Army Guards
At many of the sites we were at in Belize there were soldiers with automatic weapons. In Tikal, the guards carried shotguns. A few days before we had come, bandits had stopped a tourist bus and taken money and valuables from the passengers and a week before that a well organized group had held up some tourists on the road to Caracol and then invaded a resort nearby. No one had gotten hurt, everyone was convinced that the bad guys were Guatemalans who had slipped across the border, and everyone wanted to reassure tourists. So there were police checkpoints on the roads and soldiers at tourist destinations.
We heard about the holdup, but we wanted to go to Caracol so we asked around and were assured that the road was being patrolled and that we’d be safe. Caracol is an hour out of town, isolated, off in the boonies, so the road to Caracol had been a good place to ambush tourists, but the barn door, as they say, had been closed. When we went, we got an army escort.
We had a truck with four guys with automatic weapons drive with us for most of the way out, wait for us at the site and then accompany us back. Our own escort for our van with five tourists and a guide. And there were additional guards at the site.
Caracol, as I mentioned elsewhere, was a competitor of Tikal and may have been as big as Tikal, but much less of it has been excavated and restored. The main temple, 141 feet tall, as tall as the tallest temples at Tikal has been restored and, of course, since we were there we had to climb to the top. The view was spectacular.
While we were at the top, one of the guards came huffing up, hauling what looked at first like a suitcase. When he got it up there, I realized that what he had was a portable TV and that he had brought it to the top hoping to get good enough reception so that he could watch the first round World Cup match between Brazil and Croatia.
It was a sweet moment and I would have loved to have taken his picture up there at the top of a Maya temple, caught up in Ronaldinho, but I was worried that he’d be worried about getting in trouble, so I didn’t. Moment lost.
We heard about the holdup, but we wanted to go to Caracol so we asked around and were assured that the road was being patrolled and that we’d be safe. Caracol is an hour out of town, isolated, off in the boonies, so the road to Caracol had been a good place to ambush tourists, but the barn door, as they say, had been closed. When we went, we got an army escort.
We had a truck with four guys with automatic weapons drive with us for most of the way out, wait for us at the site and then accompany us back. Our own escort for our van with five tourists and a guide. And there were additional guards at the site.
Caracol, as I mentioned elsewhere, was a competitor of Tikal and may have been as big as Tikal, but much less of it has been excavated and restored. The main temple, 141 feet tall, as tall as the tallest temples at Tikal has been restored and, of course, since we were there we had to climb to the top. The view was spectacular.
While we were at the top, one of the guards came huffing up, hauling what looked at first like a suitcase. When he got it up there, I realized that what he had was a portable TV and that he had brought it to the top hoping to get good enough reception so that he could watch the first round World Cup match between Brazil and Croatia.
It was a sweet moment and I would have loved to have taken his picture up there at the top of a Maya temple, caught up in Ronaldinho, but I was worried that he’d be worried about getting in trouble, so I didn’t. Moment lost.
posted by Jim at 12:06 PM
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