Can You BELIZE It?!

I'm back from a week in paradise! It's going to be hard trying to sum up this week, but here it goes...

We flew into the mainland in Belize and at first I thought the pilot had made a mistake in his flight plan. There was no sign of the clear blue water of the Caribbean or beautiful beaches with palm trees. Instead we were met with ugly dry grass and dirt roads. Yikes. I started to question this vacation...whose idea was it to go to Belize anyway? Well a few hours later Belize taught me a lesson. The dry grass was gradually replaced by a thick green jungle as we were driven to our first destination in San Ignacio. Belize: 1, Whitney: 0.

We stayed at the Cahal Pech Resort in San Ignacio. The resort sits at the top of a very steep hill (which gave us more than one scare as cab drivers push their poor little cars to the max trying to get us to the top) and has a view of the entire valley below.

The view from our balcony! Also...I had just been hiking all day, don't judge.

Here's where the fun begins. San Ignacio is what you'd call a one-horse town. We decided to go exploring in town the first night there and considered ourselves experts after about 20 minutes. It was suddenly clear that Cahal Pech is definitely the nicest place to stay in San Ignacio. Trust me, that's saying something. Our little condo had two bedrooms and a tiny living room and kitchen area and the bathroom. It had been a long day of traveling so we all sat down to enjoy some Olympic viewing. One of the girls decided to take a shower and we realize that you can hear EVERYTHING going on in the bathroom, as if they were still in the same room as you. Upon further inspection, we see there's a space above the TV that connects to the bathroom (actually the shower). Luckily it's not see through. This provided quite a bit of entertainment via pranks and full on conversations about the Olympics with whoever was showering.

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

The first full day that we spent in Belize was a Sunday so we went to the local LDS Spanish branch, where I was able to attempt to use my college Spanish courses and was pleasantly surprised by how much I understood. Afterwards we went on a tour of some of the Mayan ruins. One was called Xunantunich and the other was the Cahal Pech ruins, which were literally about a 10 minute walk from our resort. It was fun to see the ruins and discuss them in relation to the Book of Mormon. I'm sure it'd be great to do one of those Book of Mormon tours and talk to an expert who's done some research on it.

Xunantunich had an incredible view, but I think what I'll remember most about it was the sound that greeted us as we got out of the car to begin hiking to the ruins. At first I thought it sounded like a wounded horse or cow and then it got a little creepier and I felt like I was in the TV show "LOST" when they are all staring into the jungle waiting for whatever "monster" was in there. Then our tour guide came back, clearly not concerned by the noise, and said that it was being made by howler monkeys! They keep that noise up all day long! Imagine trying to go to sleep every night to THAT lullaby. They can make that noise from 3 miles away and still sound like they're right next to you. So we didn't see any, but that didn't stop me from keeping a close eye on the trees while I was walking...

The whole group at the top of Xunantunich: Bekah, David, Me, Karin, and Laura.
Look out for the howler monkeys! 

The next day we went to the ATM caves (the initials are something to do with the name of the cave in Spanish, not money machines), which we unfortunately do not have pictures of because some stupid tourist dropped her camera and put a hole in a Mayan skull a few months ago so now they don't allow cameras inside the caves. Boo. These caves were one of my favorite things of the whole trip though, probably cause I felt cool doing "extreme" hiking. We forded rivers and hiked through jungle paths for about a mile and then came to a river that went into the mouth of the cave. We jumped in and swam til there was a part you could touch and then we hiked through this underground river, around different rock formations and such (with bats flying above I might add). It was awesome. We had helmets with lights on and at one point our guide had us turn them off and hold onto the person in front of us to hike for a few feet. Kind of cool to go on blind faith in pitch darkness (might make a good Sunday School lesson one day hmm?) At the edge of the cave there are some clay pots and skeletons that have been there since the Mayans. They were still in the same position they had been in when they died. The guide had plenty of stories about the Mayan beliefs and human sacrifice. It's all pretty interesting. Apparently the cave we were in was believed to be the underworld since it was so far below ground. After that we hiked back out and made our way back to our resort.

Tuesday morning we joined a tour and went cave tubing with a company called "Butt's Up!" This name derives from the guides yelling, "butt's up!" whenever they take you over a shallow part of the river and rocks might hit you on the underside. Ha ha! After the extreme experience of the ATM caves, this was basically like floating in a lazy river at a theme park, just through caves instead. Still fun, just more of a relaxing adventure than I was expecting.

The girls!

From there we went to our next destination: San Pedro! Now THIS is what I was expecting when I heard we were going to the Caribbean. Beautiful white beaches, palm trees, crystal clear blue water...*sigh* I miss it already. Most of our time spent at Belizean Shores was spent relaxing by the poolside and watching the Olympics at night, but my favorite day of the whole trip happened while we were there and it happened as follows:

Our resort: Belizean Shores

One of the excursions offered through our resort was a day trip where they take you fishing in the morning and then to a beach where they barbecue the fish that you caught. Then after lunch you get to do a little snorkeling by a reef and then they take you back. Sounds great right? Enter our guide. I call him Pops because no one really understood him when he told us his name. Now Pops, bless his soul, is a mumbler. He speaks English just fine, but he does not enunciate anything and eventually we all got tired of asking him to repeat himself so you just go with the smile and nod approach. This presented a problem when we began fishing since he was our guide and none of us were expert fishermen.

The man knows what he's doing.

The first thing he does is stand at the bow of the boat and fling a net out into the ocean. Like magic he jerks the drawstring on the net and pulls up a net full of sardines! I swear I was watching the whole time and never saw a fish move in the area he threw the net. I was curious what he was looking for so I had stood up to watch him toss the net, which resulted in a bag full of sardines being flung into my body when he tossed them into the boat. GROSS! I'm not a fan of flopping fish and might have screamed and huddled into my corner of the boat until he took them to the back.

Now that we had our bait, we were ready to fish! Pops gets out our fishing poles, chops up our sardines for bait, mumbles some instructions and lets us loose. Yeah o.k. Well for not understanding a bit of instruction I'd say we did pretty good! I even caught one fish although he made me throw it back because it wasn't big enough to cook. I was still proud though.

And that's as close as I will voluntarily come to a fish.

Apparently Pops was unsatisfied with our fishing and decided it was necessary to go trolling. This is a form of fishing where you stick the fishing poles into a couple holes in the boat and then drive...I guess it attracts larger fish, but clearly I know nothing about fishing so that could be completely false. Suddenly both poles get a bite and all hell breaks loose on the boat. I was sitting at the bow so I had the perfect view for the chaotic scenario that ensued. Karin grabbed one of the polls and started to reel in a giant fish (it leaped out of the water and I saw it, so I can say giant) with Pops yelling at her the whole time saying who knows what. At the same time David grabbed the other pole and reeled in a large tuna. He swings it into the back of the boat where it starts flopping around like crazy. Pops is yelling at him saying, "stick! stick!" David hears "Stab it! Stab it!" and grabs the knife used to cut up the sardines and yells, "OK!" and drives the knife into the middle of the fish. It was very manly, but definitely not what he was supposed to do. Pops starts yelling at him, clarifying that he wanted him to club the fish to death, not stab it. Meanwhile, Karin has been fighting with this fish and became too tired to keep reeling so she let go for a second, which is all it takes for the fish to get off the hook. So we lost that one and Pops is ridiculously upset. He's shouting at Karin, "I told you not to stop reeling!" (at least that's my interpretation of what he said). Meanwhile I am laughing to the point of tears streaming down my face at the scene I have just witnessed. It will forever live in my memory as one of the funniest moments I've ever experienced. Ever.

See? I totally could have been on Survivor!

But the day did not end there, my friends! While we waited for Pops to BBQ our fish for lunch, we sat around talking on the beach and suddenly Pops becomes Mr. Chatty. He went off on a long stream of conversation, which we all politely smiled and nodded to, not understanding a word of it. EXCEPT for the one story I happened to catch most of: he has been attacked by a shark while spear fishing! He had a net full of fish and was swimming back to his boat, when a shark bit down on his ankle. He stabbed the shark in the eye with his spear and swam back to his boat. And yes he chooses to still be in the ocean as part of his daily life. As he finishes up that story (I'm staring open-mouthed at him at this point) he says, o.k. time to go snorkeling! Um...remember how you just told me about a shark grabbing your ankle? Yeah, so do I.

He drives us over to a reef that is supposed to have really neat snorkeling. Now apparently in Belize a big draw for tourists is snorkeling with nurse sharks (supposedly harmless) and there's a specific excursion that goes to a place called Shark Ray Alley. We did not go there, so when he says that he's taking us by a reef and maybe we'll see sharks, I assume it's similar to going whale watching on a boat where the odds of you actually seeing a whale are pretty slim. As I'm thinking this Pops starts slicing up some sardines and throwing them into the water where we have anchored. Um...excuse me Pops...is that chum? As in to attract sharks and possibly get them in feeding frenzy mode? Not cool. Dave apparently has no problem with this and jumps into the water right in the middle of a school of bright yellow fish. Well Dave didn't die so I decide to head in next. As I'm going down the ladder I put my mask on and literally as I'm putting my face into the water I hear someone in the boat say, "Hey look, a shark!" and see a large sea creature swimming on the ocean floor about 20 feet directly below me. *GASP* Inhalation of salt water and much spluttering followed. I guess the one thing that has apparently stuck with me throughout my years of seeing movies about sharks is that they are attracted to splashing - I became a dead body floating on top the ocean waves.

Once I realized the shark was not at all interested in me I floated in the direction of the reef to see the other splendors of the ocean (of course never letting the shark out of my sight). I decided I'd toyed with fate long enough and should head back to the boat when I saw THREE more sharks coming towards our boat from the depths of the ocean. That took a considerable amount of restraint to not freak out. While Dave dives down to get closer to the sharks - apparently he has a death wish - I swim safely back to the boat and as I climb back in I ask Pops, "So what kind of shark was it that attacked you before?" He replies, "A nurse shark." "Oh, you mean like the ones I was just swimming with?" He nods and smiles. Awesome. *Eye roll*

Nothing could quite compare with that day, but the rest of the vacation flew by with lots of relaxing by the pool, playing Go Fish for Real (played in the hot tub with plastic playing cards), night swimming in the ocean off the dock, wandering around San Pedro, shopping, our own Olympic games in the pool, a night spent in Belize City followed by church at the Belize City branch before our flight back to the states.
Obviously, 4 girls traveling with 1 guy, we were bound to get some comments, but the best one came from a man at the LDS branch. Bekah, Karin, Laura and I sit down on a bench and David sits behind us. The man (not sure if he was the Bishop or a counselor) comes up to David and says, "Are you visiting?" Yes. "What is the name of your family?" Dumbfounded silence. The girls are all thinking, "Which one of us is his wife and which ones are his daughters? Or does he think we're a polygamist family from UT?" David says, "Uh, my name is Bennett and we're all friends from the DC area." Oh. Awkward silence. And cue the beginning of the meeting. We all had a good chuckle over that one later.

The Bennett family (minus Bekah taking the picture).

What a great vacation! Look at this awesome group of people that I had so much fun with!

Goodbye Belize!

And if you actually read this entire post, I apologize for the novel. I'll try to cut them down in the future.

What's next you ask? 2 weeks in Home Sweet Home, Draper, UT!