Weekend Field Trip

Hi everyone,

So I have had a very busy 2 weeks. Today is a holiday, St. George’s Cayes Day, so I do not have to go to training. I spent a good chunk of the morning helping my host family make 100 tamales, which they plan on selling at the football game tonight. I finally was able to escape to my room to get some of my stuff done. So let me catch up all up on my recent adventures in Belize.

Most of the week was consumed by my very boring training stuff, but on Wednesday (9-04) we had to make a garden. Now in case I haven’t told you all this before, Belize is hot, very hot. Gardening is not exactly something I would have chosen but it is what it is. So…I sweated my butt off, in fact I didn’t even know it was possible to sweat as much as I did. Then that weekend we took a field trip to a bunch of places all over southern Belize.

On Saturday morning we all went to Punta Gorda for their market, which is absolutely amazing. The market was anything spectacular, but the town is beautiful. We wandered around for a bit, meet up with some other current volunteers, went shopping, and attended a workshop about art and crafts. It was a really good visit and I hope that I will be placed near PG, or at least be able to visit the market a few more times.

After the market we traveled to Barranco, which is a tiny Garifuna village of about 130 people. It was the most serene place I have been to thus far. I keep thinking about how lucky I am to be able to see and experience some of these places. I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

That night I spent the night in a Mayan Mopan village and ate dinner and breakfast with a family. In the village I was staying in, all the houses had thatch roofs and dirt floors, which is very common among the Mayans. We slept in a lodging center for tourists, which was pretty nice. The only problem was that we arrived when it was dark and the places didn’t have electricity so it was a little hard to get settled in. There were also outdoor latrines which are kind of scary at night time. We did have mosquito nets though so I wasn’t too worried about creepy crawly things in the middle of the night.

After breakfast we all headed to the Blue Creek Caves. It was about an hour hike to get to the caves, which at some points stopped being a hike and turned into rock climbing. To make matters worse all of the rocks are limestone, which are extremely slippery when wet. It was quite an adventure. Once we got there we were all in awe. As my one friend said, it looked like something from the Jungle Book.

We were all pretty exhausted from the Caves but we still had one more site to visit before we could head back home. Not too far away from the Caves was a Mayan Ruins site, which wasn’t exactly what I expected. I thought there would be these giant temples but the place we went to didn’t have anything like that. I didn’t realize how many different sites there are in Belize that has Mayan Ruins. I hope to one day visit them all. So that is about it folks. It was an wonderful, jammed packed weekend. Until next time!

Terra

MAYAN RUINS

BARRANCO

PICTURES OF PUNTA GORDA