditional white robes and wear their hair long, but they’ve too had to adapt to keep up with changing times.
As I drove towards the eco hotel I had just been thinking that I had never seen a guacamaya (a guacamaya is a species of endangered macaw, and the namesake of my hotel Las Guacamayas) when suddenly I spotted a pair of them silhouetted in a tree against the pearly mauve sunset, squawking and frolicking amongst the thin branches. I shivered as I remembered all too well the fragility of the sight. This feeling was to remain with me my entire stay in Chiapas – a feeling of delicate balance, of teetering on the edge of something we don’t quite understand, of brushing past the spirits of ancestors who read the stars with their souls and the ethereal dignity of forests who rely so profoundly on our protection and respect.
On my last morning I woke up at the break of dawn to take a motorboat up the Rio Lacantún. I folded my arms across my chest to defend against the chilly mist and gazed down the river banks, at the way they cut through the jungle like a sharp toothed serpent and squinted in the dawn sun that glowed bright white and shone off liquid fire that lit up the hazy layers of distant trees.
The moon was still full and hung heavy above the jungle. We passed monkeys dropping fruit down to fish, weird furry delicious river fruits that grew in pods like cotton candy, five bats suspended on a tree trunk, camouflaged agents of the night with scythe like claws, colorful toucans, cheeky woodpeckers, minute finches and immense sturdy roots that wrinkled and folded over like wax sculptures. Huge palm leaves the size of armchairs cut the sunlight into ragged pieces.
As the strong current of the river carried me along, I was filled with an overwhelming sense of the profundity of the jungle, of its immensity and power, its simple gentle being and patient wisdom in the face of all of man’s fussing and fretting about. The serenity of that sunrise reminded me that time need not exist. Life flows on of its own accord and our souls are simply brief visitors on the Earth for this beautiful moment in time. We have a lot to learn from the jungle. It doesn’t compete, crave, ask to be more. It just is.
