January 5, 2012

January 5, 2012 Orange Walk and Lamanai

This morning was not as cold as the previous night, until I had to get out of bed. Today we drove two hours to Orange Walk where we took a 1 ½ hour boat ride to Lamanai. The land is so beautiful and the river was really cool. I loved looking at all of the different trees, the lilly pads, and the animals. We saw two crocodiles, several different kind of birds, spider monkeys, howler monkeys, and an owl. We saw the Mennonite community whose farm was along the river. We finally arrived to Lamanai where we ate lunch and looked in the shops. Lunch was awesome, we had chicken, rice and beans, coleslaw, and potato salad. The drinks that we had were watermelon juice, lime juice (my favorite), cantelope juice, and papaya juice. Our tour guide led us to the museum where we looked at the history of the Mayan culture and the Mayan artifacts. We then started our hike to the mayan ruins. We saw the chicle (gum) tree and learned about many other trees that have medical value. There were so many different kinds of palms and plants. I loved looking up at the sky through the branches. Then, we heard the howler monkeys who were howling louder and louder as we walked towards their trees. We were able to see several of the big, black monkeys and I was most excited to see a baby monkey jumping across the branches with his tail hanging on as he crawled around in the trees. We saw five ruins, although I do not remember the names of all of them, we climbed two of the Mayan temples, one of which was the High Temple. It was absolutely amazing to be able to experience the ruins! We climbed the longest, steepest stairs that I have ever even seen. I was pretty nervous climbing up, but when I made it to the top, I could see for miles. I'm sure that I'm going to be feeling really sore tomorrow after hiking and climbing the temples. This had been such a great opportunity, I love being in Belize. There are so many things that I want to talk about, but I'm too tired to even think about everything that we learned and did today. After our long day at the Mayan ruins, we took the boat ride back to Orange Walk where we drove close to the shore where two spider monkeys were. Several people had bananas and the spider monkeys just walked right onto the boat in between everyone and started taking the bananas and eating them. It was so funny to watch them, their characteristics were similar to toddlers in that they walked upright, grabbed food, and while eating, grabbed more food. We then drove back to Kindred Spirits. We took cold showers and then ate supper (beans, rice, and tortillas).