Belize Part II – The Mainland

In between our trips to Belize’s Cayes, we have also seen a bit of the interior of the country which has a very different vibe and culture.

After Caye Caulker we ventured out to Orange Walk to visit the Lamanai Mayan ruins. The town is home to Belize’s biggest rum distillery (the local Alcoholic Anonymous group certainly wasn’t as full as it should have been!) and some excellent street food influenced by its proximity to Mexico!

It’s an amazing multicultural place, where you see Belizeans, Mayan, Chinese, Hindus and Mennonites all in a short walk around town where you can hear people speaking Creole, English, Chinese, German or Spanish as a first language depending on their background.

The Mennonites, the most recent group to migrate there, have been a welcome addition to the under-populated country, bringing farming and woodworking expertise (although they are also blamed for clearing forest for farm land). They are a religious people originating from Germany who create their own sustainable communities and most of them do not use technology. After migrating through various different countries (Canada, Mexico, etc) who didn’t fully accept their way of living, they have settled in Belize because the country allows them to exist outside the taxation system as they claim that they don’t benefit from the welfare. It’s easy to recognise them, men wear overalls, blue shirts and farmer hats while women stick to ankle length dresses.

From Orange Walk we visited the Lamanai ruins, which are reached by boat, after cruising through a complex series of tight and not so tight river bends, slowing only to pass local fishermen and spot wildlife, before arriving at the destination on the side of a large freshwater lake.

The temples in Lamanai are largely unexcavated, so are partially covered in jungle. We walked between temples along jungle paths with howler monkeys and even saw a snake and a toucan! The guides taught us the howler monkey call which has since proven handy in our more recent jungle expeditions (more on that in a later post).

The temples are thought to be solid structures used for religious ceremonies (temples with crest) and astronomy (flat roofed pyramids).

Contrary to popular belief, there is very little evidence to suggest that Mayans performed human sacrifices (except after ball games and if they discovered people counterfeiting the cacao bean currency with balls of dirt – there are a lot of conflicting stories around).

This is especially true in Lamanai as the abundance of water left the people no need to try and appease the rain god.

Before crossing the border to Guatemala, we visited the biggest concentration of Mayan people in Belize, who live in the Toledo Region in the South. To get there, we left the local bus heading South towards Punta Gorda at the turnoff to San Felipe and started to walk along the dirt road hoping to get a ride along the way. Our hitch hiking technique is a bit of a competition and involves us taking turns to stick out the thumb. After a few failed attempts, Xavi managed to hail us a ride ( Xavi 1 – Sal 0) holding onto the back of a red 4WD (that was already full inside) to San Felipe, our cacao farm destination.

After probably the best chicken, rice and beans of the trip so far (and yes there have been many!) which was all made with ingredients from the farm, we started our lesson in chocolate making and Maya culture.

The process of making chocolate while involving many steps is actually amazingly simple. Starting with picking the cacao pod from the tree, the beans inside are selected and, after separating them from the fruit around them, roasted, peeled, then crushed by hand using special stone tools.

From there we added the desired quantity of sugar for an 80% cacao recipe, crushed/mixed again before dropping into molds for refrigeration and voila! We were so busy enjoying the end product that we forgot to take pictures!

Apart from making chocolate, our host Juan also explained a few interesting details about Mayan history including the end of the Mayan calendar in Dec 2012. Basically the whole apocalypse scenario was all drummed up by Hollywood and foreigners. In reality, the ending of the ancient Mayan calendar signified the end of an era calculated mathematically and linked with the astrological cycles of the sun and constellations. Nevertheless, business owners in all Central America were really happy with the boost in tourism!

We visited another few villages in the area the following day with an ambitious plan to hitchhike to a local waterfall. It didn’t go quite to plan when after walking 45 mins on a really hot day along a road with no shade we still hadn’t had any success – at this stage I was having serious second thoughts about not having waited a few hours for the direct bus! But to Xavi’s surprise, he managed to get us another free ride with a local school teacher on long service leave (Xavi 2 – Sal 0).

To conclude our Belize chapter, we continued south to Punta Gorda, another seaside village, and caught a small boat over to Livingston in Guatemala. More adventures to come from there soon!

Lots of love,
Xavi & Sal