To Lamanai on the New River

It's ten in the morning, and already the thermometer shows 28 degrees, which is a very pleasant temperature if you're sitting on a shady rooftop terrace. This will be a day of relaxation, a good opportunity to tell about the trip to Lamanai. It's hard to believe that it was only the day before yesterday.

Water lily, sacred flower of the Maya, a sign of royalty

 As promised we were picked up at our hotel at nine in the morning. Our landlady had sent us back to our room an hour earlier, asking, 'What time is it for you?' Strange question – until she told us that it was an hour earlier: Mexico and Belize don't have the same time. Our guide Amir took us and another couple already waiting in the pickup to the dock just outside of town where we were joined by five more people some time later. The New River is the longest river entirely confined to Belize. Just east of Lamanai it also forms the New River Lagoon, the largest body of fresh water in Belize. We were about to experience it in the best possible way: a one and a half hour boat ride through the jungle. Our knowledgeable guide Amir had grown up and lived all his life on this river. Proudly talking about his Mayan heritage he was happy to share what he knew. 

Dense growth borders the river, fairly high after the rainy season but still very calm, on both sides for the first part of the trip. We went at a good speed, but every once in a while Amir, always on the lookout for something interesting, slowed the boat right down and pointed something out to us. Usually it still took us quite a while to find what he had noticed in passing. Soon we stopped for a green kingfisher sitting on a log. A flash of emerald, it disappeared in the river after a moment. A young crocodile resting on the bank was next. To us it looked fairly big, but he said it would grow six times its size from its current two feet (60cm) in length. 

Many different epiphytes crowded the trees, ferns, bromeliads and even cacti, like this snake cactus for instance. 

Amir showed us three tiny bats on a tree trunk, so perfectly camouflaged that it took us a long time to discern them from the bark, an Anhinga, also called snake bird, moving its long neck and beak in snakelike fashion, and mangrove swallows, like the bats working on the mosquito population. There was the Jesus lizard, a medium sized black lizard who gets his name because he lifts up on his hind legs and walks across the water, and Jesus birds – not sure how they got their name. The females take a male, lay eggs and disappear to look for another male, leaving each male to look after the brood. They do that with up to four males at a time. We saw a yellow-crowned night heron and a great blue heron, the latter familiar to us from both Canada and Germany, and a Limpkin bird, according to Amir a bird that is not related to any other bird. 

Not only the fauna was varied and interesting, the flora was beautiful as well: the exquisite water lilies, their dainty white petals enclosing the yellow centre, fringed leaves stepping pads for small wading birds or turned upright like sails, showing their red underside, lined the banks; we were introduced to the bullet tree, its wood so hard that you can't drive a nail into it, and it doesn't float, and the logwood tree from which the Maya already derived a beautiful dye, and which would become an important industry for Spain and England: the indigo dye, somewhere between blue and purple, made it possible to have colourfast alternatives to the drab beige/brown, black and grey garments of the middle ages. 

After about an hour we entered a more open area, obviously used for agriculture: cattle were grazing in fenced pastures, sugar cane and other crops were growing in the distance. We had reached the Mennonite community of Shipyard. These Mennonites live in a very traditional way, moving through the countryside with horse and wagon, mostly without the use of either machinery or power, though not all adhere to these customs: we saw solar panels, for instance, frowned upon by the community at large, as Amir told us. They produce crops and vegetables for the local market. Since they don't generally own trucks they only grow the sugar cane, for instance, and have it harvested by people from the area with pickups or other trucks. There are several groups of Mennonites in Belize, of different ethnicities and varying by their religious beliefs as well. The Shipyard Mennonites, I just read, are more traditional than the ones living in Northern Belize, but less so than some other communities. Women are dressed in dark clothing with black kerchiefs, and men wear their beards long. Children are often almost white blond, as we could see on several occasions.

A half hour after passing Shipyard, the land for a while swampy and relatively open, we reached our destination, the Maya ruins of Lamanai. Amir pointed out a group of bigger boats: passengers from cruise ships that land in Belize City and arrive from the other side of Lamanai. He suggested to have a look at the small museum on site first, then eat our lunch which he and his helper had brought along. By then, he surmised, the big groups would be through, and we could have the place largely to ourselves.

Black Orchid, the national flower of Belize