Caves Branch River View Tree house

 For the first three days, we stayed at Ian Anderson's Caves Branch resort in the jungle of Belize.  It was such a great adventure.  Their selling point is that they have nice cabins in the jungle, and for every night that you stay there, you can go on an adventure the next day.  The two adventures that we chose were the ATM cave and the mayan ruins.  Since they are in the jungle, the entire resort runs off a generator.  There is only Wifi in the dining room.  Dinner and breakfast are served buffet style, but you sit with others at these community tables.  The wifi is turned off at dinner, so it forces you to sit and talk with the others at the dinner table.  It was fanatastic.  Everyone was very friendly, and it was fun to exchange stories about the different adventures that we had gone on.  We even ran into these people we had met at our stay there when we went to the beach, and we were comfortable striking up a conversation with them.

Our treehouse had a tree growing in the shower.

 The view from inside.  There were no windows- only screens.  There also was no A/C, but it cooled off nicely at night, so we didn't need it.

 A view from below. The treehouses were built up a mountain, so they had a great view.

Mayan Ruins in Belize- Cahal Pech and Xunantunich

Our second excursion we decided to go on while were are the treehouse lodge was to two Mayan ruins sites.    The bigger of the two was Xunantunich.  It was discovered in the late 1800's by a hunter.  When he discovered the ruins, it looked like a hill, but upon closer examination it was found that there were huge buildings and temples under the hills.  This just amazes me. You can see from this picture how big a temple was hidden under the hill.  The building in the foreground of this picture has not been entirely excavated so you can see how it would look "hidden" under the hill.

 The view from the top of the high temple.  Interestingly, there were many many buildings surrounding these buildings that you can see, but they haven't been excavated yet, so it looks like hilly jungle.

 This is a reconstruction of some of the carvings that would have been on the side of this structure.

 A cool staircase going down.

 Another view, from the right side of the huge temple/pyramid.

 Nearby was a termite mound.  It was in the trees. Our guide gave us termites to eat.  They tasted like wood/ carrots.

My termite got stuck in my bottom teeth.  (Gross!!)

 This building was the private palace/ home of the royal family.

 In these trees were a family of howler monkeys.  We heard them the whole time we were in the jungle.  They made a noise that sounded a lot like a dinosaur.

 These ruins are right on the border with Guatemala.  In this next picture the road you can see in the distance running all the way along the picture is the border of Guatemala.

The ruins were still being excavated.  It was clear that it wasn't continuously being worked on.  

The ruins were across a river.  They had a hand ferry to take us there.  

The second set of ruins that we went to was called Cahal Pech.  It was right in the middle of a city.  It didn't have as big a grand central building, but I really enjoyed looking at these ruins better.  There was no one at these ruins.  Literally, no one.  There were several buildings and they had halls and separate rooms and passageways.  There were a couple of courtyards.  It was quite beautiful.

 This was the royal family's courtyard.

 Our guide didn't explain much about these ruins, but that square hole at the top makes me think there was some kind of fountain there.  So fascinating.

 In one of the rooms was the remains of paint.  You could tell that they had decorated the walls.  

I find Mayan ruins completely fascinating.  They are so grand and well built, and yet, the people walked away from them and just left them to be buried by dirt and trees.  So much work literally left to go to waste.