By the next morning, it was clear that we made a bad choice taking the day off. The night before, rain pelted the roof. We had planned to go to two river caves on days 9 and 10, but Tropical Storm Alex decided to form off the coast of Honduras and proceed to march over Belize dropping buckets and buckets of water. The torrent of water dramatically raised the height of the Caves Branch river, which prevented access to the two caves we were hoping to see.
The consolation prize on day 9 was to go to the Belize Zoo and a zipline place. The zoo was nice enough and we did see some new animals, but it wasn’t what we wanted to do. However, three of us got to experience the sting of fire ants on our feet as we were admiring a butterfly. They are small but they swarm and their bite is really nasty!
The zipline had 8 platforms and we probably finished the entire course in 40 minutes (including suiting up, walking up to the first platform and unpacking). In New Zealand they use one cable and you do everything on your own. Here, they used two cables, did not include any obstacle course challenges and had two guides to do all of the hooking and unhooking. Fun, but it wasn’t what we wanted to do. (And no pictures because it was raining the entire time.)
