Welcome to Belize! Population 330,000 so a lot bigger than Cozumel. A lot of people come to Belize looking for a job. Belize is the size of Massachutes and used to be a British colony so their primary language is English. A lot of people said that they spoke Spanish as well, but to tourists they only speak English. Like Cozumel they don't really have traffic rules and no one ever gets speeding tickets. They say that speed limits are just suggestions. However, in large vehicles this must not be true because whenever our bus went over the speed limit something dinged. They have a ratio of about 7 women to 1 man there. Also they have 4 stop lights but only 3 of them actually work on the whole island.
Here are some average houses in the area. Houses are between $20,000 and $120,000 here. All schools are run by the church and kids are required to wear uniforms when going to school in Belize.
Here are some more pictures.
This is the Belize currency. You'll see that it looks very similar to British pounds with the Queen of England on the cover. Belize has free of England since 1983 but they still haven't changed the currency. One good thing about the currency is that it has a 2 to 1 ratio in favor of the US dollar... which is just about the opposite if you consider the pound.
There is a large Mayan influence in Belize, and after our cave tubing experience I really wish that we had gone on a tour of the Mayan ruins in the area instead. It woul dhave been really interesting to talk to the locals about what they thought of the Mayan calendar ending in 2012. But anyway this picture is of the Mayan Mountains. You can make out the frame of a person lying down. His face is where the sun rises and sets.
The road that we drove down to get to the cave tubing place was FILLED with potholes!! It was unbelievable how bumpy it was!! The day before we arrived in Belize it had rained all day and the tours had to be closed because the caves were flooded. We were lucky that we got to go at all. As it was the water was 18 to 20 inches higher than they normally are. Cave tubing was something that Cody and I were looking very forward to during our trip. It was the first thing that we had both decided that we really wanted to try.
Here is Cody getting ready to go!! We had to put sun tan lotion and bug spray on because we had to hike through the jungle. Now when they mentioned the hike through the jungle I honestly didn't think we were going to have to walk that long... but it took forever!!
We carried those tubes that you see in the back, a life jacket, and helmet across the jungle. There were a lot of old people on our tour... which surprised us. One guy even had a cane and was walking it. But it ended up taking us a long time to get to the place where we had to cave tube. Our guide kept stopping along the way to point stuff out to us to give everyone a break and let people catch up... but it was not a positive experience for me. It seemed like we walked a whole lot longer than we actually cave tubed.
Here was the van that we drove in. The main guy told us not to bring our valuables or cameras because it would get destoryed during cave tubing. There were a lot of sketchy people hanging out in the parking lot area and we were really worried that something would happen to our stuff... but it turns out everything was alright.
So when we started out we had to cross a river. They had a rope that we grabbed onto and we held onto our tube and we had to get across. Cody and I went first. We made it pretty quickly without any problems and then we turned back and we saw that the old people weren't even half way across yet... and we were like oh-uh. When we were finally able to cave tube we saw a lot of other groups going by us. They had head rests and they were tied together. Our group did not. So it was really hard to keep our head lifted the whole time and we had to hold onto each others feet with our arms. This was soooo uncomfortable. Above is Leon who was our guide, and he was not the ideal guide. I was in front of our group. It was two older people, Cody, and I going tubing. Well we started going and I didn't think that a guide was with us...they just let us go, and I couldn't really see behind me well. First thing we start heading full speed ahead towards some rocks... and I was like oh crap... I'm going to hit right into those rocks! So I start paddling frantically trying to steer us away from it. At the last second Leon comes and pulls us away from it.
Here are the people we were connected with. The rest of the cave tubing was pretty nice. We had a disposable camera that we took pictures with while we were in the cave. We haven't got them developed yet so they aren't in here. It was hard to concentrate during our tour because I was so uncomfortable. My neck hurt and my arms really hurt from having to hold onto Cody's feet. But our guide did mention that the Mayans though caves were the entrance to the underworld and that there are 9 levels of hell and 13 levels of heaven. At the end of the cave we went through the open sky with a lot of trees around. Monkey's are sometimes around in the trees but we didn't see any. There weren't any animals in the caves either. The only issue that happened was at the end. We came back to the same rope that we used to cross in the beginning. Our guide was no where to be found and I was in the lead of all of the tubes... and I didn't know what to do. When I got to the rope it hit my face and I went to grab it... When I raised my arms I lost grip of Cody's feet and of course the current was just strong enough to carry him down the river!! I watched in terror as he and the woman that was behind him started floating down the river! (Her husband grabbed the rope like I did). I started to scream for him and I considered letting go of the rope and going after him. There were some other guides down the river and they helped him. And our guides eventually went after them and brought them back, but I was scared for a second! It was so stupid that we weren't tied together like every other group was!! Had we been tied together or if our guide would have been in front of us or given us any type of instructions it wouldn't have happened. Cody gave me a lot of grief about it later, because I let him go.
After we went cave tubing they took us to their family restaruant. It was surprisingly pretty good. They gave us chicken, rice and beans, and coleslaw. The chicken was surprisingly not spicy at all which I was happy about. Cody was happy because they had good hot sauce there and he ended up buying a bottle from them.
Here we are after we got done eating! It was kind of a bummer because overall I don't think Cody and I really enjoyed our cave tubing trip as much as we thought we would. It was the thing that we were looking the most forward to, but I'm glad that we did it. Because I know if we wouldn't have we would have regretted it. It was something we had to experience for ourselves to see how it would be. Next time I think we'll choose to go white water rafting which is a lot more fun!
Here were some of the drinks that they gave us. They also had alcohol punch that they were offering people. But neither Cody or I wanted anything to do with it. Our tour guides the day before told us never to accept alcohol from people that give it to you for free because you never know what it is... and we weren't too keen on not listening to them!
This is the cave tubing group we went with. Cavetubing.bz they gave a good price, but if you're interested in going cave tubing I would suggest looking into another company. Particularly one with a head rest that ensures they will tie your group up with ropes. We saw a lot of other if not all companies did this.
Here we are at the end. We didn't get too many pictures of us during this day with my camera, but hopefully some of the ones we took in the cave turned out good.
Here is a picture of the lead guy that led our group.
