Travel Journal (Week 4)

12JUN2011

I toyed with the idea of going out for another day of diving, but the weather in the morning was worse than Saturday and I didn’t want to go out to Laughing Bird again. Next year I may try diving with a different outfit. I really like Patty and diving with Splash, but a friend who is a boat captains in Placencia started his own business up the coast a bit. He is working with a woman who I have dove with many times, although she was usually an instructor with students and not the dive master for the group of divers I was with. Both of them are people I enjoy spending time with. They go to South Water Caye and Glovers Reef, and probably Tobacco Caye. I have been to South Water once and always wanted to check out Glovers. Tobacco is supposed to be nice too, but they are all far enough north of Placencia that Splash does not typically go to them. A bunch of people from the project went to Hopkins, a Garifuna village south of Dangriga, and I am waiting to hear the reviews. It is even farther up the coast and dive shops there will go to Tobacco for sure as well as Glovers Reef. However, I opted for several hours in a hammock instead of diving and left all that for another time; probably next year. My biggest accomplishment for the day was buying a basket, oh and doing laundry after I got back to camp.

11JUN2011

Reef diving was the agenda of the day, but it got off to a slow start as we waited for the weather to clear. It was about 10:00 by the time we were heading out and with the late start we only went to Laughing Bird Caye, a national park that is nice, but not on the barrier reef. I have had some nice dives there, but the best ones have all been on the outer reef. Unfortunately it is about twice as far to those dive sites so time concerns kept the trip back and forth shorter. We got to the island and the ranger gave us a brief orientation informing us of the half of the island where the birds are breading and we are not aloud to go and pointing out the three places we were aloud to enter the water from to go snorkeling. The island is quite small. It is probably 600–700 ft long and about 50 ft wide. We had two dives and a nice lunch of yellow rice and barbequed chicken wings for lunch. There were a lot of nice small fish, but not much spectacular.

I enjoyed just being underwater and swimming along the reef. They were shallow drift dives, so there were no concerns about decompression or running out of air; both of which I had to deal with for our whale shark dives. It was a nice casual day on the reef. We saw some crabs and lobsters, a stonefish, a big spotted drumfish, a hawksbill turtle, some kid of fish I don’t know the name of, but it changes its markings to a vibrant neon blue when agitated. There were also several lionfish. Not as many as I was expecting, but still several. They are a scourge on the reef, eating so many of the juvenile fish that it is probably going to throw things out of whack forever. Originally from the Pacific Ocean, they supposedly got out onto the reef because Katrina destroyed an aquarium housing numerous specimens that escaped when they were washed into the sea by the storm. I know there was a bounty on them for a while last year, but it may have been lifted. They are beautiful fish, but as they are a problematic invasive species, it would be better not to see them.

10JUN2011

Today I got up early and packed, caught the bus, caught the water taxi, and walked to the beach and checked into my hotel where I pretty much went to my hammock and stayed. There was a bit of swimming we drank a few beers and went out to dinner at Rum Fish, which I am still not sick of even after eating dinner there every night I have spent in Placencia, and called it an early evening. We are going on a reef dive tomorrow and I don’t think I need to get drunk tonight and be hung over for maximum enjoyment. Nothing seemed to be shaking at Barefoot and Tipsy Tuna was dead so I will probably go hangout in my hammock again for a little bit and go to bed. I have a room that is no more than 100 feet from the shore of the Caribbean and my hammock is the closest part of it; strung up on my seaside porch.

09JUN2011

Excavations at SG13. It is a large plaza group with at least three buildings on it. The plaza is about 25 m square overlooking Rio Blanco. It is a nice spot. The hilltop has been modified and the sides appear to have been faced with sandstone to give it the appearance of a much larger construction. This is very typical for Uxbenka, as all the major areas are on large hills that have been faced with sandstone to resemble the large pyramids built at other major Maya centers. There is one large building on the edge of the valley along the south edge of the plaza. It is completely dug up with four big looters holes on the top of the platform. There is a second large building off of the plaza on a small toe to the west. The sides of the building are still there but the inside of the platform has been completely dug out. Looters destroyed the two large buildings at the group, but there is a low platform that is still relatively intact. I set in a unit on the front and top of it to see how much has survived a millennium of trees and rodents. We also set in a 5-m grid and Adam is digging test pits to see what kinds of deposits are spread out across the plaza. So far it looks like there were at least two or three different plaza floors that were built on top of each other, so it is likely that the earliest material at the plaza group will date to the early part of the site’s occupation. I do not think there is much hope I will find any of it on the small structure I am excavating the unit on-it probably dates to the latest part of the site’s occupation when I assume the top plaza floor was built. There could be some early datable material below the plaza floors, so even if the unit on the structure yields nothing we could find some interesting information there anyway.

Dinner in town was fun. Everyone went and we played some pool drank a few beers had some food and enjoyed the evening, but I think everyone was mostly looking forward to the beach trips planned for the next morning. I know I was.

08JUN2011

Well, my excavations at SG62 were pretty much a total bust. Nothing of note, no charcoal for a date, not really much of anything was recovered. At least the second structure was a structure extending about 1 m down to the bedrock, but there was even les in that unit than the axial trench. On the good side, the blue truck (Ford F350) and the white truck (Ford Ranger) are back in action. I went to town to deal with cell phone issues and was pleased that if they do what they say it will be one day and about $40 to fix the problem. We also decided that we should all go to town for dinner tomorrow. It will not be a fancy affair, but it is at an open patio overlooking the Caribbean where they serve inexpensive beer and simple food. We are working a short week, so tomorrow is the first night of the weekend before everyone heads off to various spots for a bit of R&R. I am of course going to the beach to do some diving.

It is so clear today for some reason. I guess the rain has washed the smoke out of the sky or something. Driving into town we could see the mountains in Honduras, which typically are obscured from view. I noticed walking around camp how bright it was. There is only a half moon, and it is behind some light clouds, but I could see everything. It helps that I already know where and what everything is, but still it was easy to see by the moonlight. Usually it is not until the moon is full that it is so easy to see. The clouds mostly obscured the stars and the moonlight drowned them out a bit, but it was still a nice night. I love looking at the stars. The moon should set in three or four hours. I will probably get up and take a look if the clouds abate. On clear nights there are so many stare visible in the sky it is difficult to pick out the constellations. It is frustrating, but and irritation most tolerable.

07JUN2011

Today was another day at the site like most others it was hot and rainy and the bugs were into everything. For whatever reason the ants in the area I am currently excavating are particularly industrious. They have gotten into peoples lunches both yesterday and today. Other critters seem intent on human interaction as well. There was a butterfly that landed on my backpack and hung out for a while. It let me get close and actually climbed onto my hand and hung out there for a while. It flitted off and then landed on my arm and then my hat. I pulled my hat off to look at it and it stayed and I put my hat back on and it still stayed. It came and went landing on me again and again for about ten minutes. It was nothing huge, but it was still kind of cool-and it was the highlight of my day.

06JUN2011

Today was the beginning of my fourth workweek. It as a pleasant enough with light drizzle most of the day. It kept the temperature down below 90°, which is dam pleasant. Clair came out to start excavating at SG62 with me. She is working on the largest of the four platforms in the plaza group. Her unit will be four times the size of the one I opened up. I was all set up and ready to go, but we needed to get a tarp set up over Clair’s excavation, which took a couple of hours maybe once all was said and done. So far all I have found in my little unit is a few pieces of pottery and the odd piece of chert. We got through the surface layer and into the structure fill, but I cannot tell how deep it will go. It is deeper than the last one I looked at so that is at least something.

We went to Las Faldos, as we do more evenings than not. It was raining lightly for a while and a spectacular double rainbow came out. The inner one was super intense and the outer one, while dimmer, was totally visible. I of course did not have my camera or my phone with me, but fortunately others in the group did and within a matter of minutes we were trading photos and comments about it with people on facebook, some back in the states and some a few feet away. It is odd to have that kind of conversation, but we were there contacting friends and family back home so it seemed natural to comment on a post by someone sitting a two people down the bar as others chimed in from back home in the states.