Day Two - ATV Ride

Our detour on the way to Jaguar Paw was Peccary Park. There is not much written on-line about Peccary Park. Nothing in the Frommer's bnook either. Bottom line - it is a recently established national park. This is where my mom and I went to ride the ATVs. Now I am all about riding a scooter but I have never been on an ATV. My dad rode one at The Ponderosa a few years back but I never tried it.

This is also where we became all too aware of the mosquitoes. We found our long sleeves, long pants and deet (the first day I used the 15% deet and discovered its potency when the ink from my water bottle stained my arm when it came in contact with the deet). And off into the jungle we went. According to our guide - this was the end of the rainy season but man oh man was it muddy out there! My mom proceeded to get stuck in the mud a few times. Me? I flooded the engine in a body of water... I ended up playing musical ATVs with two of the guides while my mom proceeded with the other guide through the jungle. Bummer of it all - SHE was the only one to see a LARGE cat in the wild while we were out there. It was either a jaguar or an ocelot - from the size of the paw prints left behind it wasn't a tiny cat.

In the middle of the ride we stopped at a cave. I wish I had the forethought to have taken a picture of the cave opening but the gazzillion (slight exageration) steps we needed to take to the top had me distracted. We pretty much shimmied into the cave - we were kind of standing, kind of leaning sideways on our stomaches, the opening wasn't that wide as I needed to take off my back pack to shimy in there. But once we got inside it was wide open and amazing! There were some old Mayan pots in the cave.

And during hurricanes our ATV guide's family uses it as a hurricane shelter. Go figure.