For this throwback thursday I’d like to share this image from back in 2005. Some friends and I posing for the “before the adventure” shot previous to making the journey through the Chonta underground river in Guerrero, Mexico. The journey takes from six to eight hours of walking and swimming in the river that goes trough the cave, that can be achieved all at once, or trekking half of the distance, camping for a few hours, which we did on that occasion, and resuming the next day. It requires some physical effort, but it’s absolutely rewarding.
This was the second or perhaps the third time I went to trek the Chonta river, I really liked it and I came back there several times, but going there for the first time a couple of years before and my destiny was all set up. The experience of going so many hours into the dark, looking at the huge chambers inside the earth while floating in the river’s current lit only by our headlamps, witnessing the sheer power of the water, that stuck even really large tree trunks into the cave’s walls dozens of meters above the river’s level, and the excitement that back then was something really new for me, all of that drove me years later into learning and practicing much more serious caving.
Ojo De Piedra - Eye of Stone. 