Leaving the Jungle, Going to the Beach

Well the day to vacate our jungle headquarters arrived with mixed feelings. We were pretty beat from the daily adventuring and ready for a couple of days by the ocean in Placencia, but we would definitely miss the lodge and all the friends we'd made there.

We had one final breakfast with all the other tourists. I think we might have eaten a little extra, the way you do when you're not sure what or when your next meal will be. It was funny because our room number had been sloppily scratched off of the assigned seating sign at our table. Seems like once we stopped paying them we stopped being besties!

If I had feelings I may have been sad to leave.

This is where the buses lined up to take people to amazing places. It was also where Robert the cab man we met yesterday was waiting to drive us. It was funny because he had the cab's hood popped up while waiting. Lydia and I both shared a quick "uh oh" glance before we got in the cab. We sat down and noticed there was a teenager in the front seat. The cab driver was turning this drive to the beach into a full flung family vacation, and both his wife and daughter would meet him there. The exact same thing happened to me while taking a cab a good distance to a city in Peru. Must be a thing.

We had a couple of photo opportunities. Here we are in a banana field. I had stayed up late the night before looking for cool places to stop along the way but I didn't find much. The natural wonders and the Mayan ruins are really the main draw in this country. I spotted Kropf's Bakery, run by Mennonites, but of course when we arrived it was closed. I've been outsmarted by Mennonites for the last time!

We arrived in Placencia and had Robert take us to an ATM to get some cash for him. It was sort of a more highly developed version of Hopkins where we went snorkeling. We got settled at our new hotel, Robert's Grove Placencia.

Placencia has been called the "caye you can drive to" because it is a very long, narrow peninsula that feels very much like an island.

Oh Robert's Grove, so much wasted potential. It's a beautiful place, right on the ocean. It has several nice pools, three restaurants, and the rooms were pretty solid as well. Unfortunately the staff was god awful. Especially in contrast with Ian's, the people at Robert's were really bad at their job. The desk staff insisted that we leave our bags with them and have someone bring them to us. Well, someone forgot and our bags never came, so we walked back and got them ourselves and dragged the bags to our room. We hadn't had even a whiff of internet since we arrived at Ian's, so we were really looking forward to it. Of course the connection was terrible, and dropped regularly. I believe that in the response the company left to Lydia's bad review on Trip Adviser, management blamed that on the weather. Pretty weak. The hotel was a good ways away from the town of Placencia proper, so we again went for the golf cart and got the heck out of there.

There were cashew trees on the hotel grounds. Each nut comes attached to this crazy bell-pepper looking fruit. I thought they were awesome so I grabbed a couple and figured we could read about how to eat them back in the room. When we got there Lydia read that they were poisonous in their current state, so I threw them away. Seems like a metaphor.

Pretty much my very first decision as golf cart Capitan was to pick up some hitchhikers. I'd been reading On the Road over the last several days, and I felt like if we wanted to have a comparable adventure that we needed to start picking up way more weirdos. The group was two younger women and a little boy. I later told Lydia that my new hitchhiker policy was to only pick up people that I'm sure I could beat up. So pretty much smaller women and children. The group ended up being Mayan, which I thought was awesome. One of the girls was very talkative so we got to hear a lot about her on the way to town. Her and the other woman were in Placencia to sell handicrafts that the people in her village had made. They were from the southern edges of Belize, which is home to a large population of Mayans. Somehow it came up that they eat lizards down there, which I thought sounded pretty cool. When it was time to let them off, they of course hit us up to buy some of there handmade crud. We had to say "no thanks" more than once. I figure giving them a ride was enough of a service that I didn't need to buy anything. At this point in my life my opinion on "crafts" is that I'd rather set my money on fire.

We poked around in Turtle Inn a bit on the way to town. It's an expensive place to stay owned by Francis Ford Coppola. It was nice but I wouldn't pay to stay there I'm afraid.

The airstrip was pretty funny. The planes were tiny, but it got worse. There was one of those parking lot arms that comes down in the middle of the road that went past the airstrip. The arm would go down when planes were landing or taking off that the planes wouldn't hit your car while flying by. This would be the airport we'd take out of town, so it was half funny and half scary. We had initially planned on renting a car and driving from Ian's to Robert's and then back to the airport in Belize city, but after seeing the condition of the roads and the lack of much to see roadside we changed our plans. I think we made a wise choice.

Some kids were racing our golf cart with their bicycle. The young diver had on a Diego Milito jersey. It seemed like a sign that I should smoke him in our race, which I promptly did.

All, my, friends, know the low rider.

Well we had very little to do but cruise around and eat and drink, all of which we did over and over. There were little booths all over selling tours and excursions. We purposely came to Belize in the off season on the cusp of the rainy season in order to get better prices and avoid all the tour-folk. Well as a result most of the tour booths were closed, and those that were open didn't seem very motivated to give tours. We tried to book a couple different ones before giving up.

We did bump into the couple that had accompanied us on the Tikal trip which was fun. Belize being such a small country definitely facilitated this. They were just wasting time like us. They had booked some sort of scuba diving excursion but the water was too choppy to go. That made me feel less stupid for not having planned something similar ahead of time. Later on in the Houston airport immigration line we bumped into another couple that we'd met at the jungle lodge. Pretty funny.

The next day we laid around and read our books a bit, swam a bit, and then gave in and rented another golf cart. I made sure we got a different one, because the one we'd had the day before was making some pretty nasty grinding sounds. Turns out someone was having a little too much fun driving over the country's many speed-bumps in a very bumpy, speedy fashion. Darn tourists.

This time we drove away from town toward Jaguar Bowling Lanes.

We had seen the place on the taxi ride to town but I had ruled it out. "Surely we'll have more exciting things to do than go bowling!", I had incredibly wrongly thought to myself.

Bowling is bowling, which is always fun. There was a World Cup game in progress on TV which was a plus. Then I noticed they had wifi! That place was like heaven. We joked that we wished we were staying at the bowling alley instead of our crummy hotel.

Back at the hotel we did get to see some pretty awesome lizards.

They move surprisingly quickly.

Hotel pool.

The hotel's breakfast went surprisingly later. Like until 11:00. I took advantage by eating it for breakfast and then again later as an early lunch. Baller.

We just so happened to be in Placencia on the first day of Lobster season, and many of the restaurants in town had lobster advertised, so we went for it.

One thing that made Placencia nice is that when a restaurant was called Omar's, Omar was standing out front grilling. This happened to us a couple of times.

I had the grilled lobster. It was nice and fresh.

The next morning was our final one. We headed to that tiny, scary little airport to face our fate.

Oh, Robert's Grove. So pretty yet so bad.

Our boarding passes were these big plastic things that they reused everyday.

The Tropic Air plane was pretty small.

We got on and sat up front. As you can see there wasn't anything separating us from the pilots. The seating reminded me a lot of a school bus, with long bench-like seats with no dividers or armrests. I had to hunch over to get in, as the plane had super low ceilings. No overhead compartments here. My carry on just had to sit in my lap the whole way to Belize City.

It was pretty scary. The plane was so small that it flew really low. The flight was pretty smooth but it was just so small a plane that every little bump was traumatizing. They were stingy with the air so the plane was really hot and stuffy. When we stopped half way in Dandriga to pick up more passengers, Lydia said she wished we could just ditch the rest of the flight and take a cab for the remainder. I was about ready to puke by the time we got to Belize City.

At least the view was nice. 

Through some quirk of airline occupancy we flew first class all the way back to St. Louis: Belize City to Houston, Houston to Washington D.C., and D.C. to St. Louis. This was my first taste of the airline high life, so I wanted to get the most out of it. Anytime they offered me anything the answer was yes. Well after flying all over North America first class won. I couldn't drink another drink, or bite another bite. They really keep you busy in first class. Hot towels, drinks, and snacks just wouldn't stop coming. By the end I just wanted to be left alone and try to take a nap. It was an awesome experience though! I can't wait until I have enough frequent flier miles to take a long flight in first class. They give you beds on those things!

The Lost City of Tikal

I was pretty excited about going to Tikal, and had our excursion schedule gotten somehow messed up to exclude Tikal, I would have flipped the hell out. Tikal is located in Guatemala, putting me another step closer to my secret and ridiculous goal of visiting every country in the world. Not only that, but it is the stand-in for Yavin 4 in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Oh, and it was a major Mayan city, too.

There was an orange juice press available at every breakfast.

Once again the drive to our adventure was an exciting part of the experience. The Belize-Guatemala border really had nothing to do with security, and was more about getting us to pay. I think it was $40 a person just to leave Belize, and another $5ish to enter Guatemala. Luckily we didn't have to pay anything additional on the reverse trip. Paying for the privilege to leave a country is pretty hilarious.

Our guide found this pretty awesome looking peanut head bug while we were crossing borders.

We had plenty of drive time to become familiar with the other couple in our adventure crew. Their names escape me but one worked for Google in Mountain View and the other was some sort of a military doctor. Over the course of many shared dinners and adventures we heard lots of people's stories and then later we would laugh about how much better their jobs were than ours. Lydia is a school teacher and I am pretty much a self employed bookmonger at this point, so when the couple sitting across the table from us said "surgeon" or "Lehman Brothers" it was quite the riot. You might think that this would cause some sort of feelings of inferiority, but I didn't feel that at all. I actually thought it was pretty awesome that we were vacationing like a couple of successful people. Now all we need is some success!

I was startled pretty quickly after crossing into Guatemala. A stoplight! I hadn't seen a single one in Belize. And the roads were way nicer. I had just assumed that Guatemala would be worse off than Belize just by reputation, but that didn't seem to be the case.

Dogs really love to be in the road in Guatemala. Like head down, snoozing in the middle of the street. We were constantly slowing and swerving for them. I imagine they have pretty short life spans.

We stopped for a quick breakfast which included the most delicious piña colada (virgin) that I have had. I think it must have had pineapple blended in instead of just the juice. It was thick and frothy.

When we reached Tikal we were stopped at the gate for more entrance fees. One of the employees popped his head in our van and asked if we would like to buy a little map/brochure of the grounds for $3. Sure why not. I forked over some sweet, sweet American cash and waited for my prize. Rejected. The guy didn't like the tiny rip in the $10 bill I'd handed him. The other couple handed him their own tenner. Rejected. Finally our guide just handed him something local and we paid him back later. Very annoying. You might recall me having some experience with passing shady banknotes in Peru.

We didn't have to walk very long before the beautiful ruins of thousand year old buildings revealed themselves.

Lydia has conveniently added fear of heights to her list of terrors. Other classics include fear of being home alone and calling people on the phone. In fairness, the buildings in Tikal have some massive staircases. Each step was higher than normal, and there were always a lot of them in a row. It was especially odd considering how much shorter the average Mayan was. Our guide hinted that the steps up the front of temples may have just been ornamental, with a less permanent structure behind the building providing actual access. Seriously unhelpful to Lydia's fears was our guide's habit of telling us about all of the past tourist's gruesome deaths. Most notable was a 300 pound woman in heels falling down a massive staircase, surviving, but killing two other people on her way down. Sacrifices to the gods, he called them.

Give and take tree. I don't know why they call it that.

There were a couple of areas where the reconstruction work was left half finished in order to illustrate what had been done.

There were probably just as many of these as visible structures. Massive piles of earth and jungle plants that clearly have a building or something beneath sit waiting to be unearthed. Our guide said that the restoration process is so time consuming and expensive that the government just doesn't have the resources to uncover everything. According to a 2008 Smithsonian article (here), only 15% of the site has been excavated.

Ball court.

Termites on parade.

The Ceiba tree had religious significance. Our guide told us something about the branches representing the levels of heaven and the roots reaching down into the underworld, so the tree connected the two realms somehow. To me it mostly looked like a giant honkin' tree.

You can't have a jungle without cartoonish vines everywhere.

Jungle John, Jungle John. He looks around and does other cool stuff.

I believe that this guy is a spider monkey. At one point we got so close to a group of them that they were peeing from their tree onto the ground to keep us away. It worked.

We were able to hear some howler monkeys but could barely see them. That makes sense. According to Wikipedia they "are widely considered to be the loudest land animal" and "their vocalizations can be heard clearly for 3 miles".

This is one of the most striking pictures that I took. I assume that this is another one of those "before and after" scenes where they purposely left a part of the site untouched. Turns out the jungle really likes to eat buildings.

Tikal's tallest building, Temple IV, is where the Star Wars scene is filmed from. My only prop was a water bottle, but you get the idea.

The scene in question. I should really go on a Star Wars scenes tour of the earth.

Back on the road, we had a quick lunch before passing back into Belize. I think the tortillas we ate on this whole trip are the best I've ever tasted.

Back in Belize, we passed some Mennonites selling produce out of a cart on the side of the road. I saw them regularly, and learned about their position influence on the country. We would make a couple of solid attempts at contact with them in the coming days, but would ultimately fail to interact.

Our room's sole method of temperature control was a ceiling fan, which was just barely enough. The power went out a few times, but not usually for very long. We quickly learned that if we had to wake up super early for an adventure, like we did today, that our shower wouldn't work. They must turn the water off at night? There wasn't a single normal power outlet in the rooms, only four USB power outlets, which is really odd. Luckily our iPhones plugged into those, which served as our cameras, or this would have been an uncomfortable trip for everyone involved.

We had no internet access either. I know, it's amazing we survived. We both got a lot of reading and writing done, so after the initial "no internet access shakes" wore off, it was actually quite nice to leave the world behind for a little while.