Xunantunich and Benque Festival

It’s the weekend! We went to Xunantunich in the morning after another round of market tacos! It’s a relatively big site and when you get on top of the highest structure you can see Guatemala to the left about 16 miles away. It was quite a hike up to the site after working in the field all week and partying pretty hard the night before at the local San Ignacio bars. Xunantunich was my favorite Maya site so far. It has three main structures; one in the middle of the plaza that looks out of place, the largest one with lots of stairs, and a structure that most likely served as a private area for the elite. The other sites we went to haven’t had a structure in the center of the plaza like Xunantunich. When the middle structure was excavated it had nothing of importance inside and the function of the structure remains a mystery as to why the Maya would have wanted to split their main plaza in half. The view from the highest structure was very impressive so we all relaxed up there for a pretty long time. Definitely my favorite Maya site so far! The view was great and we got to relax and explore it ourselves without a tour guide. It started pouring as we were heading back to our bus so we just enjoyed not being hot for a half hour and got soaked! Such a nice break from sweating! The rest of the day me and my roommate Tori hung out and got ready for the Benque festival. There is a bootleg channel on our TV so we watched Eclipse!!! For free…I love Belize in moments like those!

After our lazy afternoon we took a local bus to the Benque Festival which is one of the largest festivals of the year here in Belize. Right when we got there we got some pretty awkward looks but because everyone there was from all over the country it wasn’t that bad… Candy, a girl in our group got electrocuted when she grabbed onto a railing while waiting to go on a ride. That pretty much taught everyone that the rides weren’t particularly safe. Let’s just say nobody went on rides that night out of our group. It started raining again and we all packed under the little overhangs that didn’t cover much. It was starting to turn out to be an interesting night. Then the power went out. So here we are, pretty close to Guatemala in the middle of a power outage in the rain. That’s when I decided beer was necessary. The power went on after an hour of waiting and the majority of us went into the warehouse were a huge dance party was going on. There was supposed to be a band playing but I guess no power and the rain scared them away! The party literally didn’t start until 12:30 in the morning and from there on everyone was dancing! To use the bathroom you had to buy toilet paper every time you went in which was interesting. Most of the night they played Spanish music that most of us didn’t understand with such a fast beat I don’t think anybody was dancing to it right. Basically if you had a good sense of humor it was great! We left the festival around 3:30 in the morning and didn’t crawl into bed until 5. Woke up at 2 in the afternoon! That was a first for me in Belize! It beats 5:45 AM! Tori and I woke up slow and headed to Greedy’s for a long lunch. Today is very relaxing but back to the field bright and early!