On Friday we had an early start to fly from Newcastle to Heathrow, then on to Houston for an overnight stop – a little over 11 hours flying in total, gaining six hours as we travelled west, so it felt like a very long day! Our bodies thought it was after midnight by the time we had something to eat at our airport hotel and we had to be up in time for a 6am breakfast on Saturday to get the shuttle bus back to the airport; not my favourite kind of travel. From Houston it is just over two hours to Belize City, where our adventure really started. I got chatting on the plane to a very friendly Belizean postal worker who wanted us to go to this afternoon’s Carnival in the city, but sadly we had other fish to fry.

We picked up a 4WD truck and set off on the 4 hour drive south west to Las Cuevas, via the capital Belmopan. The airport is on the south side of Belize City so we made a quick getaway on good roads. At first we could have been anywhere in the tropics – scrubby vegetation, with patches of cultivated maize and some familiar looking trees, including papaya and calabash. Seeing houses on stilts surprised me in, a hurricane zone, but it seems that flooding is the biggest risk on the flat land near the coast. Red mangroves with their distinctive stilt roots, fringed patches of water some way inland.

Belmopan became the administrative capital of Belize in the early 1960s, after much of Belize City was flattened by Hurricane Hattie, but it remains very much a one-horse town. We stopped at a supermarket here to stock up on ‘tuck shop’ items for the students and I was surprised to see that both the supermarket, and the fancy coffee shop next door, were run by a Chinese family. Apparently many of the merchants here are Chinese, which explains the small group of Mandarin-speaking mums and children on our flight!

Not long after Belmopan we turn south off the main road and climb up onto the Mountain Pine Ridge, heading towards the famous Mayan site of Caracol.  The narrow ridge of granite mountains has a savannah habitat unusual in Belize, dominated by Pinus caribaea trees, with a shrubby understory. Some of the understory plants are recognisable even when drive-by botanising – lots of Tiger fern (Dicranopteris pectinata) and some Hypericum terra-firmae, with its distinctive yellow flowers. Though I’d love to have stopped to mooch, we were both tired and keen to get to Las Cuevas. The new road to Caracol is largely complete now, with just a few unfinished sections lest the driver gets complacent, but the last 16km to the station are on a track which fully justified the choice of a 4WD vehicle! The number of novel-looking flowering plants along the roadside suggests I’m going to have my work cut out.

Las Cuevas is, not surprisingly, just like the pictures – a clearing in the forest with a cluster of wooden buildings, mostly on stilts. We’re surrounded by wildlife. A group of Scarlet Macaws which were hatched and fledged here this year, before being released, are still roosting in a large tree on the edge of the clearing. They fly around at dusk, squabbling noisily like a group of unruly teenagers.  Turkey  vultures have claimed a large fig tree,  a huge flock of Montezuma’s Orlopendulas the Cedar tree close to the main building and a big family of Oscillator turkeys are foraging in the short grass.  The plants too are like something from an Attenborough film – the big Cedar has vines, including Monstera deliciosa (Swiss cheese plant) scrambling through it and the higher branches are covered in epiphytes such as Tillandsia. There are sensitive plants (Mimosa pudica) nestling in the short grass around the site which swiftly fold up their leaves as we walk past. 

As dusk falls it’s noisy, between the birds settling down for the night, the cicadas, tree frogs and the occasional owl calling. The only human sounds are conversation. We are given delicious fresh corn tacos with avocado, salad and eggs for dinner and I’m in bed before 8pm, though my head still thinks it’s very late! It’s a welcome surprise to find there is now good internet available for a few hours in the morning and evening so the blog posts may come closer to ‘in real time’ than I’d been expecting!