The Petroglyph

After breakfast, Mariano came to collect us to head of for today’s adventure. It was raining and we had our jackets but were hoping it would clear up. We walked through the village of Las Marias which is very spread out along small dirt tracks. The centre of town is about a 15-20 minute walk from Doña Rutilia’s place then we walked through more of the village down to a point in the river where we would meet our boats and guides. One of the guides was also the priest and he blessed our journey which did make me start to wonder what we had ahead of us.

The boats just kept getting smaller. We were in two dugout canoes which sat only inches above the water. I had my own canoe with three guides – the priest being one of them. Two of the guides were at the front of the boat, pulling us up river by sticking their long wooden poles down into the river floor and pulling. It was raining and that movement made the boat rock a lot, this was not going to be a comfortable ride. If it wasn’t raining and the boat wasn’t rocking so much I might have been game enough to get some photos or video but there was no way I was taking my camera out on this boat.

After about an hour or so we got to a point where we were going to walk through the jungle a bit. Valencia was our guide and she was pointing out all sorts of medicinal plants and how they use them. Most medical treatment down here uses plants for the first few days of illness, then if you aren’t better, you see a doctor or nurse. They really seem to have a cure for everything in these jungles.

Lunch we had brought with us, spaghetti with tinned sausages and bananas with some coconut bread. Can’t say I’m really enjoying the food down here at Las Marias and there isn’t a vegetable anywhere in sight. We ate what we could of our lunch then the guides finished it off – we were really embarrassed when they passed around our plates of unwanted food, there would have been plenty to share had we known.

We had an hour more upstream to get to the petroglyph and some of it was pretty hard going. The river was so shallow this whole time and we’d often scrape the boat on the river floor. Some parts had quite strong rapids and we just had to charge through them. These guys that work these boats have probably the strongest arms – it is incredibly hard work.

The petroglyph is a rock in the middle of the river that dates back over 1,000 years. It is unknown exactly what the picture depicts and who put it there. It is thought to have perhaps been Aztecs or Mayans or some other civilisation but no-one knows. We didn’t spend long at the petroglyph cause it was still bloody raining so we turned around for the cruise downstream which was a two hour journey.

For this part the guides used paddles to navigate the river and it was quite good fun and less scary than I imagined going through the rapids. By the time we got back, another half hour walk to the hospedaje, we were so cold, my hands and feet were blue. It had been seven hours of sitting and walking through the rain and everything was wet, despite my wearing a waterproof jacket. No hot showers here either, just a bucket and some cold water. Lourdes made us some coffee and before too long we started to thaw out.