Day two in Belize:
Sorry I'm a little obsessed with the construction down here I take a lot of pictures out of the foggy bus window! So much cement & cinder block... I'm not always sure what's holding it up??? There were people working on pouring a floor under this house.
A little bike/odds-n-ends shop
The streets are SO narrow. Our bus passes people on scooters/ pedestrians with like 6" of clearance. It makes me tense. They seem to just honk lightly for people to get out of the way. All the kids walk home from school with very few sidewalks anywhere.
This was a really nice, big futbol field.
A school...
Ha! So even the tombs have rebar sticking out of the top! Buy one plot and you can bury the whole family there.
This is a reaaaaally nice basketball court.
More construction...
The few big nice houses are always the brightest colors...
I don't really know what this tree farm is for but it looked cool.
This property on the hill has it's own cemetery. Most of the properties have security fences all the way around.
We visited two sets of Mayan ruins today. The first was Xunantunich. They put the people and the vans on a ferry to cross the river. There is one guy with a crank to make it all work.
Olaf saw his reflection in the river and thought he may have seen his cousin.
You walk up this hill and then all of the sudden you turn a corner and the hillside opens up into a plaza.
All of the pyramids are built with limestone witch erodes pretty easily. Some of the areas are reconstructed and SO MANY are not even uncovered yet! It seems like the Mayans really loved plazas because you'd walk into one plaza area, then the back side of the pyramid would be another plaza, and another, etc. A lot of the pyramids' exterior walls aren't even uncovered yet.
Those are individual rooms on top of this structure. The elites lived in these areas and the peasants lived all around the cities on farms.
This was a VERY recently uncovered structure. Brent (our trip guide) comes here often and he said it was just a jungle hillside two years ago. Here are some of the archaeological things they have removed from inside the structure (it was a tomb).
In this "new" tomb someone important must've been buried here. He had a fancy Jade bead necklace, a deer, a jaguar and 15 blades buried with him. The obelisk (not pictured) is still in front of the tomb but the writings have long washed away on the soft limestone.
Olaf caught a ride in Dennis' backpack. His little legs were getting tired and we were about to climb El Castillo, the 2nd tallest structure in Belize (still to this day!)
We saw some fun wildlife today. See how many moths you can find!
We made it about half way up!
So when they uncovered this large pyramid, they found these ornate stucco "friezes" that made a band around the top. The original is behind it but they've covered it in an exact replica. Back in the day all of these stone structures would've been covered in stucco and paint.
This is the view to the West. This is the town that borders Guatemala, which we'll cross through tomorrow on our way to Tikal.
Olaf on the tippy tippy top! The ledge was a little narrower than I would've liked. :D
View back to the East from the top of El Castillo.
That's the little Guatemalan border town behind Olaf
Back down the temple we found a termites' nest.
The roots of the trees are so cool looking. They don't have to go down very deep to find water like they do where we live in the desert.
Olaf is resting in a replica of one of the hoops from the Mayan ball game "pok-ta-pok" (named after the sound the ball would make). We saw one of these ball courts in each of the sites we visited today. It is believed that the
winner was actually the one sacrificed as it was seen to be a great honor. They didn't believe in death, just reincarnation.
I wish I had a longer lens with me, but we saw (and heard) two groups of howler monkeys having an argument in the trees. They are LOUD and the sound they make is terrifying. They also make a barking sound. I recorded a video so we'll see if I can get that uploaded.
We ate lunch at a little roadside shack on the river (rice and beans and a little chicken wing... with warm coleslaw that I was disappointed to not eat... I love coleslaw!) We also drank an iced hibiscus tea (out of a sandwich bag) and sliced pineapple and coconut water (out of a coconut) that we bought out of a cooler by the roadside. And then we rode our bus to the second set of ruins. These ones weren't as tall but the experience was really neat! You can see here how they've just started to uncover the base but the top is still jungle. It's easy to see how quickly these structures can just get overgrown by the jungle.
Here's our whole group! See if you can find us.
These are big steps for a little snowman to climb.
This set of ruins was really cool because I feel like it was better preserved. You can walk through a lot of the corridors and into the rooms. Many of them still have roofs. This set of stairs is even steeper than it looks.
They call these water vines. Apparently you can just cut one and water will seep right out of them so you can drink.
So... birdwatching here is a little different since the trees are like three times as tall! Someone spotted this pair of Toucans waaaay high up in the trees! You can only see one from this angle (can you find it??) We were told that they mate for life and that people really don't get to see them that often. He didn't share any fruit loops with us.
This was my favorite part of the day. The University of Montana archaeology students were there on a dig! This is one corner of a wall they found the day before:
And this guy literally picked up three pieces of pottery in one minute's time. That tote there is full of different artifacts they found in that section, including like a gallon Ziploc bag of pottery. They are only like 10" down and just picking this stuff up off the ground like it's nothing. This spot is near a burial site uncovered in the last few years.
This is a cutting tool they had just found that morning. They also had a little rubber ball the size of a bouncy ball. Metals weren't introduced until the Spaniards came (after the decline of the big Mayan civilizations) but they did have obsidian and jade from Guatemala. I also read that they didn't use beasts of burden so they didn't really use wheels as tools either. There had to be some serious manpower to do everything they did!
It's also interesting to me that we're learning about these locations and I tend to think of them as a snapshot in time. But really all of these cities evolved over about 2000 years. One era would build something, then they'd build over top of it many times. I would assume this stuff on the top would be from the most modern era.
Funky mushroom jungle stuff.
We came back to our cabana to find this little tiny gecko. It's body is probably the size of half my pinkie nail. Olaf welcomed him into our room but he scurried away to chase the setting sun I'm sure.
After a long day of hiking and climbing We were ready to kick back and relax in the hammock on our porch.
