Travel-Trotter

Hi. It’s me, Julie, and I’m going to talk about the amazing iguana. If you don’t know what an iguana is, it is a scaly lizard. And guess what? It can grow to 7 feet long! Wow! That is a pretty big lizard.

I’m going to start at the beginning. We get in the car. I was so excited. I tried to go to sleep but I just couldn’t. I twisted and turned. By the time I was about to go to sleep, we were there. I was confused at first because we were at a hotel. I saw our guide a little while later. Our guide led us through a passage way and we hiked about 10 minutes and we were there. I saw a humongous spider. I was terrified, but then I saw a big iguana. It was super cool. Then we sat down and the guide told us some facts and rules.

Big Spider

One male with 2 females

Another male came to see the females but couldn’t get in the cage

This is an iguana sanctuary. The green iguana is endangered so they try to breed more of them and rescue injured ones. They also go and collect eggs from the riverside so that they can incubate them and more will survive, then they release them to the wild.

Petting the iguanas

We went into a room with iguanas. It was so cool. I asked the guide if it was a boy or a girl. He said if it is a male it is orange. He said the males cannot be together because they fight. So there were lots of females but only one male. We looked at the beautiful iguanas for a minute. My sisters saw one pooping. It was grosssss! Then the guide asked if we wanted to feed them. We all said YES! (Except for my mom and dad.) The guide brought out some big leaves and then he brought out a ladder. I got up the ladder and fed some iguanas up high. It was so cool. The iguanas were munching down the leaves.

Feeding the iguanas

One leaf, two mouthsBefore we came, mom told us we could hold baby iguanas. But the guide said they don’t do that anymore because the iguanas would lick people and ingest bug spray or sunscreen, and some of them died, so they decided it wasn’t a good idea. It was too bad because the little ones are SO cute and bright green! But we did get to see some of them, who they keep separate from the adults.

A leaf full of baby iguanas. You can see why we wanted to hold them. They are so cute!

They do let you hold the big iguanas! The guide went to get one big one. We got on our knees to hold it. I was the first one to hold it. And then me and my sisters held it together. It scratched me a little bit but it was worth holding. It was cool touching them because it felt like a scaly creature.

Holding the iguana

Putting her down gentlyThen we went down the trail and then I noticed iguana poop was on my knee. It was disgusting. I just washed it off. But it was still disgusting.

If you go to Belize you should go see the iguanas!