Green Iguanas, Caracol, Big Rock Falls

The hotel we stayed at in San Ignacio has a Green Iguana conservation project onsite.  The give tours for a fee, or if you stay for 4 nights or more it is complimentary.  It's a great photo op, but definitely not worth the price of admission if you had to pay for it.  Anyway, they breed the green iguanas and take care of the babies until they are strong enough to release into safe places in the wild.  The baby iguanas love to climb all over you.  For the record, I did touch one of the baby ones.  And then I washed my hands.  The kids all loved having the iguanas running all over their heads and arms and backs and everywhere else.  I just couldn't wait to get out of there.  Do you know how bad iguana poop smells?

On Monday we went with our tour guide to Caracol.  We also stopped at Rio Frio Cave (pictured above and below) on the way there.  We didn't actually go down into the rio to see if it was frio, but it was a really cool cave.   

 Caracol is the largest Mayan site in Belize, but it is a horrible, horrible drive to get there.  2.5 hours on the worst road on earth.  Seriously not worth it when there are so many more easily accesible Mayan sites in Belize.  Sure it was great once you got there, but I told Mark when we got home that night that if I ever go back to Caracol, it will be in a helicopter.

One cool thing about Caracol is that it is about 2 miles from the Guatemala border, and so they have armed military escorts that follow the last car in, and also back out.  And military guys all over the archaeological site.  A few years ago they were having trouble with Guatemalan guerrillas stopping cars and robbing the tourists.  That hasn't happened for quite a while now with the military presence.

Anyway, some pics of Caracol:

The best part of Caracol is the stop at Big Rock Falls on the way out.  It is a beautiful waterfall that falls into a swimming hole, which drops into another big swimming hole.  The kids had a blast jumping off of rocks.

Abram

Aubrey

Abram

Jacob

Joel

Mark

Noah

Savanna

Zachary

The rock at the bottom pool wasn't cool enough for some people to jump off of.  They wanted to go cliff diving into the big pool, which is rumored to be about 40 feet deep.  Our guide Diego led Mark, Abram, Jacob, Joel and Noah up the cliff where Mark, Noah and Joel jumped from about 17 feet, and Abram and Jacob jumped from about 25 feet.   I stayed back with Aubrey, Savanna and Zack at the kiddie pool.

Abram's free fall from 25 feet.  Sadly, where they jumped from I could not see because of the trees, and I missed taking a picture of Jacob's jump.

Joel

Mark

Noah

Having now been to all the tourist spots around San Ignacio, if we do it again, we will leave out Caracol, and make one long day of Barton Creek Cave, Rio on Pools and Big Rock Falls.  The bumpy drive to the creek and the falls is tolerable and totally worth it.  As much as we loved being at Caracol and seeing that amazing place and climbing the temples, we all definitely aren't excited to go there again.  It's not that we didn't enjoy it--we all did.  It's just that it is a really, really awful drive to get there.

 But we would go back to spend an entire day at Big Rock Falls in a heartbeat.

This was our last adventure in San Ignacio.  We loaded up the next morning and Diego drove us to Belize City where we took the water taxi to Ambergris Caye.  That was an adventure in itself.  The water taxi terminal is much, much nicer than it was 3 years ago.  I couldn't believe it was the same place, actually.  What was a 3-walled shack with a concrete floor, a disgusting restroom with a local lady trying to charge you $1 to use it,  and a few benches is now a spacious air conditioned building with clean, free restrooms with toilet paper available.  They even check your luggage now.  We had to wait about 90 minutes for our boat, but it was a cool and spacious place to hang out and eat our lunch.  Much cooler and less crowded than the 2 hour boat ride.

Next up:  Xanadu