At the tour office the various tours split into groups. Our group was with Richard, the boss of this tour office. He's been in tourism for 30 years, including hotel/restaurant, and has been all over the world. He was extremely interesting to have as a tour guide and very friendly.
The site we visited is about 2 hours away from Belize City, where the ship was docked. We drove through the country side for a couple of hours. Belize is a beautiful, beautiful country. After a couple of hours we arrived at our destination. To get to the site we had to take a hand cranked ferry across a river.
Richard, our guide is in the front left of this picture. Jason, the driver, was in the van. Only the driver is allowed in the van when crossing the river. When we arrived at the river, we had a "site guide," he said to call him Junior, he's the one pointing. Our tour had six people. You can Byron and a couple of the others in this picture.
Once on the other side we rode the van upon a mile up a steep hill to the site. We were at the site about 90 minutes. The site was fascinating, marvelous and everything I'd hoped for.
The large group behind "Junior" is the tour group on the Carnival excursion (many many more people and more expensive than the tour we were on).
I took many pictures of the site, but I won't share them all here (I can hear the collective sigh of relief) and pictures any number of pictures of the site are available on a google search (or my pictures on my fb page for those who know me there). However, it was now time for us to climb the main temple and of that I'll share a couple of pictures.
See how tall/steep those stairs are? Well, up we went. Me on all fours at some points. My right knee was bugging me and taking the steps in the traditional manner simply wasn't going to happen. I may not have been graceful, but I made it to the top!
See that city in the distance???? The one on the left? That's about 2 miles away and that's Guatemala. We were very close to the border. Isn't this country just beautiful?
And here we are at the top!
We climbed back down, went through some more of the site and started back to the ship. But first we stopped for lunch (included in the tour).
Oh, but first on the ferry on the way back, we were greeted by a number of young Belize children/scouts and
their leaders. They were very friendly and it was lovely to say "hi" for just a minute. 
The restaurant was small and had other tourists there. We all had a set menu, though the restaurant did have a menu on hand, the tour had a set menu. We had chicken (very tender and tasty), friend plantain, a fried rice dish, cole slaw and bottled soda.
Lunch was quick, we had to be on our way to the ship. We learned more about the country on the way back and arrived back at the ship at the same time the Carnival excursion bus did. This is a very long tour - about 6 hours, so we got back in time for the next to last tender.
This was a marvelous day and I highly recommend it. And I very highly recommend Island Marketing. It would have been nice to spend more time at the site, but the glimpse we had was amazing and wonderful and I'm so very glad we had that chance.
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