Vegging out

Aftr the adventures of yesterday, today we did absolutely nothing - and that was perfectly OK with me, believe it or not. I settled in to watch Northwestern vs. Iowa football (sorry about that, Hawkeyes) and Jason made his way to the thatched dock to read on in Silence of the Lambs. I took a quick float in the pool outside our room and read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's autobiography. He grew up on the Caribbean coast of Colombia and when he writes about the jungly/swampy/buggy/rainy area of his birth, he gets a big ol' right on from me. Sitting in my resort in Belize. Because I'm a first-world jerk.

Anyway, we went to the weekly Saturday night lobster BBQ at the resort for dinner. This attracts people (read: tourists) from all over the peninsula that Placencia is on. It was packed - almost a hundred people, I would guess. At one point the power went out, and the lady next to us yelled: "Oh, GOD, the blender!" It was actually kind of neat, because you could see hundreds of stars in the minutes before the generator kicked in.

Mayan ruins

Yeah, I was going to be a big time whiny brat if I went to Belize and didn't see any Mayan ruins. (I kept on tugging Jason's sleeve and snuffling: "Wanna see ruins.") Apparently I wasn't alone - as it turned out 17 people went on the resort's Mayan ruin trip - so many that they split us into two groups. We went with the cave swimming group; the other group is a bunch of no-fun sissies.

At 8:30 we took a boat across the lagoon to Independence, which is kind of Placencia's sister, uh, village. It has the high school in the area, so all the kids who live in Placencia do the lagoon trip every morning and evening to get to and from school. Under the guidance of Juan, we drove to the Mayan site of Lubaantun, about 40 miles inland - and about 18 miles east of the Guatemala boarder. The road isn't paved for about two-thirds of the trip, and it requires several turns down no-name unmarked roads to get to the site.

Lubaantun itself is on the Belize $2 bill, and is very large - and about 90% of it remains unexcavated. It was thought to be something of a commercial center 1,000 years ago. They haven't found any residences, but there's a huge space for a marketplace, several ballcourts, a tomb area, a place where chieftans could stay and an altar where shamans could do their thing. Our guide there was a Mayan named Santiago, who works for the Belize Ministry of Archaeology and has been excavating on the site for 30 years.



This was the site where the famous/infamous Crystal Skull was found by the daughter of an archaeologist on her 17th birthday - which throws into doubt if it really is Mayan, even though the woman insists up and down it is. (Most say the dad picked it up in Mexico in the early 1900s and buried it for her to find.) Of course, there's the whackjob element that says, no, it's not Mayan, that's because SPACE ALIENS gave it to the Mayans as a token of goodwill. Here it is:


I ask you. Maaaybe not.

The site was funded by the cocoa trade (woo, city based on chocolate, woo!) and apparently they also mass produced little figurines and whistles. Santiago makes whistles based on the molds he's discovered; Jason bought a cool one with Mayan guy wearing a jaguar headdress.

From there, we had another picnic lunch in Juan's house in Blue Creek, his Mayan village. Juan has 7 kids, the oldest is in high school and already married. He had something for a 4-building complex: a kitchen, a shower area, a sleeping and and a common room with TV, DVD and stereo. (All kiddie movies. They had Shrek 2, even!) From his house we hiked up Blue Creek to the Mayan Caves, where they keeping finding ancient Mayan pottery when it floods out during the rainy season.


On the hike up we saw Allspice, which they use at the holidays, just like we do, cocoa pods, and wild ginger. The walls of the canyons up the Maya Mountains here reminded me of all the photos you see of the huge, lush, misty mountains in China.

Once we got to the top, we were equipped with headlamps and lifevests and jumped in to the cave to swim upstream against the creek. It was really NOT warm, but once you paddled around for a while you sort of warmed up. Apparently all the water wells up from a spring inside - apparently the cave on the other side of the mountain is dry. Our guide said he tried to kayak all the way to the source - more than a mile - and he couldn't find it. We made it upstream to a big cavern with something of a mini-rapid in it, then turned off our headlights. It was beyond pitch black, the kind of dark where your eyes play tricks and you see light even though it's impossible. We rode the mini rapid back to the mouth of the cave and hiked back - and then spend two jostly hours in the van to make it back to Independence.

FFC's Belize

We got up late this morning, and on the way to breakfast at the resort we saw two Mayan women who had set up blankets on the beach and were selling things. That's all I can say, because some people reading this blog will be the recipients of certain items purchased there. The women got up at 4 a.m. and caught a bus from Punta Gorda, seriously south of Placencia to go the resort walk and sell things.

After breakfast we read on the beach for two hours; spraying the chaise lounges with 100% DEET really cuts down on the bugs. I did get sunburnt, but not too badly given I was a total jackass and didn't put any sunscreen on at all, rationalizing that it was cloudy. Cloudy, yes, but still equatorial.

For lunch, we took the resort bikes and went down the road to the Turtle Inn, owned by Francis Ford Coppola. The road was bumpy and sandy, but by no means impassible. (This was, mind you, after they had regraded the dirt road after the rains.) It took about 20 minutes to go a couple of miles. Once you get there, though, you really get sucked away from any sort of authentic Belize - it's really spectacular and very, very much an oasis from, uh, what the country's really like. They had a circular infinity pool behind the gigantic open-air, thatched-roof restaurant. The food is all Italian - I had that known Belizean specialty pizza and Jason had some fried fish of various kinds. We had chocolate souffle for dessert, with gelato. Piiiigs.




We saw this fella on the roof of one of the screened cabanas that people stay in. I named him Iguanadon. We also passed a rusted-out - and none of this sissy Midwestern rusted-out - car when we biked back to our resort. Jason points out that it's a Chevy.

Ahhh, what the hell is that?

This here 8-foot wide thing is an eagle ray, and I saw two of these today while we were snorkeling. We headed out to Laughingbird Cay, which is about 40 minutes off the coast. It's a national park in Belize, and really just the perfect little spit of sand out in the Caribbean. The water wasn't as clear as the Bahamas - probably the hurricane kicking up debris - but we still saw some amazing things. These guys totally freaked me out when I first saw them. I bobbed above water and frantically waved to Steve, our guide, who went under to tell us what they were. Jason got a quick look and everyone else missed them. At least I have some sort of witness so I don't seem like crazy Loch Ness Monster lady. We also saw a barracuda, many, many tiny non-stinging jelly fish, a puffer fish, a nurse shark, stinging coral and a billion other pretty things I can't name.

While we were eating lunch on the island - a picnic packed by the resort's kitchen, of course - we saw a lemon shark basically begging for our food in the shallows. The guys started throwing them some chicken, and the captain of our boat said they are so used to being fed that they only eat barbeque chicken now. Spoiled.





When we got back from snokeling, Jason and I walked around Placencia, eating at Sugar Reef - which is apparently the party bar - they had one heck of a horseshoes tournament set up - and Daisy's, the ice cream place that was as good as billed in the Belize travel sites. While Placencia isn't as flat out poor as Seine Bight, it's still very much a village, with 500 people. The elementary school for this part of the country is located here, and you see tons of kids running around in their school uniforms, playing or watch soccer. It's one of the few reminders (well, the entire English speaking thing, yes) that it used to be a British colony.

I know what the monster in Lost is...

... it's howler monkeys! No, seriously, hear me out. With the weather cleared up, today we went on the Monkey River boat trip. You leave from the lagoon side of the resort on a 15-foot boat, go past the mangroves that ring the coast of the Caribbean and to the river, which is about 14 miles south. Our guide, Doyle, was from Monkey River Town (pop. 201) and we put in orders for lunch with his uncle, who runs the restaurant there. We got back in the boat and started up the river, Apocalypse Now-style. Doyle really, truly had an eye for spoting pretty much anything at 100 yards. We saw a baby crocodile (still three feet long), a ton of pretty birds, iguanas, bats, the freakiest spiders, a termite nest...and, from a distance, howler monkeys. Now howler monkeys don't actually howl - they sort of have this gutteral growl that you can hear from up to a mile away. It, oddly, sounds like rapids off a waterfall - or, you know, like the monster in Lost. So there you have it.





We got off the boat and hiked a bit around a Survivor -esque medicine trail. (Warning: If you lose your balance, don't grab for a branch because it might actually be a snake. Sweet.) This pic of Jason about 10 feet behind me kind of gives you an idea of how dense it was. Doyle said that everything was much, much lusher before Hurricane Iris in 2001 - it's hard to believe, since obviously it's dark and you can hardly see the sky at this point. This was also the point where our 100% DEET failed us. I got a couple of these beauties on my forehead, because everybody wants to look like they have mumps on vacation. Yum!

That's why they call it the rain forest.

The rain that started last night continued all day today - folks think it's the far, far north band of Hurricane Beta. The winds weren't too bad, but it did flat out pour for hours. So what's a girl to do? I spent about two hours at the spa, getting a massage and facial. And, much like you would if it was raining on a cruise, we ate a lot. Here's a tapeworm-temping list: Special K and Crispix mini boxes of cereal, chocolate chip macaroons, chicken quesadilla, trial mix power bar, chips and salsa, little appetizer meatballs, conch fritters, shrimp cocktail, two pieces of focaccia and rotisserie chicken.

We also had "all you can drink" hour at the resort tonight from 6-7, which started a number of jokes: Someone had seen in one of the local papers that the Placencia AA meeting is tomorrow night, and won't it be so much fun to meet up there again?

"This is more like playing Quidditch than tennis."

For the first day here, we explored the resort - which was fun, but makes me eager to get out and see more of the area. It's nice having the restaurant at our beck and call - and the food is good. All the baked stuff in the continental breakfast seem to be homemade, which is really just gluttony on a whole new level.

Here are some photos from the resort - the first is the cabana at the end of the dock at the resort - there's a couple of hammocks and chaise lounges out there. The second is one of the pool areas - the restaurant and lobby is to the right of this, and the cabana to the left is actually a bar. The final one is a few from our room at sunset. It started to rain a couple of hours later.

We walked the half-mile up to the village - and I do mean village - to the north, Seine Bight. It was pretty desolate, and very, very poor - small, ramshackle houses, grown over soccer fields without nets. The road was paved through most of the town, not like anyone there could seemingly afford a car. We wandered down a side road looking for this artist's house, but when we got there it had a creep, end-of-lagoon, The Rescuers but-not-in-a-cute-Disney way kind of vibe, so we left before we made it to the front door.

Upon our return, we rented rackets and balls from the front desk and played tennis at the resort's court. I'm very, very rusty - Jason less so, and I think he was humoring me. Which isn't all bad, actually.