Swimming on top of a natural bridge, and through bat-filled caves

The ride was very long - more than 8 hours in a crammed minibus. The weather was very bad - it had been raining very heavily a few days earlier, and the river was still very high. So basically, for the first evening, we had regrets to have travelled so far only to find what we wanted to see covered by a dirty brown river.

So when we went to the national park Semuc Champey the following morning, we didn't have very high expectations, we thought we wouldn't see much. However, we were lucky, and the river had already dropped a metre or two overnight, and the views we got were just spectacular.



It's difficult to describe what Semuc Champey is... the river flows underground, but some of the water coming from the mountains flows overground, over a sort of natural bridge, through a series of natural swimming pools, forming little waterfalls between them. At the end, both waterflows join together again.

We also went on an adventurous cave exploration thing. We didn't really know what to expect... a Polish guy in our hostel talked us into doing this. The guide gave us a candle each, and we followed him into this cave. After a few metres, the water was already too high to walk, meaning we were swimming through cold water in a dark cave, with one hand, holding the candle with the other hand. The water became lower, and we could walk again, climbed up a few ladders, kept on swimming again, etc... The only light in these dark caves was coming from our candles (which was extinguished regularly, either because we accidentally put our right hand into the water while swimming, or because we had to cross under a waterfall), so it was a very special atmosphere, and an experience we probably won't have to repeat in the short future. Unfortunately we don't have any photos of this adventure, for obvious reasons.