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Sacred Monkey River: A Canoe Trip with the Gods
The former editor of Adirondack Life provides a profound and entertaining account of his odyssey by canoe along the Usumacinta River and its tributaries along the border of Guatemala and Mexico, a little-known region that once spawned the ancient Olmec and Maya civilizations of Mesoamerica.
320 pages, Hardcover
First published August 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
February 21, 2018
Christopher Shaw's Sacred Monkey River gives us a detailed look at the drainage area of the Usumacinta River, encompassing large parts of Guatemala and the Mexican State of Chiapas. What Shaw adds to the subject is the perspective of a skilled canoe boatman. Most of the book is an attempt to prove that the Mayans took a circular route, going upstream on the Tulija River, portaging to the Jatate, and continuing on where it joins the Usumacinta.
Shaw does not quite prove his point, as the Jatate River has nasty rapids along its length, including some features that have to be walked around.
Still, it is a good, even exciting book for most of its length. It could have used an index and bibliography, and slightly better maps. At times, Shaw introduces terms and acronyms that may have been explained a hundred pages earlier, but this reader has a less than perfect memory.
Shaw does not quite prove his point, as the Jatate River has nasty rapids along its length, including some features that have to be walked around.
Still, it is a good, even exciting book for most of its length. It could have used an index and bibliography, and slightly better maps. At times, Shaw introduces terms and acronyms that may have been explained a hundred pages earlier, but this reader has a less than perfect memory.
July 23, 2025
Sono sempre stata affascinata dal Messico, dalla sua gente e cultura così che ho deciso di leggere questo libro. Ambientato tra il Chiapas e il Guatemala, luoghi misteriosi e poco accessibili dove scorre il fiume Usumacinta, il fiume delle Scimmie. Christopher Shaw, esperto canoista, ha viaggiato lungo l'Usumacinta in canoa, penetrando nei luoghi più inaccessibili della Selva Lacandona raccontando le sue avventure di viaggio.
383 pagine , troppe per descrivere quest’avventura, il libro è risultato lungo e noioso poiché sempre ripetitivo, nonostante questo l’ho portato a termine ma non lo rifarei e non mi sento di consigliarlo
383 pagine , troppe per descrivere quest’avventura, il libro è risultato lungo e noioso poiché sempre ripetitivo, nonostante questo l’ho portato a termine ma non lo rifarei e non mi sento di consigliarlo
October 21, 2020
Anyone interested in southeastern Mexico, Mayan culture, literary adventure writing, and great description of people, the jungle, paddling, and the challenges of border territories and changing culture for indigenous people will enjoy this read.
July 28, 2016
Like the current American empire, Mayan civilization was formed around highways. The watershed of the mighty Usumacinta (Sacred Monkey River) was the Route 66 that bound together an interstate network grid, crisscrossing today's Belize, Guatemala and southernmost Mexico. Cities were built next to freeway on-ramps (headwaters). Motels and fast food (canoe beaching sites and stackable corn tortillas) were available at regular intervals. There were even drive-thru churches (travel diety shrines).
Not satisfied with organic local produce and quaint indigenous culture, the Maya swapped and bartered with sleazy river-traveling salesmen advocating consumerism and globalization. (Greedy American bastards! Read all about them in Michael Moore's lesser-known work Stupid Brown Men.) Tragically, when Occupy Usumacinta Street staged a sit-down road blockade, they all drowned. Since Ferraris hadn't yet been invented, middle-age Maya men who possessed both sea shells and cocoa beans were serious babe-magnets. At least, as serious as humans can be taken.
Tourists zipping rental cars from one Mayan ruin to another seldom understand the meaning of all this. Our perspective is warped. Thanks to satellite maps, we know more of how Mayan civilization looked to its heavenly gods than its terrestrial citizens. We grasp which ruins are on the same tour circuit but not the same river circuit. We know which pyramids are excessive uphill climbing for seniors but not which pyramids were too much upstream paddling for traders. We need a more hiking-boots-on-the-ground perspective. Otherwise, we risk the modern tendency to lose touch with natural reality and consider ourselves the gods looking down from the sky.
In Sacred Monkey River, author Christopher Shaw offers a watershed-level view of the Mayan world. He may have bit off more than he can canoe. This is a massive network of lakes, streams and rivers (both over and under ground), flowing through jungles well-known to the drug smugglers and revolutionary soldiers who hole-up there but barely mapped for the rest of us. Still, whatever floats his boat. What actually does float his boat is what the Maya called the Watery Path. A highway to hell on hot days transporting you to the netherworld of subterranean passages, plus a stairway to heaven in the night with its star-reflecting surface merging into the star-spangled sky.
This book falls far short as literature. Yet, it's unique in offering a holistic and water-based glimpse of Mundo Maya. In the Popol Vuh Mayan scriptures, the Creator made a prototype that fell short of being able to worship the "Heart of the Sky, which is said to be the name of God." The monkeys are deemed remnants of that almost-there creation. The crocodiles are remnants of their primordial canoes. Paddling down a jungle-choked river with these evolutionary sore-losers mocking and stalking you from above and below, it's easy to conclude one mustn't fuck with mother nature and the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, but when an elitist class with a strong sense of entitlement lounges atop the pyramids (or skyscrapers) with scant respect for nature or the heavens, empires crumble.
The rise and fall of Mayan civilization may offer an oracle of hope and change for the current American empire. (Read all about it in my new book Fresh Wind & Strange Fire.) Americans have always considered destiny to be in their own hands more than most cultures do. People can make big changes when they really want to. Mayan shaman squatted into frog position until nearly delirious then squirted hallucinogenic cocktails including toxic frog secretions up their butts to transform themselves and transport themselves to a better place. (Mexicans still go to great lengths to party hearty.)
If Americans do want to paddle their canoe away from the waterfall of resource consumption over resource production, military expansion over military reinforcement and citizen entitlement over citizen empowerment, yes we can! But what if most don't want to? The foundations of Mayan city-states were laid in alignment with nature's ways and sacred worship spaces, much like founding U.S. documents defer all authority to "the laws of nature and nature's God." Yet, wealth and power always tend to corrupt. Long after both empires have faded into dust, there will arise peoples in the neighborhood with hands that love to work and hearts that love to pray. God bless the Americas!
Not satisfied with organic local produce and quaint indigenous culture, the Maya swapped and bartered with sleazy river-traveling salesmen advocating consumerism and globalization. (Greedy American bastards! Read all about them in Michael Moore's lesser-known work Stupid Brown Men.) Tragically, when Occupy Usumacinta Street staged a sit-down road blockade, they all drowned. Since Ferraris hadn't yet been invented, middle-age Maya men who possessed both sea shells and cocoa beans were serious babe-magnets. At least, as serious as humans can be taken.
Tourists zipping rental cars from one Mayan ruin to another seldom understand the meaning of all this. Our perspective is warped. Thanks to satellite maps, we know more of how Mayan civilization looked to its heavenly gods than its terrestrial citizens. We grasp which ruins are on the same tour circuit but not the same river circuit. We know which pyramids are excessive uphill climbing for seniors but not which pyramids were too much upstream paddling for traders. We need a more hiking-boots-on-the-ground perspective. Otherwise, we risk the modern tendency to lose touch with natural reality and consider ourselves the gods looking down from the sky.
In Sacred Monkey River, author Christopher Shaw offers a watershed-level view of the Mayan world. He may have bit off more than he can canoe. This is a massive network of lakes, streams and rivers (both over and under ground), flowing through jungles well-known to the drug smugglers and revolutionary soldiers who hole-up there but barely mapped for the rest of us. Still, whatever floats his boat. What actually does float his boat is what the Maya called the Watery Path. A highway to hell on hot days transporting you to the netherworld of subterranean passages, plus a stairway to heaven in the night with its star-reflecting surface merging into the star-spangled sky.
This book falls far short as literature. Yet, it's unique in offering a holistic and water-based glimpse of Mundo Maya. In the Popol Vuh Mayan scriptures, the Creator made a prototype that fell short of being able to worship the "Heart of the Sky, which is said to be the name of God." The monkeys are deemed remnants of that almost-there creation. The crocodiles are remnants of their primordial canoes. Paddling down a jungle-choked river with these evolutionary sore-losers mocking and stalking you from above and below, it's easy to conclude one mustn't fuck with mother nature and the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, but when an elitist class with a strong sense of entitlement lounges atop the pyramids (or skyscrapers) with scant respect for nature or the heavens, empires crumble.
The rise and fall of Mayan civilization may offer an oracle of hope and change for the current American empire. (Read all about it in my new book Fresh Wind & Strange Fire.) Americans have always considered destiny to be in their own hands more than most cultures do. People can make big changes when they really want to. Mayan shaman squatted into frog position until nearly delirious then squirted hallucinogenic cocktails including toxic frog secretions up their butts to transform themselves and transport themselves to a better place. (Mexicans still go to great lengths to party hearty.)
If Americans do want to paddle their canoe away from the waterfall of resource consumption over resource production, military expansion over military reinforcement and citizen entitlement over citizen empowerment, yes we can! But what if most don't want to? The foundations of Mayan city-states were laid in alignment with nature's ways and sacred worship spaces, much like founding U.S. documents defer all authority to "the laws of nature and nature's God." Yet, wealth and power always tend to corrupt. Long after both empires have faded into dust, there will arise peoples in the neighborhood with hands that love to work and hearts that love to pray. God bless the Americas!
May 14, 2013
The author is some sort of environmentalist from the Adirondack Mountains in New England, and this is about a canoe trip he made on the Jatate and Usumacinta rivers in Meximo and Guatemala in 1996. He has a great sense of all the history attached to the places he goes through, from when they were the preferred route across the Yucatan Peninsula for Classic Maya traders to when they were the home territory for the Zapatista uprising just before his visit, and he avoids oversimplifying either the past or the present in telling about it. Even though this is not a scholarly book like the other nonfiction I've been reading, some parts of it were just as dense with information. But, being an outsider, he doesn't have much in the way of first-hand experience to tell. I'm left thinking that it's better for people to write about where they live and have the book sold in faraway places than to go take a trip somewhere and then write a book about it for their own neighbors.
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April 5, 2008My trip down the Rio Usamacinta was the best trip of my life. Who knew they wrote a book about it?!!?
June 3, 2010
It started out really good and then Shaw just went off the deep end when he started linking himself to the Maya going to the underworld.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews