The Mayan Riviera

I don´t know why we didn´t update the blog or check e-mail during the four days we spent on the beach in Belize. Just too relaxed, I guess.

Now we´re back in Mexico,we´ve been camping on the beach just south of Tulum for the last three days.

We left Copan and made an uneventful crossing back into Guatemala. The guy with the undeveloped hot springs that are for sale wasn´t home, so we didn´t get to see them. Ever since that first crossing into Guatemala all our crossings have been easy, half hour to forty five minute affairs. We drove across Guatemala nearly to the coast and spent the night nearly under the north end of the bridge across the Rio Dulce - on the water, lots of sailboats anchored everywhere. The Rio Duce here is more like a big lake. It´s a well used mooring spot with a navigable channel running to the sea, in Belize the guide who took us snorkeling said in hurricane season he crews on sail boats that are being moved there for safekeeping. Anyway we spent the night there in the parking lot of a place named "Bruno´s," a restaurant/bar/rooms/dockspace sailor hangout kind of place. The boys loved walking the docks and looking at the sailboats. There was a lot of talk about pirates. We were in a very tight spot amongst trees and parked cars in the middle of a small parking lot. A strange but memorable campsite. In the morning Ike and I were walking the docks watching the river come alive - kids going to school, men going to work, all by boat, from (mostly) motor powered fibreglass to one old guy with a bundle of greens paddling an old dugout canoe.

We got an early start and drove north to Tikal. We´ve kind of gyped Guatemala on this trip. It´s been a country we just drove across a couple of times on our way to someplace else. It is a very mountainous country, with lots of people - most of them short, Mayan looking people - walking and bicycling everywhere. Except for the Peten in the north, which is not mountainous and not too heavily popuated. There are little restaurants everywhere. Eating in them is amazingly cheap. Anyway, it´s a great place and I´d like to come back and spend more time someday.

Tikal was spectacular. We climbed to the top of nearly every temple they would let us climb, which was a lot of them. We saw two little red deer, howler monkees, turkeys, gangs of coatamundi and some very colorful birds we con´t know the names of. We got an early (for us) start and spent until mid-afternoon at the ruins, seeing most but not all of them - they´re huge - you could easily spend two days there. But we felt like we´d seen the highlights, and we were bushed from climbing to the tops of all those pyramids. The tallest ones are accessed by climbing incredibly steep stairs made of some dense mahogany like wood that would not have been allowed in a U.S. National Park. You get to the top and look across the jungle to see the tops of other temples poking up above the jungle canopy, just like the pictures in National Geographic.

We had camped the night before on a big lawn just outside the park. After seeing Tikal we packed up the camper in record time and drove to the border with Belize, a little over an hour away We had the easiest border crossing yet, and of course, they speak English in Belize! It was bizarre after weeks of strugglin along in Spanish speaking countries, to be still in a foreign country but able to easily communicate with everyone. The roadsigns are in english, on the radio they´re speaking english, the currency is the dollar, it´s very strange. There´s huge development on the coast. The stores in Belize are better stocked than Guatemala and Honduras, but everything but the orange juice and rum is expensive. Gas is just under five dollars a gallon,and they sell it by the gallon. And fish and produce are sold by the pound. We spent our first night in Belize in an actual RV park just ten miles from the border, where there were actual RV´ers from the US, Canada and Germany. We saw several Europeans in Belize in their little VW or Toyota based euro camper mobiles that they had apparently shipped there. Anyway, Belize is different in many ways from the rest of Latin America, not the least of which is the laid back caribbean vibe.

We didn´t have any plans for Belize, so we went to the beach. Jane had talked to one of the women at the RV park, and she recommended a town called Placencia, at the end of a peninsula in the southern part of the country. We went there, and we liked it so well, and the road in was so washboarded and slow, we stayed for four days, or basically our whole time in Belize.

The town of Placencia is at the end of this little spit of sand with a road down the middle and houses and businesses on each side. On the seaward side there is also a sidewalk that led from where we were camped at "Campin on da Beach" on the north end of town, to the south end which stopped at a little dock and the inlet to the lagoon. The boys and I went out in a little inflatable boat, and Ike caught a fish immediately, Max and Joe soon followed suit. Papa didn´t get a bite. Then Max caught another fish when he and Jane went fishing from shore, so we got our first self-procured fish dinner from the ocean.

We went out in a motor boat with a guide snorkeling one morning, saw live coral, many bizarro and brightly colored fish, lobster (out of season, unfortunately) an island with a lighhouse, the whole caribbean thing. Our guide, a young guy, showed us how to open a coconut with no tools, a feat we have not duplicated. Although we can manage with a machete. We were camped on a real nice beach, the ocean out there all blue and warm, but after four days we moved on.

We drove up to Corazal, in northern Belize and spent one night there, then crossed into Mexico just west of the city of Chetumal. We´d heard good things about Tulum, so we drove three or four hours north to get there, bought some groceries, beer and ice, then headed south on the beach road out of town, paid a dubious fee to get into a "biospere reserve" full of land for sale signs, and found a near perfect campsite on the beach - actually across the soccer field from the beach. Miles of powdery white sand beaches that we had almost to ourselves. Coconuts everywhere, free for the plucking.

Way back in Guatemala, at Lake Atitlan, we told the boys they could buy something to bring home with them. We looked at woven things, Joe bought a carved and painted wooden mask, but I needed something from the hardware store, and when Max and Ike saw the machete display, they decided that was what they wanted to buy. Then later, in Honduras, Joe was feeling left out, so I bought him one too. Now they´re coming in handy, we´ve been drinking coconut water and snacking on the meat every day.

But all good things must come to an end. We spent three days camped there, swimming and taking long beach walks, but too soon we have to leave the ocean and start making our way home. We´re changing money and buying supplies in Tulum this morning, then this afternoon we start across the Yucatan, slowly making our way back to the U.S.