Okay, nice title, but I cannot take credit for it, we saw it on t-shirts all over the place.

Back on the mainland we picked up the truck and did some grocery shopping to equip us for the next few days. We drove inland to the Tropical Education Centre campground, east of the capital of Belize, Belmopan. The camp is located adjacent to the Belize Zoo and is used as an education centre for school groups and researchers and is popular with birding enthusiasts. The campsite had a nice screened in swimming pool and a dining hall, hot showers and clean flushing toilets. All was pretty good except for the bugs. We are not sure what they were, but they would take a serious chunk out of you and seemed to particularly love Randi and me, although we all got our share of annoying bites.

The campsite is located in tropical jungle, and it was steamy. Randi and Amy brought along a tent and they didn’t sleep much the first night. It was so hot, but it was also periodically raining, so they were not able to sleep without the fly on. The next day they moved a picnic table out from under a shelter and moved their tent under the roof so that they could at least have the fly off and stay relatively dry.

We visited the nearby Belize zoo, which was started in 1983 originally to provide a home for animals that had been used in making documentary films about tropical forests. Since then the zoo has grown by accepting animals which were orphaned, donated by people who mistakenly thought the animal would make a good pet, or born at the zoo. Others are rescue animals that would not have made it in the wild (like the one-winged pelican that we saw).

Jaguarundi

Tapir, also referred to by locals as a mountain cow.

Monkey with baby

Spider monkey

Ocelot

Puma

Pecary

Howler monkey

Jaguar

Harpy eagle

People often have bad feeling towards zoos, but this one seemed to be doing a lot of things right, including educating locals on how to try and ensure that these animals might continue to survive in the wild.  And for us it was a chance to see many of the animals of Belize that would otherwise prove too elusive to catch a glimpse of.

After another night at the TEC campground, we drove further west, getting close the Guatemalan border and to visit Xunantunich, Randi’s first ever Mayan ruin. And Piper’s!