My friends Gladys, Chung and I paid a taxi driver in Belize City to take us to Belmopan to go cave tubing at the Nohoch Che’en Caves Branch Archaeological Reserve. Our taxi driver connected us to local guide, we picked up our tubes and set off on quite the hike to where we could put our tubes in the river. We had to cross several shallow parts of the river, hike through the rainforest and on the hike our guide informed us about the surrounding nature. Make sure to bring bug spray as the mosquitos can be pretty bad.
We finally arrived at the cave entrance, turned our head lamps on, linked our tubes and floated into the dark. Tubing in a dark cave is truly a surreal experience. The scariest part was when we could hear a loud waterfall up ahead. The guide told us to hold tight. The crashing water got louder and louder. Our headlamps were barely making a dent in the darkness that surrounded us. I felt so disconcerted not being able to see anything. Turns out, joke was on us because the waterfall was actually on our left and we peacefully floated past it. I had heard that there are many Mayan artifacts in the caves, but we did not see any. We went through the caves in about twenty minutes, then floated down the river through the beautiful rainforest.
