Belize: Feb.2015

Life in Caye Caulker! The guy is saying, "Hot Tamales-es. Soft and tender, no contender"(except I didn't get the camera running until after the "Hot".)

After we picked up some of the street vendor's hot tamales, a pelican wanted to have some too....

We found a clothes dryer box and made it into a play house for the preschool. Roxanne's little friends decided to paint it.

Dock buddies.

A monarch butterfly who overshot Mexico a bit...

The upstairs iguana.

A big school of tarpon hang around off this dock on the back side of the island. You can go swim with them if you want - we're still thinking about that...!

Pink spoonbills and their buddies.

Flowers1

Flowers2

Big George, out lookin' for Donna...

Roxanne, her buddy, and the Rasta love boat.

Little Stars Pre-School decided to have a parade on Monday.

The "Miss Roxanne" kite for Kite Day.

Kite Day!

A tapir - the national animal of Belize.

We moved inland to San Ignacio - a friendly little town close to the Guatemalan border.

We'll stay in San Ignacio for a week, then move to a jungle lodge across the border in Guatemala for a couple nights.

A family of turkeys lives on the grounds of the Riverpark Inn.

There are lots of caves in Belize. We explored one called Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM), a Mayan archaeological site that contains skeletons, ceramics, and stoneware. We were given headlamps and hardhats, and had to swim into the entrance of the cave. We walked, climbed and swam our way in about 1-1/2 km underground.

The star of the show in ATM is the human remains known as "The Crystal Maiden" (a skeleton that actually turned out to be a boy's) whose bones which have been completely covered by calcite, leaving them sparkling and spooky.

There are Mayan ruins scattered all over the Belize and Guatemala jungles. Within walking distance of San Ignacio is a ruin called Cahal Pech. The site was once the palace home for an elite Mayan family, continuously inhabited as far back as 900 BC - one of the oldest recognizably Maya sites in Western Belize. The site was abandoned in the 9th century AD for unknown reasons.

The site consists of seven plazas and over 30 structures including temples, residential buildings, ball courts, an altar, and a sweat-house, all situated on just 2 acres. There are passages, stairs and multiple levels spanning heights of over 25 meters.

There were only a few other people at Cahal Pech while we were there and we were free to climb around all over the site.

We went river tubing for a couple of hours down the Mopan River near Bullet Tree, Belize. Nothing to do for a couple of hours but float along watching for iguanas in the trees, in the company of a young Belizean guide and his two water dogs.

This page is getting full. Please go to the next page - Belize: Mar.