Belize

I landed in the Belize City airport, which is all the way on the coast. From there it’s only about a two hour drive to our camp, which is all the way across the country on the Guatemalan border. On the way over we passed Belmopan, the country’s capital. We also drove through San Ignacio, the closest town, which is about 30 minutes from the campsite.

There’s not much of a language barrier here because English is the national language and just about everyone speaks it. I still get to practice my Spanish though, because most of the local people who work on the project speak it. There are also still modern Mayan languages being spoken in our area, as well as a Belizean Creole, which is a mixture of English and Caribbean and African languages.

As for the weather, it was definitely really hot for the first few days I was here. Not only does the sun feel hotter closer to the equator, but I swear it looks bigger too. That means we have really pretty sunsets, though. It’s their rainy season right now, so luckily when we started working on Thursday and Friday it was cloudy and much cooler, with rain on and off all day.

There’s LOTS of wildlife here. Especially lots of varieties of bugs, but also toucans and other tropical birds, lizards and iguanas, bats, frogs, and monkeys. We can hear the howler monkeys every day at the site and every now and then from camp, too, and spoiler alert: it is not a cute noise. The first time we heard two troops howling back and forth at each other we said it sounded like Jurassic Park, and that’s pretty accurate. There’s no fun hooting, it’s just this low-pitched raspy screaming. Not what I expected! (Edit: apparently howler monkey noises actually were used in the Jurassic Park movies for some of the dinosaurs!)

Fun fact about Belize to finish off my post: they still have Queen Elizabeth on their money from when Belize was British Honduras. Maybe that’s a not-so-fun fact because like, colonialism, yikes. But regardless I’ve been learning a lot since I got here!