Today began the summer I was hoping I would have. We went to the archaeological ruins of Caracol, which was a Mayan city-state from 30BC till 1100AD. The ruins were amazing. We hiked to top of the tallest building in Belize, and got to look out over the canopy and the ruins. It was beautiful and we saw some amazing things including a weird desiccated mollusk, oropendula birds (computer birds commonly because of the crazy weird computer glitch sound they make when they call), and a lot of very large Mayan stone stairs.

I saw a golden silk spider. It was slightly smaller than they can get and had a web were several other spiders were also building their own webs. I saw several tarantula holes as well. The highlight of the arachnid sightings, however, was definitely the slender brown scorpion someone found in the men’s bathroom by the picnic tables. It had venom dripping out of its stinger!

(Golden silk weaver)

After the ruins we drove back toward the Rio On pools with the intention of swimming after the incredible heat at Caracol. However, our van had other plans. Its transmission was acting funny and it was unhappy in every gear the driver put it in, so we stopped at the Tapir military check point (barely making it there even) and checked the transmission. There was no transmission fluid in the van at all, and it was definitely not going to make it to the pools, much less to the pools and then back to Las Cuevas. Instead, we all piled our bags into the back of two pickup trucks with us sitting inside the trucks and on top of the bags. I, of course, opted to be in the back of the truck for the ensuing bumpy ride to the station.

I learned a very cool trick for finding spiders at night which lead me to find hundreds of wolf spiders and a few red rump tarantulas. If you shine your headlamp you can see their eyes in the dark reflecting back with yellow iridescence.

My hair is now a very crusty texture due to all the dust and sweat from the day, and I did not bring shampoo. It’s shaping up to be one of the best summers of my life.