We left Cozumel and headed off to Belize, where we saw the Mayan ruins at Xunantunich just outside the towns of San Ignacio and Santa Elena, and then got a good look at Belize City from the inside of a tour bus.
The nation of Belize, formerly known as British Honduras, gave me a lot more hope than did our next stop at Honduras. Though Belize City itself was squalid, and had had most of what grandeur it ever possessed erased by a hurricane in 1932 and Hurricane Hattie in 1961, the country itself is doing everything in its power to ascend the ladder of development. Our tour guide was as proud as she could be of the educational system and explained that Belize has an enviable literacy rate of almost 90%. She explained that the country is extremely environmentally conscious and is putting everything in place to host large-scale economic improvement without destroying this small nation's natural glories -- including its only-one-in-the-world jaguar preserve. All it needs, basically, is some major outside investment -- it's ready, willing, and educationally able to face the future.
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Belize: Cruising With Lunatics
Here are the ruins at Xunantunich (aka "Tuna Sandwich"), outside the towns of San Ignacio and Santa Elena. As you are surely aware, several leading insane persons have deciphered clues in ancient Mayan calendars and have concluded that the world will end next month. Several of these people were on the cruise and were visiting the ruins to do... something. Perhaps to feel something. I don't know, but whatever it was, was terribly spiritual. I left them to it.
Our tour guide at the archaeological site seemed exasperated by the 2012 prophecy nuts running around the ruins.
That's San Ignacio down there.
That would be Guatemala there in the distance.
The tour guide walks on the wild side.
You've got to take a ferry across a muddy river to get to the ruins.
San Ignacio and Santa Elena are side by side, and one runs into the other.
En route from San Ignacio to Belize City.
The nation of Taiwan is doing something or other in conjunction with Belize. As to what it is, it involved agriculture and that's all I know.
Now entering Belize City.
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