Lamanai

Our trip to these Mayan ruins (which I didn't think was a big deal until after I got back and several people got very excited/jealous when I told them) was, like many other things in Belize, an exercise in waiting. It took us about 4 hours (boat ride to the mainland, bus ride to another river, boat ride through the mangroves) to get there. The trip was worth it though, for a number of reasons:

• travelling through flat land for four hours meant that I understood, at a visceral level, that every lump and bump we saw at Lamanai was an un-excavated Mayan ruin. Which is amazing, considering how many hills we saw. The idea that there could be so much history under the jungle, and Belize simply doesn't have the money to excavate it, amazes me.
• The bus we took was an old school bus repainted green with the word "Faith" on it's front. This alternately amused and frightened me as we jolted down the bumpy roads avoiding potholes
• the boat rides gave us a chance to see some amazing local fauna, with the guides slowing down to show us turtles, toucans, water birds, howler monkeys, and an eight-foot crocodile that I thought was stuffed until he got up and slid into the water. Eeeek! It was a very appropriate sighting though, since "Lamanai" itself means "submerged crocodile".
• We got to see how people on the mainland (ie. away from the tourists) lived, from traditional wooden Mayan huts to quite large stucco houses. And of course, there was the Mennonite encampment out in the middle of nowhere. Mennonites! How far they'll go to avoid being conscripted...
• Because we were so far from anywhere, when I finally got atop the Mayan Temple (those things are very, VERY steep) I could see 360 degrees, and nothing but jungle. It was amazing.
  
  

As for the ruins themselves, they were very, very impressive. The Mayans liked putting things on top of other things, so one temple would likely have another one underneath and another one underneath that (like Hungarian stacking dolls). What you could see was worn and scarred, so I understood and respected the archaeologists for not wanting to strip away all the layers just to satisfy their curiosity. It is interesting to see changes in historical records though -- people used to think that the Mayans were peaceful people, when in fact they (like the Aztecs) were very much into the human sacrifice and wide-spread clear-cutting thing. The most shocking detail, I think, was the ball courts where our guide told us that the winner was sacrificed to the gods. Yes, that's right, the winner. See, if you died serving the gods as a sacrifice, then you got to go straight to Mayan heaven with no need for a layover in Mayan hell (sound like any religions you know?).

After a delicious lunch (how our three guides managed to bring chicken, rice and beans, and potato salad through the jungle and have it be warm for us by the time we reached our picnic tables, I'll never know) we headed back onto Boat #1. It was an interesting ride back, since it was raining and the spray combined with the fast-moving boat managed to make things pretty miserable. There was a large black tarp that was spread over most of the other people, but I preferred to be wet and whipped with stinging spray rather than sacrifice the view. Also, it was amazing to little ol' Canadian me that I was in a climate where you could get soaked to the bone on a fast moving boat, and still not only be warm, but dry within an hour of the rain stopping.