Belize City and Lamanai

Today we had booked a tour for most of the day to Lamanai which is about an hour’s drive northwest of Belize City and then a further hour or so boat ride on the New River from there. We got up at 6 a.m. and went down to the restaurant on the ground floor for a quick breakfast before Kendris our tour guide arrived to pick us up at 8 a.m. We left Belize City and headed on the highway in the direction of Carmelita where we would take the river boat to Lamanai.

Kendris proved to be a good driver and an excellent source of information about the history of Belize from the time of the first settlement by the Europeans and also about the earlier Mayans who had inhabited the land as the first indigenous population. People of direct descent from the early Mayans still live in Belize, especially in the southwest part of the country. 3 Mayan languages still are spoken although they are starting to die out and the schools in the Mayan area are including the native languages in their curricula to try to preserve them and prevent them from dying out. As seems too be the case with mots indigenous peoples, the Government in Belize is trying to strip the land from the Mayans who claim ancestral rights to the land as a community resource. Kendris told us of the way in which Spain came from being one of the poorest countries in Europe at the time of Columbus’ ‘discovery’ of the Americas to one of the richest a few years after, mainly as a result of being deeded all the land west of the Azores by the Pope of the time and then plundering the gold and other assets from it. Seeing the success of the Spanish, the French, Dutch and British all sought to have their share. By means of ‘licensing’ pirates with ‘letters of marque’ Belize was settled by some British pirates in the early 1500’s.

Kendris who had retired from his teaching job a couple fo years ago in favor of tour guiding was a fount of information about the country and its history and culture. One of the things which comes through very strongly is that the Mayans, like the Incas further south had a very sophisticated and advanced culture that the European invaders managed to suppress and even destroy as much as possible. Little is left to document how they lived, what they believed and what they did. Many ruins of temples and burial places have been found and excavated but as there were no written records much of the knowledge of these people has been learned by supposition from the examination and excavation of the sites. For example, the Mayan city at Lamanai was 10 miles by two miles in size, no small city. I will try to find out more about the Mayans later and post it on this blog.

After about an hour on the road and a brief. Stop to get MAC some cough drops, we arrived at the place where we would take the boat for their 25 miles river trip along the New River which has a Mayan name which I cannot recall but means ‘white river’. Here we met our new guide a boatman Colin. A group of about 8 of us plus Kendris and Colin boarded the boat and set off at high speed up river (south). Every now and then the boat would stop to see some type of wild life such as a small crocodile, an osprey, a blue heron and a mangrove swallow. The sides of the river were covered with trees overhanging into the river and mangrove-type bushes. After a while we came to the small Mennonite settlement of Shipyard where the largest group of Mennonites in Belize live and work. The Mennonites came to Belize after moving unsuccessfully to Mexico from the USA in the 1950’s and 1960’s. They originally moved to the west of Belize but a schism in their ranks over the strict observation of their customs caused there to be new settlement further east and the original ‘orthodox’ group staying in the west. The Mennonites grow and provide 75% of the food eaten in Belize. They also make furniture and do welding and metal work. They do make money but no one is quite sure what they do with it as they are a closed community with no formal church. There is no inter-marriage of inter-breeding between Belizeans and Mennonites.

Colin drove the boat hard and seemed to relish taking sharp corners and having their boat heel over. After about an hour or so we reached Lamanai archeological site where we had a tour of the various temples and monuments which have been excavated. Collin also told us about the various trees which had over grown the site, every one of which had some use for the Mayans, one with a pod which exuded a sticky glue, another which had leaves from which you could make tea, another with a medicinal leaf and nut as well as those trees which could be used for various building purposes. There were mahogany and sapodilla trees (we had used sapodilla wood in the CEB Micro-house):

“Wood from the sapodilla tree is very dense, strong and disease resistant.  The wood is so heavy it does not float.  Carved lintels and wooden beams of many Maya temples were made from sapodilla wood.  Some lintels have survived intact for over 1,200 years!  The beautiful pinkish colored wood is also used to make durable furniture, flooring, ax and hammer handles, fence posts and railroad ties.”

The sapodilla tree also has a fruit:

“When ripe, the fruit is delicious and is said to taste like a combination of banana, mango, and jack fruit with the consistency of a ripe pear with malty brown sugar undertones and a hint of jasmine aroma.  The flesh may be anywhere from creamy beige, yellow, apricot, tan or slightly brownish-orange in color. When not ripe the fruit oozes a white gooey latex substance which makes your lips stick together and the taste is remarkably acidic and astringent.  You will be able to tell when the fruit is ripe by pressing the fruit.  If the fruit is soft, not hard, not mushy and smells sweet and the brownish skin smooth or slightly wrinkled, it is ready to enjoy.”

There were many other trees which Colin pointed out and are too numerous to mention. We also saw three of the temples or mausoleums left by the Mayans. Huge structures including the High Temple and the Jaguar Temple. These massive stone structures are very impressive but it is not completely clear what function they actually performed except some form of ceremonial burial or religious rituals. Bones of what appear to be sacrificed children have been found near one of the sites, a ‘ball court’ which seemed to be used for some form of Mayan sport which invoked a large round stone and a heavy ball. Some version of this game is still played in Belize. 

Here is a brief extract from Wikipedia about Lamanai:

“Lamanai (from Lama'anayin, "submerged crocodile" in Yucatec Maya) is a Mesoamerican archaeological site, and was once a major city of the Maya civilization, located in the north of Belize, in Orange Walk District. The site's name is pre-Columbian, recorded by early Spanish missionaries, and documented over a millennium earlier in Maya inscriptions as Lam'an'ain. Lamanai is renowned for its exceptionally long occupation spanning three millennia, beginning in the Early Preclassic Maya period and continuing through the Spanish and British Colonial periods, into the 20th century. Unlike most Classic-period sites in the southern Maya lowlands, Lamanai was not abandoned at the end of the 10th century AD.

Lamanai was occupied as early as the 16th century BC. The site became a prominent centre in the Pre-Classic Period, from the 4th century BC through the 1st century CE. In 625 CE, "Stele 9" was erected there in the Yucatec language of the Maya. Lamanai continued to be occupied up to the 17th century AD. During the Spanish conquest of Yucatán Spanish friars established two Roman Catholic churches here, but a Maya revolt drove the Spanish out. The site was subsequently incorporated by the British in British Honduras, passing with that colony's independence to Belize.

The vast majority of the site remained unexcavated until the mid-1970s. Archaeological work has concentrated on the investigation and restoration of the larger structures, most notably the Mask Temple, Jaguar Temple, and High Temple. The summit of this latter structure affords a view across the surrounding jungle to a nearby lagoon, part of New River.

A significant portion of the Temple of the Jaguar Masks remains under grassy earth or is covered in dense jungle growth. Fully excavated, it would be significantly taller than the High Temple. In the jaguar temple there is a legend that you can find an ancient spear called the heart of the jaguar, even though the temple got his name from the jaguar masks on each side.

The Maya ruins of Lamanai once belonged to a sizable Mayan city in the Orange Walk District of Belize. "Lamanai" comes from the Maya term for "submerged crocodile", a nod to the toothy reptiles who live along the banks of the New River. Lamanai Belize jungle brims with exotic birds, howler monkeys and hydrophilic iguanas. There is evidence on Mayan life that dates from about 1500 B.C. through Postclassic (A.D. 950-1544) and Spanish colonial times (A.D. 1544-1700)”.

Colin gave us much information about the ruins but I do not recall all of them and the above is a recap of much of what he said.

On completion of our tour, we had a delicious lunch which Colin had brought with him on the boat. Then after a short visit to the gifts shops, we re-boarded the boat for a high speed down-river trip back to our starting point. Kendris then took us back by road to Belize City giving us lots of information about the country and the political situation. During the journey we learned of a massive drug bust which had taken place a couple of nights ago when a plane landing on a remote airstrip was intercepted by the police who found $160m worth of drugs in board. This very morning a Belize Defence Forces helicopter had crashed near where the drug bust took place and the suspicion is that this was retribution by the drugs smugglers who may or may not have brought the helicopter down. Four of the BDF people were killed. This was obviously the main news story in this small country.

We decided that tonight was the night we would try the recommended restaurant Spooners so we walked along the road to the place, about 10 minutes away from the hotel but found it inexplicably closed on a Friday night at about 7 p.m. So we retraced our steps and ended up at 501 Hub the restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel where we had dinner and then retired to bed. Tomorrow will be a city day and we will visit the street art fair which will fill the center of town.