The Belizen Experience

I know I said one of my goals for this blog was to not forget about it, and you might have thought I had done so, but to save this blog from being amongst the googlies of forgotten web pages, I decided to write about my Bedizen experience.

Last Thursday, we arrived on the island city of San Pedro. The hotel, Paradise Villa, lived up to its name providing us comfortable, cozy, and beautiful rooms and beach-front views. We had a kitchen and living room to our disposal which I was thankful for as the food in the restaurants, I'm sad to announce, was mediocre at best. The TV even received a signal from Colorado! At first I thought the TV would only be a distraction, but with the activities being scarce on the island and the Olympics going on in Beijing, we found it to be a great filler for the night time.

We filled every morning in San Pedro with scuba diving. My first real dive experience was a huge highlight of the trip and will be hard to forget, at least until I replace the snorkel I lost on my first entry. Once underwater, I immediately noticed the sense of moving in 3 dimensions as I would swim through the coral trenches like an X-wing fighter on the Death star (sorry for the Star Wars analogy, but that's all I could compare it to). My excitement for the adventure was unfortunately evident in my high intake of air which caused me to come up early, but the experience alone was unlike anything I've done and well worth it.

After a few days in San Pedro, we embarked on the road trip to Chaa Creek. The directions to get there are as simple as drawing a line from point A to point B, but we never saw a single sign for Chaa Creek. We passed San Ignacio (where the address for the resort is) and continued through some hills and farming land. Still with no signs for Chaa Creek, we stopped on the road and thought about turning around to ask for directions in the city. The thought passed me, If the resort is on the other side of this hill and we turned around now, I'd kick myself. I saved myself a self-kicking when we reached the top of the hill and Paige jumped. "Look! Chaa Creek!" Sure enough, an old broken sign bore the name of Chaa Creek and pointed down a dirt road. How much were we paying to stay here?

The sign was deceiving as we popped out of rainforest into a pristine landscape. That set the tone for the whole stay as everything from our rooms to the service followed suit. How much did we pay to stay here?

That evening we went canoeing up the river. Yeah, we went up. Paige and I struggled to maneuver up the faster currents while mom and the guide did so with relative ease (good thing Paige and I still have the energy to waste and still keep up). Our guide knew everything about everything, or at least appeared to know, as he explained everything that did and didn't move.

A few hours later we had the same guide take us on a night walk. We all had headlights on and the first thing he had us recognize were the Jewel-like bellies on the spiders by just shining your light on them. At any given time, I could have counted five spiders in front of me. Any arachnid-phobics should probably not do this on their trips to the rain forest.

The next two days were spent spelunking. The first cave we floated down on inner tubes which was OK. The real highlight were the zip linings we did through the jungle afterwords. The next day's cave had us crawl, swim, and climb to get through. In an hour, we reached some Mayan pottery and bones which were left over from sacrificial activities. The time period was 800-900 AD which made me think of the apostasy the people had fallen into; the sacrificial activities were made to the gods of the underworld. The adventure of seeing the stalagmites and the ruins was breathtaking! In some caverns you could have fit a two story house. To think that water alone could have made such formations and large caverns.

To sum up, the trip has been a success. We have 4 more days to explore, and today will be a day at the resort as Paige has picked up something in her stomach and won't be out of bed until later.