Today was definitely a day of travel, from Crystal Paradise, to Caracol (a Mayan ruins) and then to Las Cuevas.

On the road we kept seeing animals we weren’t exactly experts on. Our guide described the animals we saw on the road side as we drove through urban and rural Belize: free-range dogs, free-range chickens, horses, dairy and beef cattle. There were trails on the side of the road for horse riders, and also cattle just hanging out. Dogs in Belize are kept as kept as pets, but not usually as indoor pets. Most owners feed their dogs in the day and at night, but either keep them on a leash in the yard or let them freely roam if they’re in a rural area.

At Rio on Pools (which translates to River on Pool) we encountered leeches that none of us expected to. When we found them on our skins and inside our swimwear. If left undisturbed, they would chew an opening into our bloodstream and feed on our blood until they expand and grow circular. Because of the pain-killers they release when they chew into human skin, they can be undetectable to us. Also, amidst natural water slides formed by granite and water,

At Caracol, we walked through the ruins that were the housing, playing grounds, and political meeting places for the Mayans. Before they abandoned this site, a whole kingdom met periodically in a rectangular plaza to hear the announcement of a king. The construction of the plaza reflected this purpose, where a hushed whisper from one of the pyramids can be heard in the plaza hundreds of feet away clearly and loudly.

Now in the abandoned plaza, a species of Stingless bee live in 30+ mounds that are evidence of underground nests and tunnels. These bees do not have a different castes, whereby one’s job may be to reproduce or to collect nectar, and live in small colonies no larger than 10-20.