University of Guelph, Ridgetown Campus

University of Guelph, Ridgetown Campus

Wednesday, 11 December 2013

Day 3 - We ate too much pie and couldn't get the van up the hill!!


Belize Day 3
This morning we woke up early and had breakfast at San Ignacio Hotel.  We were in for a treat as we were served fresh squeezed orange juice. Which without a doubt was the sweetest OJ I’ve ever tasted! Following breakfast we did a tour of the Green Iguana sanctuary, this was a truly once in a life time opportunity. We learned first that the river iguanas are an endangered animal in Belize because of predators, over hunting and loss of habitat.  The green iguana predators are the black or spiny Iguanas when they are babies, but as they grow older the predator changes to hawks and eagles.  We were lucky that the iguanas mating season is November to February when the male iguana is ready to mate it will turn from green to orange. We luckily got to see Mr. Gomez, a 17 year old iguana who has been at the sanctuary since he was young.  Mr. Gomez was a brilliant orange colour to attract the female iguanas. We were able to hold Mr. Gomez and all the other adult iguanas, and they were crawling all over us! We learned many interesting facts about iguanas, some of which are; iguanas have a special trait that makes it so they can heal themselves fast. This aids them in protection, when they feel something grabbing their tail they will drop it off. The tail will stay and wiggle around and distract the predator while the iguana gets away. The iguanas amazing healing power will make it so the tail will grow back and it will also heal broken bones within a few months.  After we continued into the baby iguana section and learned even more! Did you know that baby iguanas in the wild have a 2-4 % survival rate? That means that very few iguanas will live from every clutch of eggs. There is no wonder that the iguanas are endangered! They certainly are living a hard knock life!
We had the wonderful opportunity of visiting the Eden high school.  When we arrived we presented the school with 8 music stands, as the school is well known for their wonderful musical skills that SHARE helped them get started. SHARE sponsors 15 children to attend the high school every year paying for tuition, uniforms, and text books. This is giving them the opportunity to attend school when they otherwise wouldn’t have had the option. The children although nice were very shy, but after the ice was broken it was fascinating listening to them. We sat down in small groups with the children and talked about our similarities, differences and day to day life.
We returned to San Ignacio Hotel for lunch. While at lunch, we saw a toucan which was very surprising as they usually only come out in the early morning. It was absolutely beautiful seeing such a majestic animal in its natural habitat - that truly was gorgeous.  Following dinner we made our way to the Taiwan test plots farm ran by the Belize agriculture government. These are test plots for studying native plants as well as some from different tropical climates around the world. Chris a fellow that worked there explained to us the different plants. It was surprising to me that bananas grow out of a flower and every petal that falls off a bunch of bananas grow.  They also had a compost program in place where they were mixing milk, eggs, molasses and EM (a bacteria) - this was a very beneficial cheap fertilizer.  
Yet again we all loaded up in the bus and headed to a bio-diesel farm. He informed us of the uses for Jatropha trees (you could tell he was a sales man). The jatropha tree is a tree grown in Belize, Guatemala, and Haiti. The seeds are highly poisonous but contain 40% oil is that can be used as bio diesel. The shells are used in stoves as fuel, this is a much healthier option because the burning the shells make very little smoke. Glycerine which is extracted from the seeds is made into soap, this soap is claimed to be a magic worker. It is claimed that the soap will heal all bug bites, cuts and blemishes.  Les was given a bar of the soap as a prize for answering a question. He kindly gave the bar to Chris as he had a bug bite that had swollen up about 3 times its normal size. He has yet to try the soap to determine its effectiveness. The trunks are used as fence posts and building material because animals know it is poisons and will stay away from it.
Finally we went to the Belize zoo!! We saw all kinds of beautiful animals that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. We saw toucans, pumas, panthers and deer.  They were all very pretty and photogenic - it seemed that they were posing for all of our pictures. We saw a very special deer who we called the “Miley deer” because she was walking around with her tough out, it was rather comical.  The howler monkeys were every cool and very loud. It was hard to believe that an animal that small could make a noise that loud. We finished off our night with a long van ride and some intense bear talk. 
Good night Belize
By Holly Becker

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