06/17 I’m so excited! My good friends Karin and Marten are heading this way and I’ll probably see them Sunday night. To keep things on the cheap I’m going to stay here tomorrow so I can keep the motel costs down if I stay in San Ignacio for a couple days and visit.
Finally managed to escape the Northern Highway and made my way down to the Western Highway. Yeah, it’s worse. The condition of the road surface is better but there’s no shoulder to speak of and there’s noticeably more traffic. I did get a nice tailwind though.
My big stop of the day was the Best Little Zoo in the World: the Belize Zoo. The cool thing about it is that the more than 125 animals are native to Belize and they are in their natural habitats. All of the animals (other than the ones born at the zoo) were unwanted pets or they came from other zoos–none were captured in the wild.
I really enjoyed this place–it felt more like a sanctuary than a zoo. The enclosures were all very large and were full of trees and other plants. Some of the animals, monkeys mostly, had free reign of the zoo but usually just hung out in one area presumably where the food is.
Staying at Monkey Bay Wildlife Sanctuary tonight where they have spaces for camping at US $9 a night. Showers and internet access included. There’s also a bar/restaurant only 2 minutes away where I met all kinds of interesting people.
My Skype problems have been identified. It turns out that Belize Telecommunications (BTL), who handle all carrier connections in Belize, is blocking access to VOIP services so they can maintain their monopoly on long distance and charge whatever they want. Nah, we don’t need Net Neutrality. No calls until Guatemala I guess (unless I want to use a proxy but I can wait a few more days).
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Pictures are here. Not sure why including pictures is breaking the site layout but I’m not going to sit here for another hour trying to fix it.
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