On our way to the bridge, we stopped off in Manahawkin to drive through our old neighborhood there and see how the houses faired during Hurricane Sandy.
On Saturday morning I checked out of my hotel in San Ignacio and split a ride to the airport in Belize City with a New Yorker I met on my cave-exploring trip!
"The best-known is "The Crystal Maiden", the skeleton of a teenage girl, possibly a sacrifice victim, whose bones have been calcified to a sparkling, crystallized appearance." You were allowed to bring cameras into here and photograph everything "In late May 2012, a tourist accidentally dropped a camera and fractured a human skull estimated to be over one thousand years old. As a result, all cameras without a permit are banned from the cave"
So, because of that person, all you get to see are pictures of the teak tree farm we had to drive through...
You enter the cave by jumping into very deep water and swimming into the mouth of the cave. Yeah, that's right. It's a river cave! With flashlights mounted to our heads, we hiked, climbed and swam our way over kilometer into the underground complex! This is one of the only archaeological sites in the world where the human remains found inside have not been removed and you can see them as they were discovered. Really wild to be able to walk right up to a old human skeletons lying on a cave floor!
...and a photo of this wooden bridge! By the way, for those interested in my travel budget, the cost of both my Tikal trip and my amazing ATM cave experience came to less than $250 USD combined!
I enjoyed the Mayan site of Xunatunich so much, that I got up early on Thursday and signed up for a trip into Guatemala to see the much larger Mayan site of Tikal.
Wednesday was cloudy and rainy. After a lazy morning, I met a local driver who took me out to the Green Hills Butterfly ranch. We're about to pass a horse-and-buggy carriage driven by one of Belize's 10,000 German/Belize-kriol speaking Mennonites!
A little afternoon, I chatted with a local taxi driver about a few local places I was interested in checking out and he suggested Xunatunich, a late Mayan ruin from 650-1000 AD.
The bus from Dangriga to Belmopan was packed! I stood in the crammed in the aisle leaning on a sea of strangers for a bumpy two hours! The bus cleared out a bit after Belmopan and finally got a seat. I ended up sitting next to a guy around my age who sounded like an American. He told me he was Honduran, but had lived in Texas for years until he was found, put in some kind of crazy immigration detention center for years, and then finally deported. He was on his way to San Pedro island to meet up with his two younger brothers who he hadn't seen in 16 years! I wished him well and got off...
