I haven’t been to as many places in the world as I should have at this
point in my life. For instance, I have a friend who, by coincidence,
I was on a trip with to Antarctica in 2000. He did so much traveling
with his family that Antarctica was all five family members’ seventh
and final continent to visit, including their ten year old. I’m still
stuck on five. One of my “problems” is I tend to repeat some places
quite a bit. As an example, here I sit tonight deep in the jungle of
western Belize at a lodge called Chan Chich (www.chanchich.com).
Benjamin and I came here for an escape in August of 2009, loved it and
this is now my fourth visit in 22 months. My real reason for being in
Belize is to have my fifth experience excavating Mayan Ruins with the
Maya Research Program (mayaresearchprogram.org). But that begins on
Monday and now I can’t come to dig without visiting Chan Chich.
Twelve rooms set among Mayan ruins, 36 miles from the nearest paved
road. Wonderful staff who live here year round and raise their
families here as well.

I spent today on some of the trails here checking out the birds,
flowers, plants, lizards, toads, monkeys and my favorite, the leaf
cutter ants. I paced off one leaf cutter trail that measured 8 inches
wide and a half a mile long. I think they are amazing animals. But
tonight, Elder the manager, took me “Jaguar and Puma Hunting.” We
drove the gravel roads around the area, me behind the wheel and Elder
sitting out of the passenger window with his spotlight. Given there
were hundreds of deer including many fawn, the cats were apparently
not hungry during the early part of this evening. In addition to the
deer, we only had four gray fox and one raccoon to show for our
efforts (some bad pictures of our expedition in the dark are
included).

Once I get settled into the MRP camp next week and have a few days of
work under my belt, I will hopefully have another post. But just in
case that activity doesn’t generate another post, Baseball Tour 2011
begins on July 20!