July 12th - Learning Day

 We woke up at 6:15 and had a quick breakfast in the room before going down to the theatre area to get into groups for excursions. We were scheduled to go to the Mayan ruins of Lamanai quite a ways away from Belize City. Because we were on a cruise line excursion (thanks Costco Travel) we got to board the first tender to go ashore. The tender takes 30 minutes to sail ashore.

Once ashore we boarded what looks like a hertz northern school bus that had been modified to have actually really good A/C. Our guide, Denise, told us about Belize history.

We arrived 90 minutes later at the mouth of a canal and boarded a boat with 4 250hp Honda engines and took a 30 minute ride down their main river. It felt like we were in Vietnam going down the Mekong on a Patrol Boat, we just didn't have the 50cal up top. The jungle was on one side and a marshy jungle area was on the other.

We arrived at Lamanai archaeological site and our group was shown around for around 90-120 minutes. The mask mayan temple was quite a climb to the top, but it was pretty neat. We also saw two kinds of wild monkeys in the jungle around us - howler monkeys and spider monkeys. It was cool to see them scurry and swing through the jungle. There were also a few different kinds of iguanas.








It was quite a climb to the top.

We took the river boat back to where we started and were served a rice of beans and rice cooked in coconut milk along with fried plantains & stewed chicken - Tina really enjoyed the chicken. We reboarded the bus and took a nice drive back to the city.

This is where things took a turn as when we arrived back at the cruise terminal the line to get back to the ship was extremely long. So there was no special privilege for us to get back like there was when we left in the morning, it was a long wait. From when we arrived at the terminal to when we stepped aboard was just under 2 hours and very hot. There were 3 ships anchored today and only a small fleet of these boats to make the 30 minute trek each way between them. Anyway, we got back and had showers and drank some diet coke to cool off. So that's it for the learning portion of the trip.

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