Today started off rough, but ended up fantastic.  The A/C gave out in the middle of the night and the beds were not too comfy so everyone was a bit grumpy this morning.  Yesterday's less than ideal food no doubt added to the unpleasantness. 

Our tour of Caracol departed shortly after 8am.  It's a two hour drive, but only about 50 miles.  The "road" in many places is very bumpy, but the last part is paved.  We make a short stop at a security check point and use the opportunity to grab a candy bar.  We arrive at Caracol a little after 10.

Caracol is the largest Mayan site in Belize and the highest man made structure in the country.  Having not taken many photos thus far, I go wild today.  The site is great to see.  We climb nearly all of the buildings and get a nice workout doing so.  We see some bats inside a small room and some very big spiders.  Still no monkeys so I keep asking, in full musical mode, "Hey, Hey, where are the monkeys?".  Our guide Bruce is excellent and we explore the parts of the site that are open to the public.  The entire site is enormous with about 30,000 structures.  Around 130pm, we break for lunch and depart at 2pm. 

We make three stops on the way back.  The first two are near each other- Rio Frio Cave and Rio on pools.  The first one is a big cave opening with water flowing through it.  The second is a bunch of rocks and an opportunity to swim.  I dangle my feet in the cold water and relax from the day's activities.  Our final stop is a local artisan place where they make traditional Mayan carvings.  Not normally a shopper, they have some neat carvings and all are reasonably priced.  One of the biggest ones is of the Mayan calendar.  Since my friends know that I've researched this a bit, they encourage me to splurge and get it- and I do.   I'm planning a party on December 21, 2012, so pencil that in your calendars. 

We get back to the hotel around 630pm and discuss our room situation.  While at dinner, they fix the A/C and we adjust the furniture for more comfort.  Tomorrow we're off to more ruins. 

Addendum (per L''s request):

L' reminded me of two things that I neglected to mention.  Near the end of our tour of Caracol, we had climbed up every temple we had seen.  There was one temple atop a hill that Lonnie and I decided to pass on since we had already gotten a good view of the plaza from atop another pyramid.  L', being the adventurous (i.e., insane) one, decides to race up the last one.  While she quickly goes to the top, our group stays and chats with our guide.  We wave to L' when she's at the top while our guide points out a carving to us.  We said that L' wanted to climb the last structure because it had a neat carving.  Our guide says "I guess she doesn't know that the copy is up there, and we're looking at the original."  When L' comes down, we ask her how the copy looked.

At Rio on Pools, I didn't have my sandals and the water was cold so I didn't explore much.  While I relaxed, she forced Lonnie under some waterfall against his initial judgment.  She's always raising the bar.