Today was a day of travel, enjoyable conversations, and relative luxury at our tourist hotel.

Jeff Boschert, the father of one of the students on this trip, made a shout out to our class on the intercom before he performed take-off on the Southwest flight taking us from Houston to Belize City. Upon arrival, we went through the typical process of entering another country: declaration of goods, going through immigration, and packing and loading up on a bus. Edward, a local driver, takes us and our baggages (in an attached trailer) on the Western Highway, outside of Belize City, to the place we are staying at tonight, Crystal Paradise Hotel. Upon arrival and settling in to our rooms, we had delicious dinners of tostada, vegetable curry, rice, cooked plantain and chocolate cake.

As far as scientific endeavors go, we spotted cicadas, ants, moths, palm trees, a cartoon bee, cactus, and too much life to describe. As I am sitting inside right now, to avoid bug bites, I hear the sound of crickets, cicadas, and other animals I know not the name of. Still, I found a very obvious vinegery-smell in the pheromone of a large ant I saw working on devouring a beetle. I also learned that a cicada is a true bug because it is an arthropod with sharp sucking mouth parts. The next few days’ blog post, I can predict, will be heavier with species identification especially since that was not our focus today.

As I enter and exit from recollections of today, I am struck by the images of fires we saw, both from the airplane and in our van. Large clouds of smoke emanated from the distance, and sometimes they were up close. As far as I can tell, they all occurred in the Savannah ecosystem, some leaving blackened trunks on palm trees. I wonder what are the uses of these fires, whether they are wild or controlled, sparked by lightning, cigarettes, or a torch. Claire said that some people practice the slash and burn farming strategy, whereby plants are reduced to ashes so they may enter the soil as useful nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, quicker than they would if they had decomposed naturally. Whereas the rainforest can flourish on soils that are not rich in nutrients, human crops usually rely on rich soil for their growth.