Emily’s First Post from Belize

Hello All! I had a slightly rough start to our vacation but things are going much better now. Our travel day really wiped me out and I felt a little sick all day. Yesterday, I had really good day until afternoon when I developed a migraine while swimming. I felt it starting and should have taken medicine but I was swimming and hoped it wouldn’t get worse. I should have taken medicine because I ended up incapacitated for the rest of the evening.

I’m much better today and we have done some really fun stuff. Yesterday we went to the Cahal Pech ruins, which are right by our hotel. There are no rules or security there so you can wander around and climb on stuff all you want. I felt like we needed some Indiana Jones music. I thought about having Bill take a picture of me swinging from a vine, but it wouldn’t be quite the same as using a whip to escape from villains after you’ve stolen an artifact.

After the ruins, we ate lunch and went for a walk downtown. Our hotel is on a hill and it’s quite a trek in the heat to get downtown. It is scorching hot here! Fortunately, there are taxis to bring you back up the hill. We went to a small market and stopped at a few shops. We also identified some restaurants where we might eat supper tonight. There is supposed to be really good fruit here so I brought a mango and some kiwi at the market, but the mango was sour. I can get sour mangos in the US so that was disappointing.

This morning, we took a tour to Mayan ruins at Xunantunich. They are the closest large ruins to where we are and it was a great trip! We climbed to the top of some huge temples and found bats roosting in one of them. The views were spectacular and we were only a 10 minute walk from Guatemala. No one was guarding anything so it would have been easy to cross over. Our guide kept picking leaves from aromatic plants. There was an all spice tree, wild cilantro, lemon grass and several other things that are used in traditional medicine and cooking here. I met a woman from France who married an American and now lives in Denver. We spoke a bit of French but her English is much better than my French.

There are almost no safety apparatus on the ruins here. No rails, guard ropes, nothing. The United States would never let people climb on the ruins we explored today and yesterday. It’s wild! Apparently the Belizean government did limit how far people could climb a couple years ago after three people fell off a temple and ended up with severe fractures, but everything is back open now, still with no safety rails. It would be a lawsuit paradise in the US. It’s just survival of the fittest here.

We spent some time in the pool this afternoon then walked to town. We wanted to tour a chocolate factory but couldn’t fine it so we ate an early dinner at a nice restaurant where we got creole food. Bill’s was spicy and better than mine but I had really good fresh vegetables so I won’t complain about it. We got ice cream for dessert.

Tomorrow we’ve book what sounds like an awesome cave tour where we get to swim through the cave and see Mayan artifacts. We’ve talked to people who did it and they said it was awesome so we are pretty excited about it. That will take up most of our day.

Pictures are below. Hope all of you are doing well!