You Better Belize It

The second stop on our Caribbean Cruise was in Belize City, Belize.

The whole time we were there, people were saying things like, "Unbelizeable!" and "You better Belize it!".  I was in the country for less than 8 hours and I was tired of those jokes by the time I left.  I can't imagine how the locals feel.  (Though, the person who said it the most was the guide on our tour bus, so it's completely her fault if she experiences too much of it.)  In order to give you the full Belize experience, I have made sure to title this post with a stupid Belize pun.  You're welcome.

We had a great experience in Belize.  We got to see some Mayan ruins as well as lots of wildlife.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The tour started on a bus, of course.  I wasn't nearly as frightened by this one as I was by the one in Honduras.  We were still on a very thin dirt road (our tour guide said that the massage on our rear ends was complimentary as we bounced down the road) but there were less children and wildlife that looked like they were going to be run over.

The bus took us to an Archaeological site called Alton Ha where they are actively uncovering Mayan ruins.  This was important because climbing a Mayan pyramid was on my bucket list.

That's the first one I got to climb.

Some of the structures weren't fully uncovered.

I made sure to document my first steps of the climb, for your viewing pleasure.

When I get to the top of the first pyramid, I took this panorama of the surrounding area.

After the first pyramid, they quickly ushered us over to the second, and larger pyramid.  This one is the temple of the Sun God.

The temple of the sun god.

I wanted a close up picture of the temple with the sign.  I got our tour guide lady as a bonus.

This is from the top of the Temple of the Sun God, looking down on the first pyramid we climbed.

Looking precious on the top of the temple

After Alton Ha, our trip was not over.  We walked back to the bus, but first we had to wade through all of the locals who wanted to sell us stuff.  I wasn't interested in souvenirs, but when one lady held up a bag of pre-cut mangoes, I clearly wasn't going to say no.  Just for the record, those mangoes were possibly the best thing I ate on that trip, and I ate some amazing food on the ship.

The bus took us to a small resort where they fed us lunch and then we got on a boat that took us down the river, through an ocean inlet and back to the dock where we had started.  Our tour guide made sure to point out all of the wildlife.  It was funny because we had booked this excursion because I wanted to see the ruins, but I ended up enjoying the boat ride just as much as the first part.

The boat would periodically "turn on the AC".  That meant we would go faster.  Here are John and Carol enjoying some AC.

Some bats clinging to the tree.

Can you see the crocodile?  It's not a great picture, but he's there, I promise.

If you thought the crocodile picture was bad, this one is even worse.  The dark blob in the tree is a howler monkey.

A cashew tree.  The natives use the green fruit for eating and making alcohol and each fruit has only one nut.

We saw billions of iguanas, but this was the best pic I got.

When the boat made its way back to the ocean, there was a little area where we stopped for about ten minutes to watch manatees.  They were sooo cool!  I didn't get a picture of them, because they would just stick their noses out of the water for a half a second and then they were gone.  But it was super neat to sit and watch one pop up and then another pop up a few feet away only seconds later.

After watching manatees for a bit the boat started going way faster than we knew it could as it zipped us through the ocean.  It dropped us off at the dock, and we poked around the city a bit.  There wasn't a whole lot to see, but we did gain some true wisdom from a chocolate store:

True wisdom

We also took the time to get the obligatory picture in front of a sign.

All in all, Belize was unbelizeable.