Tuesday – 10 December 2013 – Belize City, Belize
I can't say enough good things about Belize. I've flown to Belize three times over the years and each time stayed a number of days in luxurious lodges in otherwise pristine jungle and then a few days on the the Barrier Reef which is second in the world in size to the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. Belize is a stable democracy, the people speak English, and the country has a great history of sensible development where local ownership and operation of hotels are required.
Due to the reefs, the Silver Spirit anchored some distance off the capital city of Belize. High speed shuttle boats were provided to take us to the "Belize Tourism Village", a development of shops, tourist bars, and jewelry stores. This facility, built by you guessed it, Diamond International, is adjacent to the real town of Belize City, once kind of dangerous but now quite walkable. I know that because a walking map was provided. (I usually interpret the unsolicited provision of a walking map in an unknown city as an admonition to avoid streets not on the indicated route. Just saying.)
We had pre-booked the all-day Lamanai Temples & River Expedition excursion from the ship. This provided Barbara's first visit to a Mayan ruins and also a chance for me to see the Orange Walk District, an area off limits to tourists when I visited in the 1980s and 1990s due to this area's proximity to an area of Mexico to the north where drug wars were then quite rampant.
Belize is 90% undeveloped land. The excursion started with a bus shuttle to the town of Orange Walk where we boarded high speed excursion boats for the hour and a half 26 mile very scenic ride southwest, up the New River into Belize's interior. (By the way, the river was named by the indigenous people for the newcomers, that is, the Spanish.) We saw wildlife along the shores as we held on to our hats in the 30+ mph boats.
The destination was the Lamanai Mayan ruins, a complex of temples and monuments dating as far back as 2000 years. Some ruins are yet to be fully excavated. The structures adjacent to the one mile round trip walking trail in the jungle were stunning. We visited a temple with jaguar faces built into the construction, and another called the Mask Temple had really neat looking stone faces. The local guide was the best I've experienced at the three or four Mayan ruins I've visited over the years, including the spectacular Tikal Ruins in Guatemala which I visited on a muddy Land Rover ride from Belize 30 years ago. This guide not only explained the interpretation of the temples but also detailed how the archeologists came to their conclusions of the human sacrifice of the winners of the ritualistic handball games. (I'm not making this up.) I believed the guide's explanation, even before the most welcome local Belican Beer.
A number of our hardy tour group decided to climb one of the Mayan pyramids as many of us watched in awe and took pictures. (As one of the latter I said loudly, "I climbed a bigger Mayan pyramid in Tikal." The guide just scowled at me.) At the furthest temple, I succumbed to guilt and climbed alone a different pyramid as the rest of the group just shrugged, turned their backs, and walked away.
I guess the lessons I came away with from this trip were, 1) to climb the first pyramid you get to, and 2) not to play handball with a Mayan especially if you're good at handball. The boat ride back was equally speedy, made less daunting by the aforementioned Belican Beer. We arrived back to the ship via the Diamond International shuttle craft as night fell. We immediately sailed away for a restful sea day en route to Key West.
