Mayan Ruins?

[PTPD2312]

Belize is one of the ports on our cruise and my wife really wants to see some Mayan ruins. Being a high school spanish teacher this really appeals to her. What ruins would you recommend and why? Thanks!

[ute_fan]

You might want to do a search for both Lamanai and Altun Ha. There's been a bunch of information posted on both of them in the last year or so. We've been to both and enjoyed both of them. I know there is at least one other Mayan ruin site, but I'm temporarily forgetting the name.

 

Lamanai is more of a full-day tour, combined with a river ride where you can see wildlife. Altun Ha is a smaller site, the ruins aren't as big, and you don't get the experience of climbing up the front of one of the ruins -- stairs have been added around the side that you can climb, but it's not the same experience. We took a bus ride to Altun Ha, so it ended up being quite a bit shorter trip, which gave us time to shop in the tourist village a little.

 

They both have their strong points, so I'd search for additional information before you decide.

[Binney]

Since I got to pick the excursion at this port, I chose the trip to Xunantunich. I checked it out and parts are still being excavated...but it looks great, particularly the western friese.

[ute_fan]

Xunantunich is the one I forgot the name of -- haven't been there yet. We did have someone else from our roll call go there, and they really enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I don't have any details. When we went to Lamanai, we had our young-adult age kids with us, and they really wanted to do the river trip that goes along with Lamanai. Otherwise, we might very possibly have gone to Xunzantunich.

 

All the more reason to go back to Belize eventually :D .

[rwilymz]

My wife and I did the altun ha/belize bus tour last may [2005]. We weren't that impressed. First, you can't get to altun ha without driving through the city. They simply called the drive from the dock to the edge of town a tour. Here are the highlights: there's the city park, a few embassies [only the US embassy is not an old colonial house], and that house is where the prime minister lives; his brother runs the country's cable TV service...

 

The meztizo guide [i think that's what he called himself] was, frankly, a racist. Not your typical US racist, but a Belizi racist. People were either mayan, or they were spaniard-mayan [meztizo], or they were black-mayan, or etc. The black-mayans lived in the cities and they were unacceptible, though he made certain to compliment them on their attempt to learn the national culture. ...a school field trip showed up at the site just after we did. He spent what seemed like half his speech describing how the horrible Spanish decimated the mayan culture by torching the codeces. All that mayan technology was lost for posterity...

 

Um ... what mayan "technology"? They had a civilization, and math, but very little to show for it. Not even a wheel. Burning their scrolls was bad for the loss of culture; technology wasn't affected.

 

Much more interesting to me was watching the people on the road to altun ha. They really love their bus stops down there. They're built better than the houses -- which invariably had an emaciated horse tied up to a porch post. And the grafitti. For the first half of the drive, the bus stops had slogans praising one guy [Hugo?], and the second half slogans praising another. "Hugo is love", "Sam Saves". That is what I want to know the story behind.

 

The ruins were interesting; I like that sorta thing. My wife did it because she knows I like historic stuff. But the presentation was tedious, and the racist overtones made us fairly uncomfortable.

[ute_fan]

Just a different point of view. Maybe we were just lucky, but the tour guides that we had for both Altun Ha and Lamanai were great. We had a fairly young girl for our Altun Ha trip. We enjoyed her as she obviously had great pride for her country and shared quite a bit of interesting historical information with us, prior to reaching the ruins. After our tours to Cozumel (actually went over to Tulum) and Roatan, where we felt like the guides were only interested in their tips, we found her attitude very refreshing. Her english was excellent and she was great!

 

Our tour guide to Lamanai was an older gentlemen, whose English was a little harder to understand (definite Spanish accent), but he also did a very good job. We enjoyed the drive through the Belizean countryside, and his efforts in pointing out birds/wildlife on the river trip were excellent.

 

It really is amazing the influence that a good or bad tour guide can have on your trip, isn't it?

[rwilymz]

It really is amazing the influence that a good or bad tour guide can have on your trip, isn't it?

 

Cerveza. He needed to sell cerveza. :D