Day 30: The most fun project expedition ever!

Yesterday we took the last (sad!) of our project excursions, and it was amazing! We visited the ancient Maya site of Caracol, which is one of the most powerful Maya sites and likely responsible for the Tikal Hiatus...which means they, maybe with the help of another site, Calakmul (I'm sure that spelling is wrong), actually defeated and ruled over Tikal for about a hundred years. So they're important. Caracol is actually the largest site in Belize, and both of our professors actually excavated there when they were students, which makes it really cool to take a tour of the site from them. But more on that later. We did so many other awesome things!

The ride getting there was half the fun. Caracol is about two hours south of San Ignacio, and the roads to it run through natural and archaeological reserves and are generally unpaved. Actually, they're bad enough that we couldn't even take our intrepid schoolbus, which has been through a lot going to the site every day. Which meant we rode all the way there in the back of pickup trucks! It's definitely not the tidy way to travel--between the dirt road dust and the rain we got pretty filthy--but it is by far the most entertaining. Most Belizean trucks have a frame built into the bed so that you can stand up behind the cab or hold on to bars along the outside edge. If you ever find yourself in such a truck, stand. It feels like you're riding the world's fastest skateboard or something. Combine that with bracing yourself for bumps and dodging vines and branches and you have yourself a really good time. We swashbuckled.

Caracol itself was, of course, incredible. The coolest part is that there were a TON of well-preserved monuments at the site, complete with glyphs and iconography, so we can actually know relatively a lot about the site. Picture time!

Climbing to the top of one of the temples. We look like ants!

In a collapsed room. There were also excavated tombs and things, which was super cool!

After Caracol, though, was the best part. Sam and Dr. Morris took us to the Rio Frio cave, which was INCREDIBLE. It's basically one giant cavern, but when I say giant I mean that movie theaters could probably fit inside of it. Plus, water runs through it, and it's gorgeous, and I loved it. But none of my pictures came out at all, so you'll have to imagine.
THEN, they took us to these amazing waterfall things that were actually basically natural waterslides that were SUPERFUN and AWESOME and can only be described through pictures.
Love you!
Elise