Belize- Western Highway Trip

The next day we got back in the truck and headed west along the second of the paved roads in Belize, the western highway. Our plan for the day was to drive the 78 miles through the Cayo District almost to within a few miles of the border of Guatemala, stopping somewhere along the way for lunch but returning back to Belize City before dark.

The initial part of the Western Highway looked a lot like that of the Northern Highway—a lot of shrub interspersed every once in a while with a house or collection of houses, most of which weren’t in great condition. We also passed lots of dogs trotting along the side of the road, looking thin but very happy. Dogs seem to be everywhere in Belize. A while more and we began to see the Maya Mountains in the distance and the countryside became more green. As we made our way toward the turn for Belmopan, the capital of Belize, orange groves and cattle pastures began to appear.

On the Western Highway, you really don’t see much of Belmopan. If we hadn’t been paying attention to find the turn off for the next day’s trip, we probably wouldn’t have known we’d gone through it. But as we got closer and closer to the sistercities of Santa Elena and San Ignacio, we began to see signs for hotels, restaurants, and spas (though none of them were visible from the road).

Once we entered Santa Elena, we started looking for the “temporary” wooden bridge that would take us across the Macal River. We missed it the first time, but eventually doubled back and found the turnoff for it.

Once we drove through San Ignatio, we started looking for the turnoff that would take us to Xunantunich. Once we found it, we pulled along the side of the road to wait our turn and cross the Mopan River.

The only way across it is a hand-cranked ferry that can carry two vehicles at a time. Once across we drove up the steep hills leading to Xunantunich.

The buildings there were a lot like those at Altun Ha, only taller. Most of them were constructed some time between 700 and 900 CE, despite the fact that the area was occupied as early as 1000 BCE. Archaeologists think that, as buildings such as Altun Ha lost people, other city-states like Xunantunich ("Stone Woman") grew to fill the void. The largest of the pyramids, the Castillo, had thirteen doorways (for the thirteen levels of heaven in Maya belief?) and seven terraces and was decorated with a stucco frieze that guidebooks said originally wentall the way around the entire temple. As we looked at what was left of the buildings, it was hard to imagine them and the courtyards covered with plaster and painted yellow, blue, or red. I found myself wishing that for a model that showed what scholars think the building must have looked like during its height.

After taking the ferry back over the Mopan, we wove our way back to Belize City.

The beginning of the return trip took us through a different part of San Ignacio because the bridge going over the Macal River on the trip east is a high suspension bridge, the Hawkesworth.

Belize - Northern Highway Trip

On our first full day in Belize, we set out to rent a small car to see some of the countryside. When we got to the rental place, they explained that, given the conditions of the roads we’d be driving if we planned to leave Belize City, we’d need to be driving an SUV (which they didn’t have available) or a small truck (which they did have).

Kathy quickly became comfortable with the latter and so that’s what we got.

Belize only has one paved road—a two lane “highway” – in each direction. We decided, since the rental place was north of Belize anyway, to take the Northern Highway and drive up, past some Maya ruins and birding areas, to Orange Walk.

The drive along most of the Northern Highway isn’t very pretty. It’s mostly brush, with lots of lower and middle class houses along the way. The poverty of the area was pretty overwhelming and there were some things that initially jarred us. We passed, for example, some houses that were very ramshackled and lacked indoor plumbing but that had large TV dishes in the backyard.

35 miles out of Belize City, we turned onto Maskall Road,a one to one-and-a-half lane dirt road that made it quickly clear to us why we needed the truck.

We bumped along past lots of brush, now and then a home or two (most of which were up on stilts because of flood seasons), and a few monkeys. It took us about 45 minutes to go the four miles to the turn off for Altun Ha, a Maya ruin in the area.

Altun Ha was at its height (with about 10000 people living at it) from around 200 to 900 CE. The parts of it that are excavated seem to suggest it was a major ceremonial center.

Its largest excavated Temple, the Temple of Masonry Altars (the building you’re seeing over Kathy’s shoulder), has a single stairway going up to the altar at its top and inside excavators found tombs with bodies of what they believe were the high priests.

Also found at Altun Ha was a 15 cm high jade head of Kinich Ahau, the Maya Sun God. As with many other Maya sites, between 900 and 1000 CE, some kind of disruption –a revolt? a regional conflict? a Mayan “church rummage sale”?--seems to have happened to cause the population to decline severely.

After Altun Ha we bumped out way back to the main highway and headed north to Orange Walk, the second largest town in Belize. As we neared the tow, the brush changed to some fields of sugar cane growing and the road became littered with cut sugar cane that had clearly fallen off trucks. When we got to Orange Town we’d hoped to find a choice of restaurants so that we could pick where we could get a late lunch, but there was no such luck. The town seemed to be laid out in a hodge podge type manner and the best that we could do was to stop at one of the “fast food” booths and grab a soda and some potato chips before turning around to head south.

On the way back, since it was getting toward sundown, we decided to stop by the Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary to see if—even though we didn’t plan to go out in a boat-- we could spot any Jabiru storks, which supposedly make their homes there during December and January. The road into the sanctuary, however, was “under construction” (read—even more full of ruts than the trail to Altun Ha) and after about ½ hour driving on it and seeing no birds at all, we decided to turn around.We got back to Belize City in the dark and, after getting lost several times, finally made our way back to the Fort George Radisson, where we were staying.