Saturday, January 26, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
A View from Singapore (videocast)
This is my first video podcast -- ever! Utterz makes it so easy, its great!
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008
No Laos
On the difficulties of finding a weekend getaway package from Singapore to Laos. (Photo of alcoholic beverages sold in Laos at the Golden Triangle taken in 2005; Creative Commons copyright by Alan A. Lew, non-commerical, attribution, share-alike)
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Friday, January 11, 2008
Theravadin Buddhist Wake
On my way to this Buddhist wake (ceremony for a deceased person), I heard The Enlightment Podcast episode that discussed the formal steps for becoming a Buddhist. At the wake I had a booklet for the chanting we did in both Pali (I think) and English. Most the the earlier chantings were the same as was discussed in the Englightenment Podcast: taking refuge in the Bhudda, the Dharma (teaching), and the Songha (community). In addition to the Sri Lankan priest, there were seven of us participating in this ceremony.
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Wednesday, January 09, 2008
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Final Day in San Pedro, Belize
Photo of our golf cart
Photo of the toll bridge that connects San Pedro to the northern parts of Ambergris Caye
Photo of a "Super Store" in the southern residential area of San Pedro[All photos on this blog are taken by Alan A. Lew and are released with a Creative Common Copyright: non-commerical use only, attribution required, share alike required]
Friday, January 04, 2008
Lamanai Mayan Adventure - Wet, Bumpy and Howling
Photo of sunrise at our resort pier -- the morning started out looking better than the day before, but read on...
Photo of storks standing high in a tree by the river's edge.
Menonite farm in Belize.
Photo of a jaguar face on the bottom front of the Jaguar Temple, which was still actively used when the Spanish arrived in teh 16th c.
Photo of the Lamanai High Temple - the tallest structure in the pre-Classical (prior to 300 C.E.) Mayan period.
[All photos on this blog were taken by Alan A. Lew and released under a Creative Commons Copyright: non-commercial use, attribution required, share-alike copyrighting required]
One thing that you cannot count on when on a vacation is the weather. At least it was not raining today, but that does not mean that I did not get cold and wet!
We set our alarm for 6 a.m. for a 6:30 a.m. pickup for our Lamanai tour. A boat pulled up at about 6:15 and so I went ahead to see if it was our boat. It was dropping of a family of six from Omaha, Nebraska who were staying at Tranquility Bay – the northernmost resort on Ambergris Caye (about 13 miles north of us). We were to spend the rest of the day with them, and a young couple from Canada from our resort.
The weather looked promising. It was mostly cloudy with breaks of blue sky here and there. And it was not raining. We were finally picked up at about 6:50 a.m.
The ride to the mainland took almost two hours, including a stop at their pier in San Pedro, and was incredibly cold and windy. The storm wind was causing larger than normal waves that splashed most of us on our relatively small boat. I think that only the people at the front of the boat did not get splashed, though they did get their tennis shoes wet and felt more of the boat bumping against the waves. Most of those on the boat sat backwards to block the wind and spray with their backs. We wore sandals instead of tennis shoes, which might have made our feet even colder. At least we were smart enough to wear long jeans and coats.
Some parts were more smooth than others, and our smaller boat tried to follow in the wake of a larger Searious boat that was on the same tour, but with well over 20 people on board. Still, it was a very long and very cold ride.
When we reached the Belize River we were given small sandwiches and fruit for breakfast. We made our way up the river a ways, then transferred out two Searious boats to a single bus. There was a restroom stop that almost everyone took before boarding the bus.
One of the highlights of the bus ride was a stop to see a very large aligator in a marsh by the side of the road. It turned out that the alligator had a large turtle in its mouth (a photo of this is below). Several times it jerked its head back and took another crunch on the turtle’s shell. The turtle’s head stuck out of the side at one point. I got several photos with the super zoom lens (18-250mm/28-325mm) on my new Pentax SLR. It was definitely a Wild Kingdom moment.
We also passed a police checkpoint, though we did not stop. The guide said that they were mostly looking for drugs. We were driving on the one of the major highways in Belize. It was not a very wide road, and there were no center stripes, and not many vehicles as we got further from the outskirts of Belize City.
The bus ride was another 45 minutes or so to the New River where we made another restroom stop before our bus load of people boarded three boats to continue on to Lamanai. Each boat has a new guide to take us up the winding river to Lamanai. Our guide was very knowledgeable about the river’s wildlife and the Mayan site. We saw a baby crocodile and a lot of different birds along the river banks. Although the river was very smooth, I was still very cold because I was wet, and because the sun was behind clouds.
The Lamanai site is on the banks of a large lagoon (about 3 miles long x 1 mile wide) that forms the headwaters of the New River. The water actually originates in the Mayan Mountains in the southern part of Belize, which at 3,000 ft high receive the most precipitation in the country (>160 inches/yr). The water percolates through underground limestone and rises from natural springs at this lagoon.
Lamanai once had a population of 60,000 people and the site has been continuously occupied for some 3000 year – making one of the oldest of all the Mayan settlements. The High Temple (pyramid), which were able to climb, was the tallest pre-classical (pre-300 CE) structure in the Mayan world, and has been there since 200 BCE. The Jaguar temple was still being used by local Mayans when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s. The Spanish twice tried to “convert” Lamanai (attack them and force them to become Christians), but failed each time.
We had a really good lunch and then walked through the jungle (actually a dense mix of deciduous, conifer and tropical trees). Chynna and I climbed to the top of the High Temple for a spectacular view of almost the entire country of Belize. We also saw howler monkeys and our guide was good at imitating their howl and getting one to howl back. I hope my audio recording of that turned out. Only a few of many hundreds of buildings on the Lamanai site have been excavated. The others stand as small and large mounds covered by vegetation.
It was a really fascinating experience that everyone deeply enjoyed. This was our first visit to a Mayan site and I found it fascinating. There was one college student who I was talking to and on the boat ride back he was telling his partner (not sure if they were married) that he was thinking of changing his major from communications to archeology.
(You can read more about Lamanai online.)
We had a short stop at the restrooms and gift shops. One gift shop was run by a local village, and another was run by a women’s arts and crafts group. We then got back on the boat and traced our way back the way we came. Our guide was a major source of entertainment on the bus ride back, telling jokes and riddles and games. I had was sitting up front with my headphones on listening to podcasts, so I did not catch much of what he was saying.
The boat ride back after the bus only took one hour (instead of two like in the morning) because the took a more direct, and much more bumpy, route. The wind was still very strong and there was an occasional drizzle, but we did not get splashed on much and the air temperature was a little warmer. Skylan and I both had aching backs by the time we got to the resort, though we were not as wet as in the morning.
One of the major disadvantages of being on Ambergris Caye is that all of the tours involve boat trips, and those to the mainland require crossing the more choppy parts of the Belize lagoon. (If you are rich enough, you can fly to the mainland.) Of course the older the tourists are, the more difficult such a trip would be.
Photo of an aligator eating a large turtle -- taken from our bus window.
Belize Howler Monkey
Can you tell which sound is the howler monkey and which is the guide's call? - This was recorded that the Lamanai Mayan site in Belize. A full blog about this can be found at http://travelography2.blogspot.com/ (sometime after soon as blogger.com is back up)
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Thursday, January 03, 2008
It Was A Dark and Stormy Night (and Day) in Belize - January 2, 2008
I was woken several times over night either by rain beating against our windows, or by the wind. At about 4am on Wednesday (2 January 2008) there was a lull in the rain and I went out to bring in a couple clothes items that were hanging by clothespins to dry on the hammock. I was afraid that they may have blown away.
At 6:30am the wind and rain were still pounding away. This was unusual as all of the previous squalls like this only lasted an hour, more or less. Someone came by our unit at about 7:30 to see if we had booked a fishing tour. I saw about 10 people eventually make their way in rain gear to the pier for that fishing trip.
At about 8am I went down to see if my scuba dive was going to take place. It was raining lightly and blowing hard. The front desk said that the dive people had called and cancelled the dive trip. I went back and got my computer so I could just hang out in the lobby and get my blog site up. Fortunately, the internet was a lot faster today than last time. A lot of people were checking the weather forecast on the public computer in the lobby, and the tour booking person was busy rescheduling tour, as well as booking new tours for people who had just arrived the day before.
I noticed a couple filling out a form, which I guessed was for their sale pitch meeting, and so I asked if we could move our sale talk from Friday to today. We were changed to 11am today, which included lunch for the four of us.
I had a hamburger for lunch and our sales person joined us. She said that the Sunchaser timeshare group (which has 14 resorts in Canada, Hawaii, and Mexico/Central America/Caribbean) was having a membership campaign, which is why we saw this resort available as an Interval International Getaway week several months ago. Following the typical timeshare sales pitch, she asked us where we had vacationed, where we would like to vacation, if we saw ourselves vacationing well into the future, and what our dream vacation was.
They all ask these same questions, then try to fit their resort into your dream and future vacations. Unlike other sales pitches that we have experiences, she included the kids in the discussion and asked them questions like those above, as well.
She also showed us a pyramid that had beach resorts at the top (highest demand and easiest to exchange), mountain resorts in the middle, and inland resorts at the bottom (lowest demand and hardest to exchange). And she repeatedly commented on the second longest barrier reef in the world and the low supply and high demand for timeshares on Ambergris Caye.
She commented that the sales are low key here at Costa Maya Reef Resort and asked if we were interested in the resort. I said no and she said that she was required to go over the purchasing options, which she did quickly. She also said that about 35% of the people she talks to ends up buying into the timeshare.
At one point I mentioned that I was more interested in reducing the number of weeks that we own (currently 2) and she mentioned that she could buy one of our weeks for $1000 to $2000, which they would then sell to a wholesaler. I found that interesting and may look for a wholesaler myself. Alternatively, I was thinking that if we could sell what we have now for a timeshare in San Francisco, that would be the ideal situation for me, since I could easily visit that city for a week every couple of years.
The entire pitch took 90 minutes, including lunch. That was pretty good, as in most other resorts, 90 minutes means 2 hours. And we have had some incredibly high pressure sales pitches in the past. In fact, I often will not do them no matter what the offer they make.
The rains had completely stopped by late morning, but the winds were strong all day, the sky was completely overcast, and the temperatures on mild to cool. We pretty much stayed inside for most of the afternoon, though I did convince Mable to get a couple of bikes to go for a bike ride on the beach later in the afternoon. We rode about a half mile down the beach to the next resort, and then about a half mile up the beach to the next resort.
We saw a wide range of different levels and forms of development, including abandoned and storm damaged buildings, quite a few fancy private homes of different styles (some with thatched roofs), and several completely undeveloped parcels. Most had narrow sea frontage, while extending back quite a ways to the main road. We were advised not to take the main road because of its poor condition during the rainy season. They expect to have the road paved all the way to San Pedro by next year sometime.
The Trade Winds that had been blowing since we arrived were an onshore wind, blowing from east to west. The winds with this storm were blowing offshore from west to east, which tells me that it may be from a low pressure system to the north of us. Last night was cold – the first time we needed blankets.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
An Afternoon Day in San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, Belize - January 1, 2008
Photo of one of the maps of San Pedro that are found all over town, with different art. It would be hard to get lost in this three-street town (Front Street, Middle Street and Back Street).
Photo of Front Street in San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, Belize.(All photos are by Alan A. Lew and are released under a Creative Commons copyright, non-commercial, attribution, share-alike.)
Tuesday, January 1st, was a down day for us. We were pretty wiped out by the manatee tour and slept in and rested in the morning. One of our issues was our departure flight on Saturday, which leaves at 8am from San Pedro. We had booked a water taxi for Saturday at 7am (no regular ferries run early enough for us), but another option that we thought of was to spend Friday night in San Pedro in a hotel near the airport. To check out this option, we decided to go to San Pedro yesterday afternoon.
There are three options to go to San Pedro from the Costa Maya Resort. The most frequent is the Island Ferry that runs every two hours from 7:45am to 2:45am. That costs US$25/round trip. The second option is a Costa Maya Resort boat that goes to San Pedro at 1pm and returns at 4pm for US$10/round trip. The third option is to order a water taxi that would cost about $50 one way. We took the resort boat (cheapest) and spent 2.5 hours walking around town.
Being New Year’s Day, San Pedro was a bit slower than it was the first day we arrived, which was nice. Some, but not all, of the gift shops and food places were closed, and there were a lot fewer golf carts to dodge on the roads.
The main objective was to see if there was a hotel near the airport that we could spend Friday night at. But first I went to find a golf cart rental near the pier where we will be dropped off on Friday. I found Polo’s rentals, as well as Polo’s gift shop, both of which were located at the dead end of Front Street. (The street’s real name is something else, but everyone calls it Front Street.)
The gift shop was really good and we bought several items there, including a hat for me and a large bag for Mable’s taekwando supplies. The one thing that did not have was bottles of different kinds of Belizean hot sauces, which we wanted to take back with us. We found those at another store.
We also went to the Searious Tours to pick up some t-shirts. The American Jerk that I mentioned yesterday kept saying that he wanted his free t-shirt, and telling everyone else that the one of the local brochures said that we were supposed to get free t-shirts. At the end of our manatee tour he went into the tour shop while we were temporarily docked there and came back with a t-shirt.
Well the night before I was looking at a booklet for hotels in San Pedro and I saw the advertisement he was talking about. Except that is said to bring the coupon to get a free t-shirt with a booking. This particular booklet was given to us by Tropic Air (four copies, one for each of us), so we had four coupons, and they happily gave us four t-shirts.
Searious was near the airport so we next checked out the hotels. There were actually five of them near the airport, two just north of the airport, on across the street, and two just south of the airport (but still within easy walking distance). Starting north, the first place (the Holiday Hotel) had a room available for US$161. The second place (Ruby’s) was full. The Sea Breeze was across the street from the airport, but they required that we take two rooms (2 persons in each) at about US$160+ per room.
The fourth hotel was Steve and Becky’s Cute Little Hotel. It was a very nice, but we could not find a front desk. Son we went across the street to Ramon’s Village, which we found out also owned Steve and Becky’s. Ramon’s was quite pricey, but we both likes Steve and Beckie’s where we could get a bungalow house for the four of us for under US$200 including tax. So we decided to do that.
We then made our way back north through town. We stopped for some ice cream and at a grocery store near the pier. The boat left on time at 4pm for the 15+ minute ride back to our resort.
On the boat ride back we talked to a young couple from Tucson, Arizona who were on their honeymoon and an older couple from Walnut Creek, California. For dinner we had rice, canned corn beef, and cabbage. It tasted good.
Happy New Year from Belize
photo: Snorkeling with manta rays on New Years Eve off Caye Caulker, Belize.
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Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Manatee-Goff's Caye Snorkel-Manta Ray-Caye Caulker Tour - 31 December 2007
Photo of the ranger house at the Manatee Reserve where we paid our US$5 entry fee.
Photo of Goff's Caye, a 1.2 acre island and playground for tourists. Note the box-like toilet structure on the right side.
Photo of Manta Ray at the Caye Caulker Ray and Shark Alley. (I may upload a video when I get back home to a faster internet.)
Photo of busy traffic on the main street of Caye Caulker.=====================
I am writing on January 1, 2008 - Happy New Year!
Events on December 31, 2007
Another day of a lot of sun. I currently have 520 photos and videos from our first three days in Belize. We took over 300 more that I deleted. Today is a day of rest, after our first two days full of activities, though we are planning to do a bike ride and some fishing with Kirk this afternoon.
Yesterday (31 December), we did the Manatee-Snorkeling-Manta Ray-Caye Caulker tour. It started with an 8:15 pickup by boat. We were the first two be picked up, being the farthest north of San Pedro and our destinations. Eventually we had 28 people (all from the US) and 3 guides on our small speed boat. We had to pay a US$5/person park fee for each of the three parks that we were visiting that day.
The American Jerk: There was one guy who we picked up who insisted that he had to be back by 4pm for an important game (!?!?!), which actually was at 5pm he later said. The boat’s driver told him it was going to be a long day, probably 5:30pm. He put him on the phone to talk to his boss and this guy would absolutely not take no for an answer – what a jerk! He finally got the boss to agree to tell the boat driver to try and leave about 20 minutes early. (He was also complaining about having a full boat of people, though one of the guides had told us before we picked him up that this was their high season when they make most of their money.)
At the end of the day we had about 40 minutes to walk around Caye Caulker, returning to the boat at 4:30pm. We were a few minutes late, and several people were much later than that. This guy who needed to be back at 4pm was one of the last to get back to the boat! We got back to our resort – the last one – at after 6pm.
So it was a 55 minute ride from the south end of Ambergris Caye to the Swallow Caye Manatee Nature Preserve. On the way we passed many large and small islands surrounded by mangrove swamps, and some that simply consisted of a house on a sandbar. Most of these houses were only used during the lobster season. Belize is one f the top suppliers (it may the leading one) of lobster to Europe. We stopped at a small hut on stilts where the boatmen paid our entrance fee to the manatee reserve.
Looking for manatee is lot like looking for whales, which I have only done twice before (in Venture, California and on Maui, Hawaii). The first half hour we saw nothing. The guides told us to remove our shoes so as not to make boat noise that would scare them away. They used a wooden pole to maneuver us in several different locations as we scanned the water for a manatee coming to the surface to breath. They used to allow people to swim or dive with manatees, but they found that their reproduction dropped when they did this.
After at least 30 minutes and several location passed when we saw our first manatee. The photo I got of that one was actually the best head shot that I had of the manatee. We saw several other heads rise out of the water for air (which they do about every 5 minutes), and a couple of tails at the surface. One was just off the front side of our boat. That was about it. Not nearly as dramatic as the video that was shown at the resort orientation meeting on Sunday, nor the photos that promote this tour. Still, it was better than the whale watching experiences that I have had in the past.
We then headed out east for about 30 minutes to Goff’s Caye, a 1.2 acre island that receives about 500 visitors a week, mostly from cruise ships that dock on larger nearby islands. Two people were parasailing when we approached, and there were a couple f catamarans anchored off the island. Several people headed for a floating restroom, which looked like a large, square submarine. A couple of guides took most of us (not all) out to the attached coral reef while the third oversaw the cooking of our lunch by some guys on the island.
The reef here was very shallow, mostly less than 5 feet deep. In fact, all of the Belize lagoon between the outer reefs and Belize City is less than 15 feet deep (according to our guide), except for the dredged deep see ship lane. One person on the boat had the Olympus compact camera that is good to 15 feet under water without a case – so he could take it anywhere here. Someone else had the same camera that I had with the same case, and someone else had a much larger camera with an underwater case.
Because there were some 20 people snorkeling together in a shallow area quite a lot of sand got kicked up, and although there were lot of fish, many were hiding from our mob. Skylan was having problems with his mask getting water in it, and snorkel falling off its clip, so I traded with him at one point. Chynna wisely stayed close to our guide while I helped Skylan get set up.
After awhile, the kids went back to the boat with most of the rest of group, while I stayed with the guide and a couple of other people to snorkel back to the island. That was a bit nicer, though the guide pointed out that all the grey rock-like objects were dead coral from coral bleaching (caused by overly warm waters – global warming).
For lunch we had BBQ chicken, pasta, vegetables, curried potatoes and chocolate and rum muffin or coconut macaroon cup desert. After lunch we headed to the Caulker Caye shark and ray alley, another 30 minute speed boat ride through choppy waters. On the way we passed two cruise shipping docking spots and a private island with a golf course on it. That island is currently for sale for about US$90 million.
We stopped at a tiny island with about four houses on it and about 8 dogs, where we bought some fish to feed the rays and sharks. There were several other boats at the shark and ray alley when we go there, and there were no sharks, just rays. And a lot of them, drawn by the food. I got some good photos and a couple of great videos. At one point I held on to the boat’s anchor rope and put my feet on the backs of the rays below – which were very slippery.
We then headed over to Caye Caulker where we found Chan’s Fast Food (the fried chicken smelled great), but since we had so little time, choose to just buy food to bring back at Chan’s grocery store. I also finally found Belize hat pins in the one gift shop we went into (yay!!!).
Caye Caulker is a small community of less than 2000 with two dirt roads and a lot of tourist oriented businesses. It seems as though every fourth shop was selling manatee tours. The pace is definitely slower than San Pedro, though we barely had time to soak up the atmosphere before we had the meet the boat at the northern tip of town, near the Lazy Lizard – a combination bar, dance joint (reggae music on the roof) and swimming spot (with people diving off a boat permanently anchored on one side of the bar).
Once everyone was back on the boat we made an unplanned stop at the Belizean Seahorse Park on the back (west) side of Caye Caulker, where our guide placed a large (>6 inch) seahorse into a jar for us to see. We also saw a crab eating a fish off the side of the boat.
Tour boat social dynamics are interesting, especially when you have so many people huddle on a small speed boat. The range of personalities is considerable, from the most gregarious and vocal, to the most quiet. I am sure that every group is different, and on this trip there were three very vocal women and two very vocal men at one end of the extreme. There were quite a few more of us at the quiet end of the extreme, including my family and two couples. Then there was the middle, which I think included most everyone else. Most everyone drank alcohol (beer and rum punch), except I think all of those at the quiet end of the spectrum.
Of those that we had heard, most were quite wealthy, in construction and finance. By the end of the trip several of the more vocal participants had plans to meet up for a New Year’s party later that evening.
There are clearly many expected standards of behavior that reflect the shared values of this white, upper middle class American tourist. It is OK to be loud and boisterous -- an is actually encouraged by the guides/crew. With the small quarter on the boat, however, people were respectful of each others space, which was made more possible by the loud noise (engine, wind and waves) when moving from one location to the next -- the American jerk, that I mentioned above, did cross that line when he first got on the boat. Several people mentioned his behavior when he got off the boat at about 6+ pm. Apparently his wife told someone that he does that all the time, but does not always get his way. Someone else mentioned that despite that outburst, he turned out OK and did not complain about getting back much later than he had wished.
My initial impression, influenced by the more vocal tour participants, was that the Cayes (coral islands) of Belize were little more than a place for Americans to drink and party. No doubt that is a big part of the whole Caribbean sun, sand and surf experience. But not for everyone. This particular trip drew the animal lovers (for manatees and rays), more than some other might (like zip-lining). Our Thursday trip will draw the historical and cultural crowd, as we visit Mayan ruins and a river village. So it could be an interesting comparison.