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!

We arrived at our eco-resort the Maya Mountain Lodge and checked into our bungalow a slightly musty hut with two rooms and settled in for several days of exploring the Maya interior and ramping up school.  I went exploring the downtown area to get my bearings of the area and got scolded by several traffic officers apparently I tried to cross the one way bridges the wrong way.  In my defense they have zero traffic signs so how am I supposed to know???

We completed school the next day and took a swim in the very cold pool, burrrrr.  We explored the local Maya site in the afternoon called Xunantunich (pronounced shunantunch).   It was our first big Maya site at it was very impressive.  It was built on a hill adjacent to the Mopan River, there is one major temple that dominates the site and some huge plazas that allows you to gaze at the temples and feel very insignificant.  The Mayan constructed their temples so the tops of the temples would appear just above the top of the jungle canopy likely to allow them to worship the sun, one of their many gods.  We climbed the largest temple which was a bit scary running after the kids climbing up steep inclines.  There was also a nicely preserved ball court, shaped in map view like an “I” with parallel sloping sides.  This is the only ball court that has been discovered in Belize with vertical hoop goals perched at the top of the walls.

After spending a few days in Siene Bight we discovered we were living in a Garifuna community.  The Garinagu are a people who are a mixed African/Indigenous people defined by their Garifuna language a dialect of the Arawakan Language.  They were a population that originated on Yurumein, now called the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the in Windward islands of the British West Indies in the Lesser Antilles.  They are a mixture of Red Carib, Arawak Indians and African slaves who were ship wrecked near the island.  After an uprising on St Vincent island they were forced into exile taking 5 years to reach several locations in Belize, Hondouras and Guatamala including Siene Bight.

We were lucky enough to meet Joshua who arranged for a drumming and dancing demonstration.  We were treated to about an hour of history, drumming and dancing.  They got us involved in dancing and it was apparent that this community was very passionate about keeping their cultural identity intact.

I tried some of the food at a local restaurant it was a mixture of Carribean food with African influence including cassava and spices as well as seafood.  I had fish with beans and rice, it was one of the best meals I had while in Siene Bight.

The Garifuna have their own celebration day to commemorate their landing in Belize around the early 1800’s.  The celebration occurs in mid-November and includes lots of dancing and donning of costumes.  In 2008, UNESCO proclaimed the Garifuna language, music and dance as a “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity”

We finished up our time in Placencia with packing up our stuff on Sunday, always an onerous chore.  We headed out toward San Ignacio a three hour drive west toward Guatamala.  On our way we stopped at the Marie Sharps hot sauce factory, this was the ubiquitous condiment on the table at every meal in Belize and we have developed a love for it; yes I’m including the kids.  We tried more than 20 different hot sauces but the habanero is still the best.

Further along toward San Ignacio we stopped at the Blue Hole National Park (not the diving one) but a flowing spring that fills up a sink hole until it overflows and drains to a cave system.

We explored for about an hour and enjoyed our time but knew we had to get to San Ignacio so we went on our way.  We stopped for lunch at an Indian restaurant at Maddy’s request and had a wonderful experience, got face paint and apparently ordered about 5 times too much food and then felt a bet ripped off when the bill came.  Oh well.

We drove from Belize City south about 3 1/2 hours toward Placencia a long sandy peninsula that parallels the coast.  The kids did well to endure the car ride with ipad time and snacks.  We picked up some fresh fruit from a road side stand; lots of Mandarin Oranges, limes and Pinapples.  When ended up staying at the Nautical Inn in Siene Bight the town next door to Placencia.  We were right on the beach and it was a great start to our trip perfect for relaxing on the beach.  The Caribbean in this part of Belize is very shallow with very small waves perfect for the kids.  The coast is protected by a barrier reef off the coast.

After we vegged for a day or so we visited a preserved area call the Cockscomb Wildlife Basin, known to have one of the densest Jaguar populations in all of Central America.  The area was a preserved tropical jungle with beautiful huge trees and dense forest.  We were going to do a hike to a waterfall but got a hearty “no” from the kids instead we settled for a tiny hike to a wrecked airplane

and an inner tube float down the river.  It was quite fun and refreshing in the hot weather.

No sightings of Jaguars, I think it is pretty much impossible to see them during the day,  but we learned that they get lots of pictures of them from camera traps.  There are estimated to be 60 adult Jaguars and various other large cats including Puma, Ocelot, Margay and the Jaguarundi in the 128,000 square acre tropical jungle.  Although we didn’t see any wild cat sightings we did find this life sized statue that was perfect for a ride.

  I think actually seeing a Jaguar in the wild would scare the hell out of all of us. 

The frantic days of packing and tying up loose ends are over and we are off on travel!!!  We started our journey to Belize on New year’s eve leaving out of the Milwaukee airport.  We had one of the kids babysitters drive us to Milwaukee on that morning to avoid a large seven week parking bill.  Even though there was four inches of snow the night before we had little trouble navigating the roads to the airport.  Our flight with Southwest was on time and we were off to Houston and then onto Belize City.

Although not the capitol, Belize City is one of the larger cities in the country and where most tourists fly into.  We walked off our plane into the warm moist air and truly knew we were out of the Midwest, winter fading quickly away.  We rented a car for this first portion of the trip to see some of the far flung locations.  After a quick drive into town we checked into our hotel.  Unbeknownst to us the hotel we are staying at is throwing a huge New Years Eve party, with music until 4am in the morning, Ugghhhh our first major fail.  We ate dinner and took a quick walk around town; we took a picture with the big Belize sign then went to sleep.  We endured the music and the loud party using ear plugs and most everyone slept reasonably well.

The next morning both Maddy and I went on separate runs around the town, mostly the downtown area of Belize City which is situated on the two sides of Haulover Creek.  It was interesting to see what appeared to be a mostly run down city, with a bit of investment could be a very charming downtown area although they are missing beaches so will likely miss out on the associated tourism.  We ate breakfast and then began a 3 1/2 hour drive to Placencia.