[07.28 - Sunday] Waterfall Jumping & Myan Ruins

Agua Azul, Tonina, San CristobalAs the morning dawned it found us all rising out of bed for an early morning swim at beautiful Agua Azul! We all piled in or on the Yukon and headed to swim. When the road ended we started walking. The trail followed the edge of the river which was so blue that it looked fake! There were multiple cascades all up the river. It all looked so incredible it was hard to believe that it was real! So beautifully sculpted by our Creator!Finally we got to the swimming rapids! We swam out to rocks and dove into the white, swirling rapids to be carried down in the current until you could swim out to another rock! When the dare devils got bored with that they climbed up to the rocks to the next cascade and proceeded to dive in from there for a longer ride! Some of the more conservative ones kept to the rapids! :-)Then to top off Agua Azul the REALLY daring ones climbed up a twenty foot falls and as you can imagine, they dove off!As we walked back Bonnie was talking to one of the guards and hoping to get a chance to share the gospel with him. She asked him why Ch’ol, Tojolabal, etc were such different languages even though they are so such close together? He said that when he was six, his great-grandmother who was 120 at the time told him that a long time ago the Mayans decided that they wanted to reach up to their gods so they started building this tower. After they had got it really tall the gods got angry and decided to mess up the language so they couldn’t keep building. Then he added, “Of course I know that’s not true because there is only one God.” Then Bonnie was able to tell him that actually that is what the Bible says. She pulled it up on her iphone and let him read it and he was amazed that it was actually true! But the amazing thing to us was that the Bible hadn’t been translated into Ch’ol fifty years ago and that story had simply been passed down from generation to generation. Yes, God does write the truth in the heart of man!Next we headed to Tonina, which is some old Mayan ruins. I used to think ruins were cool but now I think they are awesome! It was amazing to climb up the 260 steps to get to the very top and realize that it was so old! It was built between 300 and 900 A.D. It felt like forever to get to the top, but it was almost harder to climb down because it was so incredibly steep! It’s hard to imagine the Mayans running up and down and probably carrying a load as well.We met up with a tour guide who was telling us all kinds of stuff. We found out that the first place that we took a group picture was where they would actually did human sacrifices. Apparently they would play games and sometimes they would sacrifice losers and sometimes the winners. We got to go inside part of the palace and see some of the thrones! There were so many passageways that went in all sorts of directions. One place they had a maze which was dark and but every now and then there was a lamp. But part of it was so incredibly dark that you could feel it. We felt like we should have been with Indiana Jones!We finally made it to back to the Terrells’ and after a delicious dinner climbed into real beds where the sweat didn’t roll off of us and it was actually cool!And such is the perspective of Liz!- Elisabeth U.