Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve

I was planning to leave San Ignacio the next day to head over to Guatemala when Sandy asked me to join them the next day for a road trip to Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve. I knew that Maayan, a girl from Israel, had been looking for people joining her to get a rental car and go there but hadn't really thought about it as my plan was to just go to Actun Tunichil Muknal and not spend any more time in San Ignacio. But now that I was asked again I figured - isn't this the upside to have 6 month for my trip? So that i could just change my plans like I wanted and just stay longer whenever there was an opportunity for some adventure?
So checked with the hostel if I could stay another night and told everybody I was in.

We were 10 people all together and got 2 4WD for the trip. There were 4 places we wanted to go to inside the park and we decided to drive to the one furthest inside the park first and stop at the other ones on the way out. So the first one should be the Rio Frio Cave. We even found that one in maps and used my phone to guide us there. After the while the phone told us to leave the main road (which was already just a gravelroad) and take a small path towards the river. We followed these directions without a doubt. After a while the street got smaller and bumpier and due to the rain there was a lot of water in the street. At one point the street was completely under water for at least 20m and we didn't know how deep it was. But the phone had told us to go this way so Justen gave it a try and started into the water. We did pretty good for the first half but somewhere in the middle the car got stuck. By trying to get out with a lot of gas Justen gave our car a nice camouflage look :) He probably should have closed the window first.
As the car wouldn't move we all got out and started collecting wood to put it in front of our wheels for better grip. The guys from the second car came to help and we all stood on the side cheering him on when Justen got back into the car to give it another try. There was a lot of flying mud again but it worked! The car was free and Maayan, who was driving the second car, managed to get through the mud without any trouble.
We kept on going down the road till we got to a pretty steep hill with again a lot of water at the bottom. So we decided to give a closer look to the map and figured out what the problem was. We hadn't logged in the parking lot at the cave but just the closest "street" - which wouldn't bring us to the hiking path and was divided from the cave by a river 😬
We send Tassilo and Peter to check out the way beyond that hill and used the time to start eating our food while listening to some raggaton music from a CD we had found in the car. Even though we still hadn't made it to any of our touchpoints we had a lot of fun and this trip was already worth it's money!

When Tassilo and Peter came back they told us it would be pretty hard to cross the river and get to the cave from this side so we jumped back into our cars and made our way back toward the main road. When we came back to the flooded part of the street Justen made us get out of the car first and drove through the mud with a lot of noise (partly from hitting a tree) but he made it. This time it would be Maayan who got stuck. But we already knew how to get a car out now. At least now both cars looked alike.

After this adventure track we found the rest of the streets to be pretty decent and there were actually signs telling us where to go.

The Rio Frio Cave was huge and there was even a little beach inside. Of course it couldn't beat Actun Tunichil Muknal, but it was still pretty amazing.

The next two stops were Rio on Pools and Big Rock Fall. Two spots at the river with pools and waterfalls. Unfortunately it was still pretty cold due to the rain the night before so we didn't actually go for a swim. But it was still fun to walk around and spend some time near the river watching the water fall. And there were never really a lot of other people around. Really nice.

Our last stop was a fancy resort with an outside terrace from where you could watch another waterfall. We didn't quite know if they would even let us in the way our cars looked. But they were just smiling. Actually everybody we passed kept laughing at us. Stupid tourists not knowing their way around ;)
We treated ourselves with an expensive drink and enjoyed the view.

After that we headed home and were surprised to hear that the owner of the car rental was really happy to hear we had a great time and didn't really care that the cars looked like they did. He only asked us for a good review on TripAdvisor and even wanted us to share our pictures and videos.

After that eventful day we enjoyed the end of the day in the hammocks on the roof of our hostel. It's gonna be a day to remember...Read more