ADVENTURER & EXPLORER

Vann with Lacandon child

Marvin Vann's first visit to South America was precipitated by a trip on the Amazon River with his son, Tim, to collect butterfly specimens. There, they met two Wycliffe Bible translators telling tales of living with indigenous people in the Amazon basin. Making the trip again the following year, the Vanns sought out similar experiences with tribes in the more remote areas of Mexico. Accompanying a missionary doctor on his airplane rounds, Vann had 20 minutes with the Lacandon Indians of the Lacanjá settlement, whom he found to be "beautiful people - honest, self-sufficient, hardworking, [with a] religious core of their own that was very satisfactory for them." Between the 1960s and 1993, Vann made approximately thirty-five different visits to the Lacandon. Along with Tom Fisher, a co-worker from Vann's early days as an engineer with Lockheed, Vann explored Mayan ruins with the Lacandon. "The Lacandon people knew...some of these archeological sites that had never been seen [by outsiders], or had been forgotten about. Our plan was to have them take us on little expeditions, a fun thing for them, and [an] interesting thing for us," Vann explained.

In 1971, the Lacandon helped Vann and Fisher find the remains of a 1500-year-old religious retreat of the Mayan civilization. They were the first white men in history to inspect the ancient shrines. The "retreat" is located within and beneath Lake Guneo, where five man-made islands contain piled-stone platforms and caves, some of which the Lacandon still used for worship and as a refuge to get away from the hard work of their everyday lives. The sacred lake is known to rise and subside mysteriously, completing the cycle every 14 years. Legend says that when the lake is down, there are paths connecting all of the islands, which are built up twelve feet from the lake bottom with stones and crude masonry work.

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Updated February 27, 2003 JAT