First Inland Excursion

So this past week we went inland to San Ignacio.  We had an interesting ride in, using a water taxi and then a bus nicknamed the "chicken bus."  Monday was mostly a travel day but we did went into the interesting parts on Tuesday.

We took a van ride to Caracol, which is a Mayan site.  We had an awesome guide named Diego, and here's a brief video of him explaining an aspect of the ruins:
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We walked around and checked out the various ruins.  On the way to the main area, we ran into these guys:

These howler monkeys stayed quiet the whole time but they were moving around and watching us intently.  As soon as we walked away from the monkeys, this is what we saw:

This ruin was pretty large, but the biggest one was across from it and here's the video of me climbing up it: <iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/RUXNSF28Soc" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The view from the top was amazing.



The panoramic view was even better:












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And of course I can't go anywhere without eating something weird.  Our guide found a termite nest and taught us how to get them,
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Believe it or not, they were really good.  Had a good minty taste.

After the ruins we went to a waterfall and did some cliff jumping.

We did some swimming to the waterfall and were jumping off the sides into the pool near the waterfall.  It was a lot of fun.  This day was awesome but we had a lot of fun on Wednesday as well.