Today we left the lovely TEC to journey into the Chiquibul rainforest! We had a long and bumpy car ride through the capital city Belmopan through the Maya Mountains, to our first stop: the Caracol Archeological Reserve! As someone who is also majoring in anthropology/archeology, this visit was so insanely cool! We saw multiple different plazas, ballcourts, and complexes, and got to walk up and explore one of the large stone structures, the top of which is the highest manmade point in Belize! The view was so vast and impressive! We also saw these enormous ceiba trees which had giant buttresses and intertwining roots. 

I also saw the first signs of my rainforest taxa which are arachnids! While we were at the site, there were a few dark and moist recesses in the stone walls, where we just barely spotted a tailless whip scorpion ! These dudes look pretty freaky, but they are non venomous and won’t hurt you. They usually like living in caves, so I wasn’t expecting to see any until our last day spelunking adventure! 

After this visit, we made another long car ride to Las Cuevas Research Station. We had a short orientation to the site, but spent most of our time last night doing lectures so we haven’t really gotten to explore yet. That’s for tomorrow’s adventure!