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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