Central America

We spent our last few days in San Ignacio, Belize visiting the surrounding areas. It has more of a carribean feel than most other places we visited...or maybe it was just the fact that I was offered weed about 6 times a day. Some pictures from the Mountain Pine Ridge reserve. Swimming in some waterfalls and pools in some rivers. In the big waterfalls you could actually jump from about 30 ft up. I was quite impressed when Susan did it, since it's about ten times her height. You can see her all itty bitty in the bottom left of the third picture. Unfortunately 85% of the pine in the reserve has been wiped out by some beetle. We also visited a huge (girth not length) cave in the reserve. In the third picture in the second row you can see the tiny little people.
In that cave there was a little chamber through a hole in the floor filled with hundreds of bats, I couldn't get my head in to focus or frame so I just stuck my hand in and started snapping. The results are rather dissapointing. On another day we passed a "butterfly farm" and decided to stop in. It turned out to be a butterfly tent with several tupperware containers filled with caterpillars. When we arrived, we got an alternate guide since (and this is an exact quote) "the usual butterfly guy is in the parking lot getting high". I'm pretty sure the wonky old guy who gave us the tour was only available because he'd already finished getting high.
These pictures are from Xunantunich, a Mayan ruin in Belize, and one of the tallest man made structures in the country. Second only to a temple in another ruin that's about 3 feet higher. From the picture of Susan you can tell it's about 85 degrees celsius. We shared the site with a tour bus that had made a two hour drive with cruise ship passengers...from texas. It was the first culture shock I experienced on our trip. Amongst the seniors there was one guy, about 19 yrs old, who admitted to voluntarily going on the cruise...alone. What the hell was he thinking? Getting there was pretty fun too. We took a cab, which got about 400m before running out of gas. Luckily we'd only gone uphill, so he reversed about 100m until he found an uphill turnoff he could coast up a bit and then down again forward. Now going forward, we went the last 300m...to a traffic circle, went about 270 degrees around it and exited and made it right to a gas pump. I was impressed.