vacation continued III...San Ignacio and Bullet Tree Falls

Our third stop was in San Ignacio which is is the Cayo jungle district of Belize. We stayed in a jungle hut slightly out of San Ignacio in a small town called Bullet Tree Falls. This place was amazing! The huts were right on the river and we were the only guests there so we had the place to ourselves. 

The best part by far was the rope swing that swung out into the river! 

New Years Eve Gregg, Kris, and I headed to San Ignacio for dinner and to check out the festivities. Supposedly there was going to be a street party from 9pm-4am but at about 9:30pm there wasn't really anything going on and we decided against driving back to the jungle in the middle of the night. We did have some awesome Indian food and talked to a guy who lived in Redmond! Small world...  

Crazy house in San Ignacio

Downtown San Ignacio

The second day we were there we did an awesome cave tour called the ATM. Since it was one of the highlights of the trip I'll do a post just for that next. 

That evening we went to one of the many Mayan ruins that are in the Belizian jungle called Cahal Pech. The site was a palacio home for an elite Maya family, and though most major construction dates to the Classic period, evidence of continuous habitation has been dated back as far as 900 BC, making Cahal Pech one of the oldest recognizably Maya sites in Western Belize. The site is a collection of 34 structures, with the tallest being about 25 meters in height. The site was abandoned in the 9th century AD for unknown reasons. The name Cahal Pech, meaning "place of ticks", was given when this site was a pasture during the first archaeological studies in the 1950s. It is now an archaeological park, and houses a small museum with artifacts from various ongoing excavations.

Next...the ATM!