Crocodiles, Monkeys, Mayan Ruins, and More

I spent five days on Caye Caulker and then made one last stop in Belize before leaving.  The stop was in the north central part of the country in a place called Orange Walk.  It's main attraction for me was the opportunity to take a boat ride down a river to the Mayan ruins at Lamanai.  Enroute to the ruins, you pass a Mennonite settlement, a sugar mill, a rum factory, and you see a lot of white herons, snowy herons, crocodiles, monkeys, etc.  It's a great day trip, and since Orange Walk is a little bit off the beaten path, it's a good way to get a break from the tourist mob.

The hotel options are sparse in Orange Walk, but I found a small family-run place just outside of town and right on the river.  It had a large veranda facing the river with a restaurant that was popular in the daytime, but I was the only guest there so it was a quiet little retreat for me. 

The boat for the daytrip to Lamanai picked me up first and we started upriver to pick up the rest of the tour group (mostly Americans daytripping from the beach resorts on Belize's coast).  On the way, I saw my first crocodile:

Check out the Teeth!  We saw some babies too, but this was the biggest one.  She was about 6 feet long.  That's pretty small as they can get to be up to 10 feet. 

It took about an hour to reach Lamanai.  The weather was perfect, no clouds in the sky.  We were lucky because the day before and the day after were cloudy and cold - more of that abnormal weather.  Lamanani is only partially excavated, so the pictures below constitute the bulk of what there is to see.  The climb up the main pyramid was the best part.  From the top, we were higher by far than anything around us, and we were surrounded by jungle on three sides and the river and sugar cane fields on the fourth side.  There was an archaeological marker at the top dated 1966. 

The Main Pyramid at Lamanai - it's ~112 feet high

Climbing the Main Pyramid - Going up was Nothing; It was Down that was Hard

Mask at the Base of a Temple at Lamanai

Jaguar Mask at the Base of a Smaller Pyramid

On the way back from Lamanai, the tour guide made a few extra stops.  One by the sugar mill where barges were being loaded with sugar and attached to a tug boat to go up-river.  Two, we visited a few spider monkeys in a little inlet by the rum factory (which looked like a barn) to feed them bananas.  One of them came right onto the boat and sat within a foot of me, so I got some great pictures of him. 

The Sugar Mill

Barges Loaded with Sugar Waiting to be Transported Up River

Spider Monkey

Lamanai was another great stop.  The next day, I took a chicken bus into Mexico, which wasn't in my original plan.  I have rescheduled my flight back to the US from Cancun so that I don't have to go all the way back to Costa Rica.  So, I've been able to see a few things in Mexico while making my way up to Cancun.  More to come...