**Since I don't work on the weekends, I've decided it would be perfect to start a Weekend Spotlight section for this blog. I'll highlight one (or more, if I have the time) countries or cities that I've visited and post the articles every Weekend including a photo slide show (if I have digital photos). I only started using my first digital camera in 2007 (thank you dad!), but I may do some articles on countries that I traveled to back before my "digital age" when I was exclusively a film photographer. I promise to still make an effort to find stock-photos to accompany any articles to show the places that I'm writing about which I visited pre-2007. That way, this will force me to upload pictures for trips that I've been too lazy to upload yet, and to reminisce about some of my favorite destinations as well.
BELIZE: I helped one of my clients organize a custom tour to Belize last summer for a group of about 20 North Carolina teaching fellows. Since I work for an educational travel company, I'm allowed to accompany one of our groups on a trip each year. I decided to travel with this group for two reasons: (1) I'd never been to Belize before and (2) since this was an older group (college-age instead of high schoolers like the majority of our travelers), we'd been able to add some really cool activities to the itinerary, like going on 4-wheel ATVs through the jungle. It was a nice change of pace to be going on a trip with folks closer to my age after two summer trips to Europe with 13-18 year olds the two previous years!
This was our itinerary:
Day 1 Hello Belize
Meet your Tour Director and check into hotel
Day 2 Belize City
Boat ride down the New River to visit Lamanai Ruins
Day 3 Belize City
Peccary Park ATV Excursion
Belize Zoo & Tropical Education Center visit
Day 4 Belize--San Ignacio
Travel to San Ignacio
Canopy Tour in rainforest
Explore River Caves in Cayo District
Day 5 San Ignacio--Ambergris Caye
Cruise on Olde Belize River
Travel to Ambergris Caye
Day 6 Ambergris Caye
Snorkelling tour of Hol Chan Marine Reserve and Shark Alley
Free time
Day 7 Ambergris Caye
Free time
Day 8 Flight home from Belize
Belize has the perfect balance of cultural adventure, adrenaline-packed activities, wild-life viewing at its finest, and relaxing beach time to make for a fun and educational vacation. Belize turned out to be even more culturally diverse than I had ever imagined. Before traveling there, I knew that Belize had been a British colony so the official langauge of the country was English because it still held some ties to the UK. I figured since it was right next to Mexico and north of Guatemala, a lot of Spanish would actually be spoken and that a bulk of the population would be of indegenous and British colonial decent. I quickly learned, however, that the majority of the population was in fact of African decent due to the role that Belize played in the caribbean slave trade. They also had a surprisingly large number of Chinese and Indians living there owning and operating the majority of the food and whole-sale related businesses. I even found a full fledged Hindu temple in downtown Belize City and I heard from some locals that you could see women in Sahris walking around that part of town most days of the week. I was lucky to have an extra day before the rest of the group arrived into Belize City to do some exploring on my own. I figured the best thing to do was hire a local taxi driver to show me around, and the $20 he charged was well worth the personal tour. I found out the majority of locals considered themselves tri-lingual, speaking primarily among themselves "Kriol" (an english-based creole), proper English (with tourists), and Spanish. If you listened hard enough to the Kriol they spoke to each other, you could pick out some of the English words and even some of the older English expressions that had remained in tact, such as "Mek aste" meaning "hurry up" based on the old English expression "make haste." Being the linguistics nerd that I am, I asked our guide to take me to a book store so I could pick up some books about Kriol. Luckily a linguist had published both a dictionary and "Travul Buk" containing the most common phrases that a tourist would need. I bought both, and despite sounding like a fool, I made my best attempt at trying out the phrases in the book with our guide and driver. I think they appreciated my attempt, but I'm sure they were thinking "silly white girl" the whole time, but they were nice enough to play along.
For our adrenaline junkies, my client had requested zip-lining, 4-wheel ATVing, hiking/cave tubing, and snorkelling in shark & ray alley to be included in the itinerary. Now, I am a bit of a scaredy-cat when it comes to heights (I didn't even go to the top of the Eiffel Tower while in Paris a few years ago due to a mild panic attack thinking about being so high up), but I managed my way through the zip-lining without freaking out. I just didn't look down, so I suppose I missed some of the point of seeing the jungle from up in the canopy, but oh well, I didn't start hyperventalating so I couned that as a WIN. Since I'm not a tiny little thing, I picked up some serious speed on the zip-lines themselves and whacked into some brave "catchers" who prevented me for the most part from whacking into the trunks of the trees supporting the launching platforms. I guess it was better to bowl over a few well-meaning men than plow feet first into a tree. One guy sort of missed his catch and I did hit fairly hard into one truck, but it was luckily well-padded so there was no harm done (except maybe to my pride). The hardest part wasn't the zipping and the speed because they just guided you along pretty quick clicking you in and out of the harness system, it was coming down at the end that posed the real problem. They wanted me to sit down backwards off the edge of a platform some 100 feet in the air. In my head I knew the harness would kick in and support me once I got to a full seated position, but the whole sitting down into nothingness so high up had my knees shaking so badly they almost buckled out from under me. It took the staff a good 10 minutes to talk me down off the platform and I wanted to punch the guy holding my rope at the end because he tried to use it to pull me over the edge a couple of times, which I did not appreciate, thank you very much. I survived, and that's what counts.
ATVing and snorkelling probably tied for my favorite activities because they did not involve any heights and both had some interesting surprises. The ATVing took place on a privately owned section of jungle land and was operated by a very nice family. Other than needing to jump start a number of the vehicles, it was a relatively safely and professionally run facility. They also had an undocumented Mayan archaeological cave site on their land that they allowed us to stop to visit, which was an unexpected suprise. They had us unload at a random spot during the ride and then gave us helmets with head lamps so we could check out the pottery and bones still inside the cave. It was a bit of a squeeze and gymnastics act to get through the narrow opening of the cave, but overall very fascinating to get to visit a site that was inhabited hundreds if not thousands of years before and served as a natural shelter. I'm sure the majority of our group enjoyed racing around the cleared-out jungle paths and spraying each other with mud going through the big puddles, but the cave site was my favorite part of that day's adventures. Snorkelling in shark & ray alley on Ambergris Caye (or locally referred to as San Pedro--yes, like the Madonna song "La Isla Bonita") was amazing, I have to admit. I had only snorkelled once before in the Pacific on the island of Aitutaki during my semester abroad's visit to the Cook Islands, and I'd been blown away by the giant clams and brightly colored fish there, but they didn't have sharks. So when they told me there would actually be sharks and sting rays where I'd be swimming there in Belize (hence the name Shark & Ray Alley), I was hesitant to get in the water even though they assured me nurse sharks were small and would not bite a human (the whole they're more afraid of you than you are of them song and dance). They even hung "chum buckets" under the boats to attract the sharks to come closer. I remember thinking "no, no, no, that really isn't necessary, let them stay where they are...hopefully far away from me." I did finally talk myself into getting into the water and as soon as my face went below the surface, I was once again mesmerized by the underwater world in front of me as I'd been the time before. The unexpected surprise came not from a shark or ray, which there were plenty of, but from a barracuda. I was swimming along, minding my own business, following a cute little yellow fish swimming about 2 or 3 feet in front of me when out of the corner of my eye a barracuda darts right in front of me and bites the cute little fish clean in half and swims away just as fast as it appeared. Our snorkelling guide, who was quite the laid-back, island living pot-head, had been swimming right along side me and saw this supposedly rare sight as well, so he came up to the surface and spits out his snorkel to exclaim "Duuuuuuude, that was narly! That like never happens, did you see that Barracuda, man?" I figured since the barracuda didn't bite me in half, I was happy I'd gotten to see it. I was just going to keep my distance from "cute little fish" in the future so I wouldn't become barracuda bait.
The cave tubing was definitely worth doing, though, I didn't particularly enjoy the 45 minute hike up to the launching site. It's not that I don't enjoy a good hike, it was the fact that I had to walk in very worn out water shoes that I rented off a guy and carry the big inner tubes the whole way and there just isn't a good way to carry those things. Plus was really hot and sticky as you would expect the jungle to be. I ended up balancing the rim of the tube on my forehead for a while, but the bouncing on my back got annoying so I ended up carrying it the rest of the way, which bugged the heck out of my wrist to keep it off the ground. I was ecstatic by the time we reached the place we could actually get in the water because I was verging on a good old fashioned "Are we there yet?" whine just as we rounded the bend that apprached the river. I luckily got to keep my adult status by avoiding that statement. Our guides followed along with us in the river to ensure we didn't run into any big rocks in the caves or into the spiny plants along the river banks further down. I was impressed with how they kept their balance walking alongside us and guiding the tube chain that we created by linking one person's feet under the armpits of the person in front of them through the very small patches of rapids to ensure we didn't get pulled to far to one side and hit the riverbank. The rock formations inside the caves were pretty impressive and for the most part it was just a relaxing float down the river aside from the patch or two of fast moving water, which really couldn't be called rapids to be honest. The group found a rope swing near the end of the river and since I don't swing since several embarrassing mishaps on ropes back at camp as a teenager(forgetting to lift my legs high enough...well,not worth getting into really), let's just say I was happy to act as videographer and photographer as they took turns climbing to the top of a big boulder and using the rope to propel themselves out to a deep spot where they could dive in. All in all, it was another worthy inclusion on the trip.
Moving on to wild-life, Belize really had it all. The best viewing was done on the river cruise that we took to visit the Lamanai Ruins early in the trip. Our skilled guides were able to stop the boat so we could photograph crocodiles, Jesus birds (so-called for their ability to seemingly walk on water), and even a spider monkey, which our guide fed a banana to. At the Lamanai Ruins we encoutered two howler monkey clans fighting over territory in the canopy above us and got to hear their lion-like howls as they chased each other from branch to branch above our heads. The sound was actually quite frightening, but when you saw the monkeys themselves, they were much smaller than the animal you imagine that sound is coming from. The guide told us that they produce the unique sound with a specially evolved bone in their windpipe. I really wished I had a video camera because that howl is really hard to describe without hearing it yourself. Other animals that our guide pointed out along the way back included blood sucking bats (they assured us, they just sucked on cow blood), various lizards, and even africanized bees (their hive was really architectural and different from normal honey bees). My client had visited Belize the year before and hand't gotten to see as much wild-life on the boat cruise she'd been on, so she had also asked that we add a visit to the Belize zoo to ensure the group wouldn't return feeling like they'd missed seeing any animals, but by the time we got there, our group was already pretty impressed with what we'd gotten to see out in nature. The one thing the zoo was able to offer that couldn't happen out in nature was an up-close encounter with their jaguar. They got to go into the Jaguar sactuary and get inside a cage while they let the Jaguar out and it climbed all over the cage and did tricks for them, well if you can call eating pieces of raw chicken tricks, but again this was something I was happy to watch, but didn't need to be up-close and personal with. Unfortunately, I would get my own up-close encounter with nature later that day at Pook's Hill Lodge where we stayed out in the Cayo Jungle District. I was getting ready for bed in my private cabana, which I absolutely adored, up until I went to close the curtains. As I pulled the folds apart I discovered a SCORPION clinging to the fabric. It was fairly late, and I was all by myself, so I didn't know what to do. I was going to go try to find our guide in the dark, but I noticed since the bug wasn't moving and there was a spot on the curtain that looked as if it had been squished by the previous occupant, it was probably dead and I could wait until morning. So I just left the curtain closed so I didn't have to look at it, smart right? Wrong! When I did grab the guide in the morning to help me remove the scorpion from the curtain, I went to show him where it had been and...dun dun dun...it was GONE! Luckily, it hadn't gone far, and we found it just a little bit to the left of the curtain. The guide found two wooden hangers in the closet and acted as my hero by killing it, and I could once again breath easy. If being in the middle of the jungle wasn't nerve-wracking enough, did I really need a scorpion trying to sting me while I was asleep?
After that harrowing portion of the adventure, I was more than ready for our beach time out in Ambergris Caye. We got to the island by returning to Belize City and taking the high-speed ferry over. Our hotel was well-located, I felt, because it was about 20 minutes from the busy part of town where everyone lived and the tourists congretated. It was easy enough to get into town by renting a golf cart, which was the only type of motorized vehicle other than taxi vans allowed on the island, and I found a few ladies at the hotel who invited me along for some riotously fun golf-cart cruising. We had a small private beach at the hotel, which I quite enjoyed lounging on as well as a pool, which was good for cooling off in between naps on the beach. A couple days of worshipping the sun and sitting by the ocean was a perfect way to wrap up the trip. With pina colada in hand and my butt parked in a chaise lounge, I finally got to say I was officially on vacation, and it was glorious. I hope to return to Belize in a few years for more sun worshipping and embarassing attempts at speaking Kriol. I truthfully don't expect the country to be much more developed than it was during this visit, although I could be wrong. Life there seemed to operate at a very slow, "we'll do it when we get around to it" pace. So we'll just have to see if they've "gotten around to it" by the time I go back, but fingers crossed, I hope it will be just as I left it, balancing on the edge of development but still untouched enough to still offer some real adventure.
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