The long hard trail to Jalisco’s most beautiful cave
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- Published on Friday, 30 November 2012 12:04
- Written by John Pint
It’s 7 a.m. at Rancho El Zapote. The air is full of early morning sounds. Loudest of all are the roosters who live only meters from my tent and have been trying to wake me up since 4 a.m. Then come the chickens, a very large pig and dozens of loudly mooing cows, one of which wears a clanking bell, indicating that she is the leader of the herd. Suddenly I hear the distant and repeated gurgle of a car engine which doesn’t want to start, accompanied by incomprehensible shouts of men who, I’m sure, are crowded around an uncooperative truck. Finally, varoom, varoom, va-ROOOOOM! The deafening attempts to start the car go on forever and I decide it’s time to get out of my sleeping bag and into my caving pants. Today we are going to visit La Cueva de los Monos (Cave of the Figurines), which can only be reached after a long, hard climb up a steep mountainside above the little town of Toxin, which is located 37 kilometers northwest of Colima City. The cave is so named, I understand, because local people claim they found artifacts inside.
Our group obviously considered a good breakfast the key to good caving, so it wasn’t until 10:20 a.m. that we finally headed up a north-trending trail which at first struck me as very friendly, after all the stories I had been told about the previous visit to this cave. “That climb was a killer,” said Mario Guerrero, leader of this trip and the preceding one, “because it was the hottest week of May, which is the hottest month of the year, and we hadn’t brought along nearly enough water.”