Visiting the Stone Maiden

Atop El Castillo

A couple weeks ago, we headed west to Cayo for a lee getaway in celebration of Ginnie's birthday. We love visiting San Ignacio (the district town of Cayo district and often referred to as Cayo) because it is among the mountains and has some of the best food in Belize!

Having lived here for 15 months, we had still not visited the ruins at Xunantunich, so we decided this was the time to do so. As you may be able to tell from our travels, we enjoy visiting Maya ruins! Anyway, Xunantunich (pronounced zshoo-NAN-too-NEECH - can you tell we work with phonics?) is interpreted as "Maiden of the Rock," "Stone Maiden," or "Stone Lady," depending what you read. The ruins are fairly small (in comparison to other sites we've visited) and are located near the border. Its tallest structure, El Castillo, is the second tallest in Belize (after the Caana Pyramid at Caracol, another site we plan to visit at some point) at 130 feet. For Mayans, this is pretty tall, according to sources we've read and the sites we've seen. The fact it is built on a hill adds to its height and the incredible views you can see from the top. For whatever reason, we keep climbing to the top of these things, though this was far less scary than some others since it was not as steep and skinny on the top (really, how could we not climb them?)! We could see all over the area and into Guatemala, as well as many beautiful views of the surrounding mountains and hillsides.

Here are some views of El Castillo and from El Castillo

Looking out over the ruins from the top of El Castillo with Oso de Paz

Being that the portion of the site that is excavated is small, we enjoyed a leisurely morning just hanging out in the museum reading about the site and then in the plaza listening to the howler monkeys, and watching the toucans and a stray dog who was chasing butterflies and some crawling burrowing critters. Since there were only two other visitors to the park, we basically had the place to ourselves, which we feel is a nice way to see the sites. When we visited Chichen Itza in 2004 there were so many people around we couldn't take pictures without having strangers in them!

Just hangin' out in the plaza

Traveling to Xunantunich is part of the fun, too. We hopped on a Benque bus and got off a few miles down the road at San Jose Succotz where we took a hand-cranked ferry across the Mopan River. A BDF soldier got on the ferry with his pickup truck and offered us a ride up to the entrance (which is a 1-mile uphill trip so that was pretty awesome). Unfortunately, he was gone when it was time to return, but the walk downhill was not bad and it was becoming increasingly overcast as rains headed in so it was not as hot (and it's shaded by many trees).

The friendly ferry hand-cranker man


This guy was just hanging out by the ferry

We learned that Xunantunich has a connection to our days in "the valley" (that's the San Fernando Valley for those of you who didn't realize it). The Getty Conservation Institute and UCLA archaeologists worked together on a project studying Xunantunich to see how the climate effected the site. Here is some more interesting information about the site.

In addition to the ruins, we had a nice relaxing night at Martha's Guesthouse where we'd stayed on our first trip to Cayo back in our first month here. Martha and her husband are two of the nicest people and we enjoy staying with them when we can. We also met up with a Stonehill student who is living in Cayo for 15 weeks as an intern at the hospital and had a nice dinner at Erva's. We'd not yet eaten there and heard it was a must-visit. It was so good and our server, Guillermo, was really friendly so we had a nice long chat with him, as well. Ginnie had the biggest burrito, yet, and Anthony had a good chicken sandwich. It's always nice to have a change from rice and beans! Though, I guess we are supposed to try Erva's rice and beans, we just don't feel like eating that when we go out since we want to have something different... :)

That's a big burrito and I ate it all (though, it is rather skinny, so that's a good thing for calories)

We also hit our favorite bakery before leaving for the ruins and had some delicious treats - cinnamon swirl, apple turnover, and a whole wheat German muffin (not really knowing what it is, but it tasted sort of like a banana muffin without the banana). It does appear we talk about food fairly often, which we find common among PCVs. Must have something to do with limited diets and such!

It was a really fun weekend, and reminded us we need to get out of our site more frequently to take a break and see more of Belize while we can! We really need to get up north soon!