Fourth in a series of Sunday travel photos and stories....

For something a little closer to home than Namibia, my wife and I took a trip last year to Belize, a Central American country on the Caribbean Sea, just east of Guatemala and south of the eastern part of Mexico.

Belize richly deserves its reputation as a diver's paradise and generally a great country to visit if you love ocean, jungle, and Mayan ruins.

Formerly called British Hondouras, it is a little smaller than Massachusetts and one of only three British colonies in Central and South America. (The other two are Guyana, formerly British Guyana and the Falkland Islands. The official head of state is Queen Elizabeth II but political power is really vested in the Prime Minister and it is politically one of the most stable countries in the region, partly because it operates primarily under English Common Law. (That's also the reason it's much easier for foreigners to buy property there than in Mexico and other non-English-law countries.)

In terms of hard currency earnings, the main industry is tourism followed by fish and agriculture exports.

You can get a lot of detailed info at the CIA World Factbook page on Belize at this link:
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/bh.html#Intro

A more detailed map is at:
http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mapshells/central_america/belize/belize.htm

The first place we stayed was the Blancaneaux Lodge. It's a beautiful small resort owned by Francis Ford Coppola. We had a beautiful private hut on the beach.

It's a great place to relax, fish, dive, and go into the nice little nearby town of Placencia with a borrowed bicycle.

My wife and I both love scuba diving, and my little Minolta digital camera has a nice underwater case so here are a couple of underwater photos for your enjoyment. First is a caribbean lobster. They don't have big claws like our Maine lobsters and they basically can't hurt you unless you grab them and cut yourself on their sharp exoskeleton. They're very tasty, though again probably not as good as the Maine lobsters. On the other hand, for a diver they're better because they are much more colorful and beautiful.

Next is my wife, Kristen, with her new friend, a moon jellyfish.

Following our beach time at Blancaneaux, we went to another nice though most eccentric resort called the Maruba Resort Jungle Spa. It's a quite amazing group of rooms, mostly as individual small buildings, done in the ultimate in mod-African decor. Check out the web site at the link above!

They do some funky spa treatments including a mud massage which is followed by a bath in a large outdoor tub. Kristen and I did this together. It was a riot, and more than a little embarrassing....

Maruba is about an hour north of Belize City by car, and not on the water. It's a good place from which to do some excursions. We did a couple, one of which was inner-tubing down a lazy river through caves surrounded by jungle. The pictures don't do it justice, so I'll just post a picture of our other excursion: a trip to the fantastic Mayan ruins at Lamanai.

To get to Lamanai, you drive to a boat dock on a river and take a beautiful 45 minute boat ride upriver through beautiful jungle, watching beautiful birds and keeping an eye out for crocodiles, monkeys, iguanas, and other wildlife.

At Lamanai, you walk around ruins of varying size and quality but generally excellent examples of Mayan physical culture. Overhead there are howler monkeys who make a noise much louder than you could ever imagine coming from such a small body, almost like hearing a lion up close.

Here's a picture of one of the Mayan temples at Lamanai:

OK, that's it for this week's travel photos. I hope you enjoy them. As always, please feel free to comment or to e-mail me privately if you ever want any travel advice.