Belize: Free Day!

Today we had a whole day to do whatever so Dr. Hickey asked if we wanted to got to Tikal and Flores in Guatemala. The trip cost $108 but was well worth it! As we crossed the border the scenery was instantly different. It was kind of scary and as we continued deeper into the country houses became smaller and most places weren't much more than a hut. It was quite the culture shock. We even saw a kid riding his bike towing a dead dog by the neck. Hopefully it was just a dog that got hit by a car and the kid was bringing it home but who knows. About 2 hours of travel later we arrived in Tikal. It almost looked like a national park here in the states. Not even 2 minutes into our hike we saw spider monkeys swinging from trees and a little further we saw a gray fox wandering around a Mayan ruin and then even further we saw some tropical raccoons. At least thats what our tour guide Max called them. I remember we got so excited over all these little ruins we saw in the beginning and Max was just like stop wasting your time on these you'll see why soon. Not even 5 minutes later i knew why he told us to stop wasting our time. These ruins were huge and the temples were even bigger. Max explained the difference between temples and pyramids but they all looked the same to me. Another cool thing was there were giant Ceiba trees that were just the biggest trees i have ever seen. I guess they would be like the redwood trees in northern California but i have never seen a redwood so i'm not too sure. The largest temple was 156 feet and we could almost go to the top of it. It was an awesome view. We were able to go to the top of several other ruins so that was neat and Amber and i even raced up one of the temples. Looking back it was actually pretty dangerous but we are still here so no harm done. Joe and i spent a lot of that day together because he liked to climb like myself to the most difficult parts of the ruins. After Tikal we went to the city of Flores and that was really nice. There were beautifully colored buildings and all sorts of shops and restaurants. The city sat on an island connected by a bridge so cars could get out to it. There was even a Burger King in Flores. We wandered around for a bit and i bought an iced coffee for like $1. It was awesome because the same coffee would be like almost $6 here at Starbucks. There was a festival that day honoring this one goddess who was real tall which the people of her time made fun of i guess. So as they had this festival there were men dressed as women with bats and belts parading down the street with a tall women presumably on stilts dancing behind these men dressed as this goddess. It actually scared me because i was standing on the street when all of a sudden all these men dressed like women were running at me with weapons so i jumped back almost into a store then i realized it was just this festival. Thankfully no one really noticed. It shortly started to rain so we left and on our was back our headlights were shining into the back of this what appeared to be a cattle truck and several women sitting in the back with their heads down. We asked the driver if it was normal and he said its common. It still seemed real sketchy though. Another hour or so we were all getting our passports stamped and heading back into Belize. It was a great day but we were happy to get a chance to relax. My host mom Adma always prayed we had nice weather on the days we did fun stuff and she must have did something right because we always had great weather most of the day.