Lamanai Ruins with Tanisha Tours

Debbie got a good tip that Tanisha Tours is a good outfit to use for a tour of the Mayan ruins of Lamanai. If you head out from San Pedro, you get the pleasure of a fun zipping boat ride on the river through the mangroves. This was for sure more exciting than the ruins though the ruins were interesting. Your tour guide Daniel has been doing the tours for 20 years so he is quite experienced and has loads of knowledge on the wildlife of the area. He and his helper can amazingly spot a small bat or lizard amongst the mangrove as they wiz by in the boat. They are always willing to turn around and show the animals to the people. If you come from San Pedro, breakfast of banana nut bread and juice, lunch of local styled food, and water during the tour, and a rum punch or beer is provided. The only down side is that the trip to the ruins from San Pedro via boat is about 3 hours (including an unpleasantly bumpy 1 hour bus ride), but the fun boat ride makes it well worth it. The other option (not with Tanisha tours) is to fly with TropicAir and you will still get to do one portion of the boat ride but I think the portion you do if you go with Tanisha is more interesting (possible dolphin spottings when traveling through the sea and sharper turns when navigating through the mangroves).

Natural Scaffolding

One thing that is refreshing is the use of natural, unmanufactured materials for various purposes. Granted, this is probably done out of necessity but it keeps open the question of how much we really need to manufacture. (This is really a post for my mom because she was wishing she could get into the scaffolding business the first time she went to Europe and I know she loves natural "construction".)

Critters

This little crab somehow managed to crawl into our bathroom at night and die. It was there first of what to be some critter visitors in our little cabana at Hotel Del Rio in San Pedro, Ambergris, Belize. The "hotel" has a nice little common area where the guests seemed to use quite frequently which gave it a nice community feel. So much of a community feel that Debbie and I had no qualms of dashing to one of the other cabanas late at night to get a guy to come kill what was the biggest spider either Debbie or I had ever seen. Really...it had to have been at least 6 inches in diameter (including the legs). It moved to fast for us to get a picture of it. The owner and manager of the hotel says they didn´t know what type of spider it was. We are still alive now so I suppose it doesn´t matter now.

Belikin Beer

I took the opportunity of drinking Belize's beer to test out my handy-dandy Swiss Army knife. It worked wonders! I was pleasantly surprised by how good the Belikin beer is. One could even call it pretty good. I'm definitely surprised that the national beer is good...at least from the comparison to the "national" American beers.

TropicAir Flight to San Pedro

We opted to fly to San Pedro from Belize city which meant we flew on a plane that takes about 15 people. It's only a 15 minute flight. The Belize City International Airport is quite small and the flights on TropicAir leave as soon as the plane is full so we left about 15 minutes earlier than the scheduled time. It's a nice view over the ocean to the island of Caye Ambergris. There is another airline (Maya Air) that flies to San Pedro and they have the same flight schedule and similar prices. Not sure what their planes are like but I had no complaints about our flight with TropicAir.

Let the adventures begin...

Well...my around the world trip started in luxury. Debbie and I got upgraded to first class for our flight to Belize which meant we could get into the American Airlines lounge. We lounged in-style while we waited for our flight. I had to soak it up because it is probably the last vestige of luxury I will have for a while :).