We needed to start making our way back towards Belize City so that Randi and Amy could catch their flight home. We found a place near Belmopan where you can rent tiny houses and also camp, and Randi and Amy were happy to have a real bed for a night.
The Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary was established in 1986 to protect the jaguar and is considered the most important jaguar reserve in the world. We headed to the sanctuary mid-morning, knowing that we were unlikely to see the nocturnal jaguars.
After our ATM cave tour, we decided to head to Placencia for a little more beach time. It was late in the day, so we decided to stop for the night in the town of Hopkins where we were able to camp for the night outside of the Jambel Jerk Cafe. We were serenaded by a local band with Bob Marley songs. Across from the restaurant was a laundromat. Clean clothes!
I had read about the ATM caves tour in our guide book, but wasn’t sure whether we should do it or not. First, it said that you had to be relatively fit to do the tour…Derek and I are fairly fit for our age, but we have been fitter….hours of sitting in a truck, you know…and younger…years of living, you know. Second, it was pretty expensive compared to other tours where you might, say, float on an inner tube through a cave. Then we talked with a fellow tourist at another campsite, and he had said that if you are going to pay for one tour in Belize, that it should be the ATM cave, so we signed up. We later were told that National Geographic listed the Top Ten Sacred Caves in the World, and the ATM caves was named number one. Sold.
We headed towards Caracol, the largest Maya site in Belize. The road is rough and slow, so we planned to camp half way and then get to Caracol early the next day. Before setting up camp, we stopped at Rio On Pools and played in the water for a few hours.
(Somehow this post got out of order…it should have been prior to the one about Caracol…)
Xunantunich is an ancient Maya ruin close to the border of Guatemala. The road to Xunantunich was fun in that it included a ride on a hand cranked ferry across the river.
Okay, nice title, but I cannot take credit for it, we saw it on t-shirts all over the place.
Back on the mainland we picked up the truck and did some grocery shopping to equip us for the next few days. We drove inland to the Tropical Education Centre campground, east of the capital of Belize, Belmopan. The camp is located adjacent to the Belize Zoo and is used as an education centre for school groups and researchers and is popular with birding enthusiasts. The campsite had a nice screened in swimming pool and a dining hall, hot showers and clean flushing toilets. All was pretty good except for the bugs. We are not sure what they were, but they would take a serious chunk out of you and seemed to particularly love Randi and me, although we all got our share of annoying bites.
We picked up my niece Randi and her girlfriend Amy from the international airport near Belize City on the 18th of February. Randi and Amy had planned months ago to join us for a couple of weeks travelling around Belize and we were excited to finally have them with us.
We had, yet again, been having problems with our fridge when using it on propane. Derek worked on it near Bacalar, but we just could not get it to stay lit and we had run out of tricks. The plan had been to visit the beautiful multi-hued lake of Bacalar, but instead we decided to head to Chetumal where we had a larger town at our disposal and better internet to troubleshoot the issue.