A guide to exploring the Lacandon jungle, Mexico’s answer to the Amazon

More than 10 million people visit Mexico’s resort-heavy Cancún annually. About 300,000 travelers make it 11 hours further south to see Palenque’s Mayan ruins. By the time we reach the equatorial jungle of Lacandon selva (another four hours southeast), my family of five will double, and sometimes triple, the daily visitor numbers everywhere we go. 

This is the Lacandon rainforest—and to get here, you have to head way off the tourist track. 

An inverse set of numbers waits for us in the biodiversity hotspot. Despite only covering the smidgiest bit of southern Mexico (0.4 percent), the Lacandon forest—one of just two major remaining forests in the country—contains a quarter of Mexico’s total living species. 

This includes nearly half of the country’s butterfly species and 25 percent of its animals, from spider monkeys and tapirs to endangered jaguars. With more than 1,500 tree varieties giving home to a third of the country’s bird species, including the last wild scarlet macaws, this forest is nearing the Amazon in abundance.

But first we need help from Mexico’s most ubiquitous species: Military personnel. The Lacandon is within squawking distance of a sometimes tetchy border with Guatemala. In Palenque, my husband holds up his phone to a man with a Heckler & Koch rifle slung across his chest. On it is a map of our planned jungle reconnaissance detouring 340 miles (550 kilometers) between this final supermarket outpost and San Cristobal de Las Casas, a highland town in Chiapas state. 

“¿Es seguro?” he asks. Is it safe?

Only about 1,000 Central American scarlet macaws remain in the wild. Nearly all shelter in the Lacandon. At sunset, a group gather in a tree near our riverside cabin. They sound like it was a quiet afternoon at the local pub, until someone shouted shots.

My children (aged 11, 9 and 8) have become used to the sight of camouflage-uniformed, combat boot-wearing, submachine gun-holding law enforcement, whether army, military police or National Guard.

The sunglassed man pinches his fingers to the map, zooming out for context. He gives the answer we need: “Es muy seguro. La frontera no es problema.” The border may still have problems but thankfully is not a problem.

Here in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state, the forest’s biggest threat is land clearing. Potholed roads lead us through hilly jungle peppered with maize crops and grazing cattle. Pulling up at Top Che Centro Ecoturistico, my family’s visit offers a financial alternative for the small Indigenous Mayan community of Lacanja’ Chansayab.

A handpainted welcome sign spruiks lodging, food, guided walks (Spanish only) and rafting. Day trippers can tour from Palenque or San Cristobal, or book online. We unload our pre-bought drinking water into a cabin roofed with thatched palm leaves, palapa-style. There are mosquito nets, a cold shower and bare electric lightbulbs.

Top Che was meant to be our base to visit the Yaxchilan Mayan ruins. Set on a river bend on Guatemala’s border, we discover the site has closed suddenly—no clear reason why and no timeline for reopening. 

Instead, the kids discover hammocks. They stop swinging for simple meals that Google Translate says is ‘murdered chicken’. Only so many village chickens are available for murdering, it seems, before it’s wiped from the menu. Rice and eggs suffice for the remaining meals.

Next stop, Reforma Agraria, a tidy nine-block ejido (community-owned village). Similarly named townships exist throughout Mexico after sweeping 20th century reforms first redistributed land from wealthy hacienda owners to peasant workers then, to alleviate poverty, allowed agricultural development of forestland. Much later, a station attendant pouring petrol from a plastic container into our car using a halved Coke bottle funnel doesn’t recognize where we’ve come from. That is, until we say, ‘Las Guacamayas’.

Las guacamayas—the macaws—the name of the village’s ecotourism cooperative. Only about 1,000 Central American scarlet macaws remain in the wild. Nearly all shelter in the Lacandon. At sunset, a group gather in a tree near our riverside cabin. They sound like it was a quiet afternoon at the local pub, until someone shouted shots.

Only about 1,000 Central American scarlet macaws remain in the wild. Nearly all shelter in the Lacandon. At sunset, a group gather in a tree near our riverside cabin. They sound like it was a quiet afternoon at the local pub, until someone shouted shots.

Even without a ruckus, the birds stand out. Scarlet macaws streak psychedelically red against a blue sky, their long tail feathers stretching their stats to 35 inches (89 centimeters). Add golden patches to wings and garnishes of electric blue to tail and wing-tip for full effect.

It’s a mesmerizing combination enticing poachers to climb 130-foot (40 meter) trees to steal chicks from their mated-for-life parents’ nest. The black market, insatiable. The population, dwindling.

In 1976, the ejido’s first 40 families from neighboring state, Oaxaca, weren’t distracted by macaws. Their focus was on making a new life with corn, beans, cacao, chilli—enough but not really, as the tied plot lines of subsistence farming and jungle clearing so often goes.

Decades after the Mexican government created Cancun, it recognized that tourism could provide income for impoverished communities after the forest’s protection. It’s this more recent story of ecotourism—communities benefiting financially from their environment’s preservation—that makes me a bit-player to the scene.

I stand in the pebble-bottomed shallows of the Lacantún river gazing up at the partying macaws. Unseen black howler monkeys roar long, low, and loud from the river’s far side, part of the Montes Azule Biosphere. The monkeys will, our cabin hosts promise, wake us at 4.30am tomorrow morning.

There is only one place to eat in Reforma Agraria and that’s at Las Guacamayas Centro Ecoturistico at the other end of town. A raised boardwalk curves through stilted cabins to its restaurant overlooking the river. Salsas and the whirr of hovering hummingbirds accompanies dinner. We book a boat ride at reception for early next morning, relying on the howler monkey alarm clock.

Neither myself, husband or kids are bird watchers when we clamber into the eight-seater fiberglass boat. In the three hours journeying up the main Rio Lacantún and its tributary, Tzendales, we’ll transform into avid twitchers with the help of guide Nicolás. He speaks no English and my husband speaks very basic Spanish. To spot gartered trogons, we’ll all speak Google.

With the exception of buying soda and unidentifiable candy from the only store—five foreigners splashing the cash—village life goes on with or without our presence.

Before the morning fog lifts, blue kingfishers fly low over the water, darting in and out of steeply muddy banks. A yellow-bellied black toucan—a collared aracari—glides high above, its comically long beak making flight improbable. Buttressed ceiba trees rise tall, garnished with termite mounds and macaw nesting boxes, trunks dripping with bromeliads. Nicolás’s green laser picks out tiny bats hanging like barnacles from a branch low over the river. 

His village is half an hour from Las Guacamayas. Nicolás has been guiding on, what he refers to as, the big river for eight years and on the small river for two. In that time, he possibly saw a jaguar once but it disappeared “muy rapido”. The boat’s roar will keep the estimated 115 Lacandon jaguars far from our eyes today.

Back at the cabin, our children loll in the river shallows. Village kids use bottles to catch tiddlers and soon, a local will ride his motorbike into the water for its evening wash. With the exception of buying soda and unidentifiable candy from the only store—five foreigners splashing the cash—village life goes on with or without our presence.

At night, I lay in bed, ears tuned to the forest, eyes open to the dark. No sooner have we shushed the kids to hasten sleep, and I’m urging the whole family to look up. Four, five–there’s another—six fireflies rise slowly to the thatched ceiling… miniature balls of magical light that only we get to see.

****

Adventure.com strives to be a low-emissions travel publication. We are powered by, but editorially independent of, Intrepid Travel, the world’s largest travel B Corp, who help ensure Adventure.com maintains high standards of sustainability in our work and activities. You can visit our sustainability page or read our Contributor Impact Guidelines for more information.