Mexico Easter 2003 - Part 9: El Sumidero National Park

Heroes take journeys, confront dragons, and discover the treasure of their true selves.
Carol Pearson

12 April - El Sumidero National Park

I rose early with much difficulty and we drove up magnificent scenery high in the hills to El Sumidero National Park, about two hours into deepest Chiapas, and not far from Mexico’s border with Guatemala. Dismounting from the van, there was a river port where many motorboats were docked, ready to take people into El Sumidero and show them around. We boarded one of these fast boats for a relaxed couple of hours.

In the middle of the river, about half an hour in, they made some people swap boats, jumping over the river into another boat. A couple of people almost fell in. Our Indian guide could see a crocodile from so far away it was flabbergasting. As we approached the massive canyons, birds of prey winged slowly over a vast landscape of eroded limestone strata cliffs, stretching, as I thought “to the sky”. And then a group of spider monkeys jumped and swinged hundreds of metres above the teeming river, doing stunts that would put David Copperfield to shame. Imagine the River Amazon in mid-basin, then add towering cliffs to the sky on either side, and make the vegetation more sparse. The area was disturbed from its raw fecundity only by motorboats chopping the mysterious waters.

Our guide pointed out a cliff. In the Spanish Conquest, the fiercely proud Chiapas Indians of El Sumidero jumped to their deaths to avoid surrendering to the Spanish. The scenes of these Goliath monuments evoked in me rising images of the landscapes in books of Hemingway or even Thoreau. The juxtaposition of this dangerous area and the Indians’ natural ability to hold their home sacred gave me pride in being a visiting presence.

That night we got back, I had a detailed discussion with Bonnie about buying a ring when she had so little money (she buys rings because she likes them) and we moved all our stuff to cook downstairs as rain threatened San Cristobal. Me and Tosh cooked a really good dinner (obviously) and as we were all generally whacked out we went to sleep! But something was making enough noise to keep us all smiling - a couple were having loud sex in a ground floor bedroom! Live porn, good for sleep.