There's no arguing that Ambergris Caye is beautiful, but it tends towards a sandy, beachy environment. So, we were awfully surprised (but delighted) to find a little jungle oasis right in southern Ambergris last weekend.
As we mentioned in a previous blog post, we took a long bike ride south on Sunday, and after going as far as we could, we turned around and headed back just a short ways to the Marco Gonzalez Archaeological Reserve/Maya Site, which we'd never checked out because we don't get down that far south very often, and when we do, we don't always have bug spray with us. Today we did, so we decided to venture in and have a look around. As we learned from the sign below, this is a very ancient site. And it became the first Maya Site National Park on Ambergris Caye in 2011.
We also enjoyed watching birds as we trekked through. There were a lot of them! But we didn't have our binoculars, so birding was a little frustrating since we weren't able to identify too many of them other than just general categories ("flycatcher"). We also saw quite a few hermit crabs crawling about. I've seen more hermit crabs in Belize than anywhere else in my life!