Belize: Altun Ha

Altun Ha was a Mayan city close to the coast, and important as a stop on ancient trade routes. It's important today as a tourist destination, being the closest Mayan ruin to Belize City.

Belize City is deeply dependent on the cruise ships that stop three to four days a week. I got there on a Monday when no ship had been present for four days. The hunger was palpable. I was constantly bombarded by requests for "a dallah to feed my five kids", and then was latched onto by a man who chatted me up with bizarre lies about being an out of work professor who normally charges $100 an hour to the University. His version of Belize history was colorful to say the least. I couldn't shake him and finally gave him a couple dollars to go away. He was happy with that much reduced "salary".

All the guide books say don't do any of the attractions near Belize City on a cruise ship day, and it is good advice. The tourism bureau has a phone number to call to find out when the big ships will be parked five miles from shore, where they offload tourists by the thousands.

The day we went to Altun Ha we drove in the van that came with our rented house. I can't help but make comparisons to Mexico. The roads in Belize are the worst I've ever seen. But the sidewalks are great, if there is one. The Old Northern Highway shouldn't even bear the name highway. All that is left of the paved road is a jagged strip of asphalt in the middle of a path cleared in the jungle. On both sides are graveled ruts, wet or dry depending on the weather. Heaven help both cars that meet from opposite directions.


Signage is another Belizean problem. There aren't many. And the few that exist are low to the ground, and almost unreadable. We hadn't yet seen a sign to Altun Ha, so we stopped to ask a fellow who was sitting on his porch. In something more like Jamaican English, he indicated it was further down the road. The simple Altun Ha sign was only two feet tall. A kid standing in front of it could have blocked it entirely. Fortunately there were giant tour buses off down a dirt road, we knew we'd arrived.

The site has been well reconstructed and was crawling with Americans and Canadians. They began to clear out after a while and we could climb all over the ruins. Most were in good shape, only one had not been reconstructed. Its fallen blocks had been recycled to build the nearby village of Rockstone Pond.

As Mayan sites go, it isn't big or impressive. But it did have a long path through the jungle, perhaps following an old causeway over a swamp, that led to the "housing" section. That part was unexcavated but visible as large mounds with trees growing out the top. On the left of the path was a large reservoir, the rainwater storage that allowed them to grow to a city of many thousands and survive there almost two thousand years. It also serves the local village today.

Altun Ha was occupied for a very long time. The earliest signs of occupation date to 900 B.C. It was abandoned rather early for Mayan sites, at 1000 A.D. The area is in a "dry" jungle. It is swampy with water seeping from underground but does not receive as much rainfall as other parts of Belize.

The largest pyramid is called the Temple of Masonry Altars. A tomb there revealed jade, shell, and other non-perishable objects including the famous jade head of Kinich Ahau (the sun god), now on loan to an American museum but usually housed in the Museum of Belize.

Unfortunately there was no signage or explanation of the site. There was no museum either. We purchased a booklet and read what the various temples were called and what they'd been used for. It was a great half day trip and introduction to Belizean Mayan ruins.

Trees grow out of the pyramid mounds

Detail of the stonework

Plaza for ceremonies, that had great acoustics.

Temple mounds. The sacred objects would have been
in small thatched buildings on the top platform.

Views from the top

Belize, The Land of Dollars

Rusting boat at Caye Caulker. 

Belize is a funny country. Their currency is the dollar, the Belize dollar, which is worth exactly half the American dollar. As a result, all prices are given in dollars. And sometimes you find out to your surprise (and irritation) that they mean the American dollar. It kind of depends on where you are.

At the tourism village, I thought, wow a hamburger for $14.00 Belize (or $7 US). Not bad! Then I discovered my bill for $18 including a drink, was NOT in Belize dollars but in American. Somehow I was supposed to know the tourism village is only for Americans so the prices were American dollars. US dollars are so common and plentiful that they are used everywhere, and given in change regularly.

But thirty miles away, in the Baboon Sanctuary, I expected the $26 dollar fee to rent a canoe for a couple hours would be in Belize dollars. It wasn't!

As it turned out, the $26 (US) was per person, and the canoe came with a paddler/guide who was quite knowledgeable about birds and vegetation. He could spot the tiniest green parrot sitting way up in a perfectly matching green tree from the middle of the river. In the end, with two of us per canoe, the price was worth the experience. (That same guide picked some strangler fig leaves and enticed an entire troop of Black Howler monkeys out of the trees. They were close enough to pet...!)

We rented a house from the VRBO website. It came with a cell phone and a car full of gas. It was a large house with a swimming pool, right on a man-made canal that led directly to the Caribbean Sea less than a block away. The sunrises were stunning every morning.

From this base we were able to drive to Altun Ha (the nearest Mayan ruin), the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary, the toll bridge on the New River where we rode a boat to Lamanai (another Mayan ruin) and to the Belize Zoo and Baboon Sanctuary (Howlers are called baboons in Belize). We also made a couple of water taxi trips from Belize City to Caye Caulker where we enjoyed great seafood and snorkeling in shark infested waters. (Infested is a good term to describe the dozens of nurse sharks that came up in the shallow water for bits of fish tossed out by the guide.)

And all this fun just cost dollars, lots and lots of dollars. Belize isn't cheap in either currency!

Rare Trogan at Lamanai. We had an
excellent bird spotter as our boat guide.

Our group at Lamanai

Excellent giant carved heads at Lamanai

Jaguar at the Belize Zoo. All the animals are rescued and
cannot be returned to the wild for various reasons. 

Coatimundi at the Zoo

Toucan at the Zoo

Wild and free mama Black Howler and her baby.

Baby howler in the wild

Howlers in the wild at the Baboon Sanctuary

Tarpon at Caye Caulker

Guatemala: Lake Atitlan and Antigua

Sunset view from Panajachel

This blog post requires a few pages, but being short on time, it'll only be a few photos with captions.

I passed through Guatemala by bus and plane on my way to Belize. I thought, looking at the map, such a small country it would be easy to get to Belize City in 5 days and see lots in the process.

Yes, it's small, and no it's not easy!

The central highlands are mountainous and vast. The bus from San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas takes a full day from 6:30am to 5:00 pm. If a person is prone to sea sickness, this would be a good time to invest in patches or dramamine.

My friend David lives in Panajachel, on the edge of an enormous volcanic caldera filled with water, Lake Atitlan. The waters have been slowly rising, flooding the tiny "beach" areas and encroaching on waterfront homes. The reason is that the lake has no outlet and never has had one. There are enough cracks and fissures in the bottom that the water drains out at about the rate it flows in during the very rainy seasons. An earthquake a few years back apparently sealed some of those cracks. So....the travel advice is go visit while the town exists, it may not in a couple of decades.

David and I went around Panajachel, took a boat ride to another little town, and on Thursday went to Chichicastenango to the crafts market. David graciously acted as my pack burro and carried all the cloth items I purchased!

Then we bused over to Antigua, an old colonial city that was once the capital until earthquakes serially destroyed the cathedral, monasteries, and homes three times in the same century. They moved the capital to Guatemala City and never looked back. It's the most picturesque city in Guatemala, with towering volcanos on three sides and many ruins that photograph well against a deep blue sky or in the long glowing sunsets.

On Monday I flew to Belize City. It was expensive, but worth it. What took two hours, would have taken almost 2 days over more mountains!

Old rusting Mercedes staff car stuck in the jungle.
(Actually it's in the yard of an art gallery!)

Beach in Panajachel, now underwater!

Hetel in Chichicastenango

In the market in Chichi

Cathedral ruins in Antigua

Children vendors in Antigua,
watching a street performer

La Merced church in the setting sun

Famous arch in Antigua, it is actually a passageway
connecting two halves of a convent

Maximo, the "patron" saint of Guatemals. A native
version of San Simon, who smokes cigars and
drinks the many gifts of alcohol from his petitioners

The pool at the public laundry, women wash in a series of basins,
dipping water from the pool. Still used regularly by locals.

Reflections in the laundry pool. 

Xochimilco: The Venice of Mexico

Mexico City is massive, one of the largest cities in the world. It is almost solid concrete, and so jammed with traffic that the most efficient way to get around is on the underground Metro and the Metro-buses that run down special lanes. The buses are very much like free-wheeled trains. The stations for embarking are platforms and the doors to the bus stay open only for a short time. But if you miss getting through the door, another bus will come along shortly.

Malena, her three-year-old son Mateo, and I left her mother's house around 11:00. We metro-bussed to a restaurant with a kid's play area. By noon we were on our way again to Xochimilco (Zoh-chee-meel-koh). Using the fastest methods available, we arrived in that far-south part of the city two hours later.

Malena and Mateo

On the outskirts of the densest parts of the city, the streets are lined with trees, homes are larger with lovely gardens, birds flit and screech all around, and street dogs live a good relaxed lifestyle feasting on the table scraps the maids dump out on the sidewalks.

Xochimilco is famous for it's chinampas, the "floating gardens" dating back to Aztec times. In those days the Aztecs built large square plots of land a couple of feet above the surface of the lake, which itself was not very deep. Between the plots they left eight or ten feet of open water for boat travel. If the rains were not sufficient, they could always dip into the lake and water their crops. And because of that, they took great care not to contaminate the water with human waste.

The climate was mild enough, even in the winter, to have three rotations of crops every year and this practice is still continued in Xochimilco. The earliest accounts from the conquering Spaniards told of markets overflowing with fresh vegetables and fruits, the likes of which they had never seen, and of a variety they found impossible to imagine.

These days the original lake is surrounded by city and eight embarcaderos where tourists can hire a boat with a poler to take them into the waters between the chinampas. Unlike Venice, where beautiful stone buildings seem to rise directly out of the water, the houses on the chinampas are usually set back in the middle of the lot, with gardens all around, though some buildings are right on the water's edge. The gardens are planted with flowers of every kind and, in the winter, with chard, spinach, peas, hardy lettuces, carrots and potatoes. There are a couple of wide canals where the bulk of the tourist boats pass, but between the islands are much smaller waterways used as streets by the residents.

Floating around with us were small flat bottomed boats with vendors selling colorful embroidered clothing and table cloths, toys, musical instruments, cold drinks, and food kept hot with a coal fired stove sitting on the bottom of the wooden boat. We weren't yet hungry but we could have sampled steaming ears of corn with butter or mayonaise slathered over them, tacos, or tamales. Bands of up to ten musicians also floated around and entertained the boats full of people, for the price of about $5US per song. We just floated past and enjoyed the music other people had paid for!

A floating vendor with toys and dolls.

View out the front of our boat. We were docked at a greenhouse
where we toured a typical chinampa garden.

Empty boats, it was the low season. 

Large group parked at a restaurant along the canal

Typical view up a residential watercourse

Many couples enjoy Xochimilco for a romantic getaway
or not.....

PS: for us word nerds, the flat bottomed boats are called trajineras.

Traveler at Home: Southern New Mexico

Yesi in Carlsbad

I've had a visitor for the last few months from Mexico. Yesenia (Yesi) is the daughter of my friend Malena whom I have mentioned often in the blogs about San Cristóbal, Chiapas. She came in September, took care of my house and cat when I went to Thailand, and spent most of her time in the US perfecting her English through the free ESL classes at UNM in Los Alamos.

Yesi had only a week or two left so we decided to go on a trip to Southern New Mexico, to see the Bosque del Apache, White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, and finally the Alien Museum in Roswell.

Yesi lives in southern Mexico with mountains covered in lush jungle. She commented on how naked our mountains were, and I told her that her own would look identical, stripped of their lovely green cloaks.

She also had no idea just how large the state is. We spent three nights in hotels and drove over 700 miles in a big circle starting in Los Alamos.

We arrived in San Antonio just in time for lunch at the famous Owl Bar. Scientists from the Los Alamos labs had presented themselves (at the bar) as prospectors during the war, while they prepared a nearby site for the first atomic bomb test. Just like they were, in those long ago days, the burgers are  the best in the state. Mine was juicy, cheesy and loaded with fresh roasted green chile. My mouth waters just writing about it!

White Sands in fog

At the Bosque, the ducks and geese rested on ponds but a few were flying around, we could hear the honking. Big gray sandhill cranes foraged in the wheat and corn fields planted just so they would have plenty of food. We went on a short hike through the forest where recent light rains had dampened just the top quarter inch of clay-soil. It clung to our shoes with each step building up until it felt like we were walking on platform shoes. Only they weren't stable and at any second the wad of clay and mud might fall off making one shoe inches shorter than the other. Yuk! Every log along the path was coated with mud where other people had scraped the bottoms of their boots.

Hours later we arrived at Alamogordo. It was dusk and cooling fast. We stayed at a small hotel along the main drag and went early the next morning to the White Sands. The whole valley was blanketed with a dense fog. I've been to White Sands many times in my life, but rarely in winter, and never in fog. It was interesting, and obvious that we could become seriously lost. With white fog over white sands, there was no way to orient oneself with the mountains on either side. It was literally like a white-out in a snow storm.

But eventually the sun burned off much of the fog revealing the mountains shrouded in deep blue rain clouds. It even warmed up enough to remove a few layers of clothing.

Winter in White Sands

Another long drive took us from Alamogordo through mountains to Carlsbad. In Artesia, I stopped by the school I had attended in first, second and third grades, Atoka Elementary. Thirty years ago, some company was using the old gym for a manufacturing operation. The building was outfitted with huge roll up doors on three sides and there were cars parked in the lot, indicating it was a going concern. But now, it's been completely abandoned for at least twenty years. The tall chain link fence was broken down in one spot so I could go in to take a few pictures. Chalkboards were still up on most of the classroom walls. Cupboards had doors, though most were barely hanging from hinges. The cafeteria, where rolls were baked fresh every morning, still had the old serving counter and built in ovens. Graffiti covered the halls and ceiling tiles formed piles on the floor, but in general it was not horribly ransacked like I expected. There was a dead civet cat in the open doorway, dessicated and defurred, but not eaten by crows nor torn apart by animals. The place was abandoned by all, even scavengers.

River of lights

Carlsbad, a half hour drive south of Artesia, is of course known for the caverns. But this time of year, the city hosts a River of Lights. Small open flat boats troll up and down the river to see the light displays put on by homeowners whose back yards slope down to the river banks.

I'd seen it once before and remembered it as less commercial. The most prosperous people in the town live along the river, the homes range from simply large to mansion-like. Many have sculpted their yards with stairways, piers, boat houses and even large water slides and tubes from the house's patio down into the river. All of those features formed the basis for the light displays as well as wooden cutouts, plastic statues, large golden crosses, and scripted sayings in lights. Many yards appeared to have been co-opted by local businesses. Three Chevrolets (a truck, a van, and a car) were covered in lights and parked on one lawn. Next door the Ford dealership had a similar presentation. But it was all pretty to look at, and the lights reflected in the mirror river was something to behold. We lucked out with the weather which was quite mild and made the ride on the river enjoyable.

The next day we headed south to the caverns. There are limestone caves all over Chiapas, but none like these caverns. Yesi was rather astonished, and insisted I take photos, though most didn't turn out well. She was appalled by the overwhelming guano smell at the entrance, but I assured her it didn't stink further down.

On the steep path into the bowels of the cave, we ran across a group of Angolan men who were on a field trip from their Police Academy school in Roswell. They all spoke Portuguese, which is another language Yesi speaks fluently. They had many questions about the formations which I was able to answer (from my days as a docent) and she translated.  We enjoyed the walk down so much, I barely noticed my aching aging knees.

Entrance to the Caverns

Stalactites high on the ceiling

The next day, our first stop was in Roswell. We spent about an hour at the cheesy tongue-in-cheek Alien museum. There are certainly many mysteries surrounding the crash siting back in 1947, and the town has amplified it to create a legend. The museum has been remodeled. It now features a large craft suspended over plastic larger-than-life aliens (as if we knew how large fictional aliens were!) that occasionally "turns on" spewing fog and blasting museum-goers with noise.

It also has a replica of Pakal's sarcophagus lid (from Palenque) which is the Mayan artwork used by Eric von Daniken to "prove" that people flew in space capsules. The display pointed out all of von Daniken's conjectures, and down below in small print, there was an archeologist's explanation for the symbols. Even an amateur like me could tell the difference between the Mayan's sacred corn-on-the-cob and a space ship!

The drive home took five hours, and we were privileged to see a glorious sunset over the mountains as we came through hills south of Santa Fe.

Dock on the Pecos River banks

Life on Koh Tao

Rheta and I stayed on Koh Tao for two weeks. Her primary reason for being there was to visit with her son Darius. Mine was to learn scuba diving. But I had a cold. For some bizarre reason, the dive teachers frown on sneezing into the masks. So all I got to do was snorkel and do touristy things.

One of the finest touristy things to do is get a massage. Thai women are famous for their massage technique, and certainly there is a pattern and series of moves that distinguish Thai massage from other forms. 

The massage was done over a cotton shirt and pair of pants. We had to lie on a soft bed, and be mashed and pushed, prodded and poked until it hurt so good!

They start with the left foot and work up the leg, then do the other leg. Each hand and arm gets worked over before the groin, armpits, and finally, the back. 

"Madam? Madam? Turn over please.......Madam?" 

Barely able to open my eyes, those insistent women wanted me to rise up and rotate. It took all my will power to get those uber-relaxed limbs to respond.  

All I wanted to do was relax into oblivion.

We did this again and again. It was heaven, and for about $16 a pop, we could afford to have many over the course of two weeks. 

The island is fairly small, we circumnavigated it in a couple of hours on a snorkeling trip, stopping for half hour stints at various bays and reefs. I had heard it was volcanic, but the boulders that had tumbled into the ocean looked more like very weathered granite. The highest peak is only about 1000 feet (300 meters). Most of the roads were dirt or gravel. The main road between Mae Haad and Sairee Beach was paved. One disastrous road goes up over the mountain, through a saddle and down to the other side where there is an abandoned resort. Rheta and I attempted the hike twice, in the coolish early morning. The first day we decided our shoes weren't the best and bagged it about half way up. The second day, we could see the saddle but we could also see five vicious dogs, two of which were intent on rushing us. We would need to hire a long tail boat to take us around the island to the abandoned resort, if we were that intent on seeing it. We weren't. 

Nasty road up over the mountain

Staying in a place for a while allows the visitor to get to know some of the politics and the problems people face on a daily basis.

For instance, about the only zoning on the island is a law that no building can be taller than a coconut tree. But coconut trees can get really tall, taller than a standard 3 story building. So some buildings, especially those in the resorts are very tall and probably block the views of the neighbors. There is little or no concern for "green" building. Everything is concrete and fairly simple construction. 

Billboard showing the new resort

There is however a big concern about water. In the tropics it rains a lot. But it doesn't rain consistently. The island drains off all rainwater directly into the ocean, with almost none of it soaking in, filling up aquifers. As a result there isn't enough fresh water to fill all the swimming pools or to flush all those hotel toilets. People collect rainwater off roofs and fill giant concrete cisterns. People who collect all the rainwater from many houses sell it to users downhill. Even so, there is sometimes a serious shortage. 

Needless to say, a giant resort under construction is a very unpopular project. A billboard in front of it shows a design with at least five swimming pools. Other smaller private pools will be built for special suites. Once it comes online, the water situation on the island could become critical. There isn't a strong enough government to stem the tide of construction or slow down the number of people coming to visit Koh Tao. It's a place that may ultimately be destroyed by its own popularity. 

Typical resort cascading down a hill

Koh Tao's Hitchhiking Dogs

Koh Tao is an island in the Gulf of Thailand, the northernmost of three in an archipelago, famous as a diving destination.

One of several dog methods of riding
on scooters.

It is populated by about half Thai and half expats from Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the US.  The island is covered with restaurants, resorts, and all the associated businesses that support them.

There are almost as many wild, feral, and homeless dogs and cats as people. They seem to do quite well for themselves mooching off the humans who feel sorry for them, and those who simply discard a lot of uneaten food.

Even the dogs that are owned wander around town, fearless, knowing that nobody will run over them with a motorcycle because the people of the island are both kind hearted and good drivers.

In fact, many dogs ride on the motorcycles and scooters, with rumps on the seat or the lap of their owners, paws on the handlebars. Often the wife and kids also ride behind on the family's only transportation system.

And some dogs have taken to riding sideways on the scooters, often simply hitching a ride with whoever stops long enough for them to hop on.

My friend told of one 80 pound dog that can really throw off the scooter's balance. He just pushes off from the foot boards when he decides he's reached his destination. He doesn't even wait for the scooter to stop first.

I saw quite a few posters for the humane association, and was told that they routinely pick up animals, spay them, and then let them go back to the pretty good life they'd been living. But there was one poor dog whose back side was paralyzed. She pulled herself all over the beach begging for tidbits. I was a little surprised the association hadn't picked her up yet.