The fifth day found us in Belize. We woke up that morning early as we had to catch a tender to shore and needed to be on one of the first so that we could catch our excursion (cave tubing and zip lining) as we decided to go with a company outside of Carnival. Breakfast in the dining room wouldn't have given us enough time to catch the right tender so we went to the lido deck and hit the buffet. Afterwards we went to the Follies theater to get in line. We got there early enough to catch the second boat. While we were waiting, we talked to a nice lady from South Carolina. When we got to the shore, we met our tour guide. The whole thing looked a little sketch until we met a family from Oklahoma going with us as they had gone with the same tour guide the year before.
We drove through Belize City, our guide was very knowledgeable and told us a lot about the area and the culture. Everyone spoke English but they also spoke an interesting dialect mixing a few languages together and changing certain sounds as well. I talked to him a little about education as we passed several schools. He told me that education was highly valued as that was the only way to progress. Parents made sure that their children did well and behaved in school.
We eventually made it about an hour out to the countryside. It was interesting to see the differences in how people lived both in the city and outside of the city. We had to pass through a couple of military checkpoints, but I didn't get any pictures.
We finally got to the right place, got ready to go, grabbed our tubes, and started walking. We got to a river crossing with one of the guides and waited for Tom, our main guide, to catch up. While we waited, the rest of the group decided to do some "cliff" jumping. We probably ended up waiting twenty minutes or so, another reason we were glad the family was with us telling us it was a legit tour guide. We finally had a guide from a different group tell us that Colette and I were going with her and that the family should wait as Colette and I were also going zip lining and the family wasn't so we needed to hurry.
The lady already had a family of four going with her. This family was staying in Belize all week so they were telling us all about the adventures they had been on. The lady guide was very knowledgeable about the rain forest we were walking through and pointed out different plants and how they could be used. When we got to the river and cave entrance, our new guide realized that she couldn't tie our tubes to the others so we all had to hold onto each others feet and make a chain. It was all fine and dandy at first and then my arms started to get tired and even go numb a little. The guide practically had to swim us through the cave so we would be done on time. We saw lots of cool things in the cave and then just floated back down the river once we were out of the cave.
After the tubing, we changed into dry clothes and went zip lining. It was my first time and I had a blast! There were seven different zip lines that we went on through the forest. We were sad that we didn't get to see any monkeys, but we did have a cute guide named Oscar. I wasn't able to get a picture of him though.
This was the best shot I got of Oscar.
At the last line, we had to wait for a family in front of us to finish. Their son was very hesitant the whole time and finally built up enough courage to go by himself on the last one. Everyone thought it was very touching for him to do that and I was standing there trying not to laugh because I understood what his guides were saying in Spanish. So, you have to lift yourself up in order to be hooked to the cable and the boy wasn't doing such a great job on his own so he was being lifted up by the two guides while they tried to connect him. They were struggling a bit and one basically said that the kid was like a sack of potatoes and the other disagreed and called him a sack of oranges. While we waited, Oscar showed us the nest of a tarantula and took a picture for us. He said that the white thing is a sack of eggs.
After the zip lining we had to rush back to the tenders to get back to the ship on time. We were fed lunch, but Colette and I had to eat ours in the car. It was pretty good for being chicken with some rice and beans. On the way back, we saw a bus that had broken down, our guide told us that we now had plenty of time because he knew the bus was one used by the cruise line which meant the ship wouldn't be leaving on time. He told us to expect to leave at least an hour late and we did. Tom still pointed out sites on the way back including the LDS church in town as he thought it was interesting that it was built across the street from the Harley Davison shop.
We got on a tender and headed back to the ship. We met a really nice lady from Georgia who was with her family. We talked about education and some of the things Tom had told us about. She was appalled at some of the stories I had about parents that I'd dealt with. As we were going from the tender to the ship, a couple of ladies asked where we were from as they saw my Western Family water bottle and that the area code on my tag was 801, turns out that they were also from Utah so we talked a bit and discussed other people from Utah that we met including another guy on the same tender wearing a BYU hat.
After getting back on the ship, we showered and hung out for a bit before going to dinner. We sat with a couple from Tampa and the couple from South Carolina we met that morning. Every night around 7 pm, the dining room crew would put on a little show for us while we ate.
After dinner, we went to a movie trivia show/event/game. They showed still shots of kissing scenes from popular movies and we had to identify the movie. I did fairly well, but discovered that Colette has not seen a lot of movies (don't worry, we're now keeping a list to correct this). We tried to go see the sunset outside, but it was cloudy, still pretty, but cloudy. We then went back inside to watch a 60 Seconds or Less show with people traveling on the ship. Afterwards, we went back to our room, got ready for bed and were then surprised to find that we could watch So You Think You Can Dance on our TV. We were really tired from the day and ended up going to bed early.
Our towel critter for the night: elephant.
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