Belize - Day 6 - Maya ruins

Xavier was thrilled to have the upstairs bedroom to himself but it didn’t work out so perfectly. After the waterfall caving trip, Quentin changed in Xavier’s room but left his wet underwear in Xavier’s bedroom floor. When Xavier went to pick up the wet undergarment a “huge” cockroach jumped out, crawled on to Xavier’s arm, advanced up his arm to his shoulder and then scooted down his back while Xavier did desparate contortions to try to remove the disgusting vermin from his flesh. We were all downstairs when this happened – if only we had a recording of Xavier’s panicked scream!



But it wasn’t totally over for Xavier. During the night, some creature scritched and scratched on his roof, keeping him awake. He has the bright idea to clap to scare the beast but all that it did was move to another part of the roof. Tonight he vows to go outside with a flashlight to see what beast he is dealing with.

Although this is out of sequence, we have another bug story. Beth was in the shower at our place at Lamanai shampooing her hair when she looked down and saw something squirming on the shower floor. She had no glasses on, so she flew out of the shower dripping wet and soapy and put on the glasses only to discover that she was sharing the shower with a three-inch scorpion! She yelped and asked Annick for a sandal. The first whack only made it squirm more and finally the second harder whack destroyed it.

Returning to day 6, we woke up to drenching rain tumbling down on our metal roof. What a racket! Other than a brief shower on the boat ride from Lamanai, this was our first rain in the rainforest. The rain cleared out and the sunshine poked through by the time we went down to breakfast. Soon after, we headed out to two Mayan sites, Xunantunich and Cahel Pech.



It was hot. Very hot. Very hot and steamy with no shade. We climbed to the top and admired the view across the Mopan river valley and over to Guatemala. The main temple at Xunantunich is the second highest in Belize. It is a towering structure overlooking a huge site filled with some noble houses and a ball court.



After melting at Xunantunich, we went to San Ignacio to have lunch at a restaurant. Fortunately, it was a casual outdoor restaurant as Gerard and Beth were completely drenched in sweat. It was embarrassing, but what choice did we have? The wait staff obviously noticed our situation and strategically place a fan blowing right at us. Eventually, we dried off before heading off to the next Mayan site.

Cahel Pech was also punishingly hot – what a surprise! It is not as well excavated as Xunantunich but it had some cool structures and there was a team of archaeologists working a site. We watch them do their thing for a bit and then we were on the ride back to our lodge.