Sam of Bomba

When we went on our Lamanai Mayan Ruins tour, in the village of Bomba (Lat=17.8833, Long=-88.2667), we saw some odd-looking pieces of flint-like rock on the side of the road. A gentleman named Sam came over and asked us if we knew what those were. We said they looked like petrified wood.

He told us that he had worked with several archaeologists on various ancient Mayan building dig sites, and that they removed the outer layers of many of the ruins to get to the older portions of the structures. He said that when the ancient Mayans built their structures, they first laid down a layer of "chippings."

These chippings came from ancient stone carvers. They would start with a large piece of flint-like stone, and chip away at it in order to create something like a bowl, a mask, or whatever. The debris from this process were called chippings.

The Mayan builders would then take these chippings and put them into the bottom layers of the foundations of their buildings, and those were what we were looking at. Finally, Sam said that he had worked on building the road through Bomba, and they had used some of the chippings from the archaeological dig site for their roadbed.

Sam was a really nice, and very articulate person. I asked if I could take his picture, and he said that would be OK, so I did. Sam said that money from the very high tourist taxes imposed by the government of Belize was not trickling back down to any of the people. Indeed, his village did seem very poor. Sam said he lived on a ranch a short ways out of the village, and he invited us to come visit.

Kathy also made friends with three children. They were using a stick trying to knock breadfruit down from a tree, and were having a lot of trouble. Each child knew exactly which piece of fruit they wanted, so Kathy used the stick and quickly knocked down a piece for each.

We wished very much that we had been given more time in the friendly village of Bomba.

Things to Do - It's Not Really a Wild Party Town

We found Ambergris Caye to be kind of a vacation for adults; there were not a lot of wild college-kid party spots, and the restaurants and bars were mostly quiet and peaceful. Not much loud music or other things that those of us wanting a relaxing vacation would find offensive.

Along with snorkeling and ruin trips, there are loads of other things that we did on Ambergris Caye:

• Shopping
• Bicycling
• Walking
• Birdwatching
• Going to Church
• Beachfront food and drink

Critters

The wildlife in Belize is amazing! The entire environment in the ocean, air, and ground is teeming with life.

The nights in our hotel room on the ocean were so quiet; the water inside the reef is protected from waves, so we really didn't hear the ocean crashing at all. Occasionally in the deep dark, we would wake to hear a "tick-tick-tick-tick" noise. We, at first, thought it might be a nocturnal bird of some sort, but one night Kathy was on the balcony enjoying the breeze at 2:00 am, and she saw that the noise came from the lizards that are all around keeping the hotel free of bugs.

Indeed, we didn't see many bugs while we were there. Very few flies, a few tiny ants in the kitchen, and of course mosquitoes, of which we saw quite a few.

Kathy collected some tiny, tiny shells from the beach, brought them into the hotel room, and before long, some of them had walked across the counter! The very small hermit crabs inside were not one bit interested in being taken back to snowy Colorado, so Kathy took them out behind the hotel where she had found some larger hermit crabs earlier, and during our entire stay, she kept those crabs well fed and happy.

We saw crocodiles, a snake, monkeys living wild in the trees around the Mayan ruins, small bats that slept on the sides of trees and blended in so completely that you couldn't see them until our guide pointed them out. The bats indignantly fluttered around us when our guide splashed a bit of water at them.

The Mayans Aren't Dead, They Just Moved South

We were all very interested in seeing some Mayan Ruins, of which Belize has a huge number. Originally, we wanted to travel into Guatemala to see the ruins there, but that one day trip would have cost us $600US, and we didn't want to spend that much on one trip. So, we sent an e-mail to Ocean Adventures, and asked them to book us on their Lamanai Jungle/Mayan Ruins Tour, as one of the blogs we read indicated that Lamanai (Lat=17.75, Long=-88.65) was one of the best.

This is a full-day trip. It starts at 7:00 am, and we got back about 5:10 pm. They served breakfast, lunch, beer, rum punch, soft drinks, and water.

The trip was marvelous! There are three legs of travel to get to the Lamanai ruins. First is a boat trip along the reef and across the bay to the mainland. During that phase they served a breakfast of Johnny Cakes, pineapple juice, fruit, and I forget what else. This was where we saw the crocodile, and the camouflaged bats.

The second leg of the trip was a bus ride from the little town of Bomba to the start of the river trip up to Lamanai. It was a little bumpy and had lots of curves and turns. When we asked the bus driver what he did while we were visiting the ruins, he said "I recover from the drive." However, the drive was very interesting; we passed jungle, sugar cane farms, cattle ranches, and small communities that are dotted here and there about the country.

The third leg was a fantastic ride up a river. The river curves and curls, gets wide and narrow, and the trip winds its way up to the Lamanai site. On the river we saw a Mayan (yes, there are still Mayans living in Belize, they just don't live in the ruins) rowing a dugout canoe with a load of wood. There was also a large Mennonite community by which we set our engine to a slow, quiet speed and kind of tiptoed.

When we got to Lamanai, we had lunch under a roofed, open-air picnic spot. The lunch was rice-and-beans, chicken, Johnny Cakes, Belikin Beer, soft drinks, and water, chips, hummus, and salsa. We had to be careful of the salsa, it was VERY VERY hot with a type of pepper that is locally grown.

Next was a stop at the museum and a short lecture on what to expect, and then we toured the ruins.

Snorkeling at the Reef

In 1842, Charles Darwin wrote that the Belize barrier reef was "The most remarkable reef in the West Indies."

Diving off of the hotel dock was really fun (see photo), but we mostly wanted to get to the reef and see the life and colors of the coral.

We went on four snorkeling trips, and we used Ocean Adventures for all of them, and I must say that they really treated us right. I'm an on-line kind of guy, and they were the only tour operator that responded promptly to my e-mail messages in the weeks prior to our arrival, and they booked us on the snorkel trips we wanted and the Mayan Ruins tour without fuss on-line, all set up, before we even arrived. The other tour operators that I e-mailed either didn't respond, or they kind of said "...well, we're not sure if we are going to do that tour, so call us when you get to town..."