Traveling Applejax

After a lovely couple of days on the island of Caye Caulker, Mike and I started heading west across Belize. We stopped the first night at the Monkey Bay Wildlife Sanctuary and camped out. It was a lovely little educational sanctuary currently hosting a couple groups of high school students from the States. Alas, no cheeky monkeys.

Today we biked to San Ignacio, the last “city” before Guatemala. The terrain has become less flat, and we encountered a few hills today — some nice long slow ones and some quick steep ones. Nothing to worry about yet, though I’m afraid our flat terrain will be something strictly of the past now. Also, it’s a bit hot — esp. without the nice breeze coming off the ocean. By the end of the day today I had sweated out so much salt that you could have scraped it off my skin and filled an entire shaker. Which makes me want corn on the cob for some reason.

At any rate, San Ignacio is nice. It’s a touristy town since it’s on the backpacker route to Guatemala, but there are many interesting things to do in the area. We might go caving if we get a chance and it’s not too pricey. Some of the caves were used for Mayan rituals and still have bones and pottery shards in them.

On a side note: Apparently, biking Central America is not such an unusual way to spend a vacation. We keep stopping places where people say things like “All the bikers seem to come through here,” and “Did you start in Arizona? No? You’re coming from Cancun? Well, that’s a respectable distance,” and “I just met a guy last week who started in Alaska and is going to the southernmost tip of South America.” I can’t imagine! Some of the other guests at a hostel we stayed at a while back expanded on the theme and told story after story about crazy physical stunts. Like people rolling eggs along the ground with their noses for entire marathons. Or a man who swam across the entire pacific ocean with a dermatologist in the support boat (whose job it was to keep the man’s skin mostly attached to his body). So, if you thought we were crazy to set off on this trip, it’s all relative.

Sorry, but I don’t have any pictures this time. Blame the crappy Internet service. Mike’s having trouble uploading pics today. I’ll post some more next chance I get (which incidentally may be a while — I don’t know when we’ll be in a major town overnight again). Hope everyone is well. I want you to know that I’m jealous of all of you who will be picking up a copy of Harry Potter at midnight tomorrow. Happy reading, nonetheless. I’m satisfied for now with the fact that I’ve finally convinced Mike to try the series. He’s picked up book 1 and begun to read it. I’ve already finished a David Sedaris book I found along the way, so hopefully I’ll be able to trade it for something else soon. Take care, and may Harry prevail!