Our next destination was San Ignacio, Belize. We took the 1 hour water taxi from Ambergris Caye back to Belize City, took a taxi to the bus station, and then took a local bus to San Ignacio. The local buses look like school buses and are cram packed full of people. They drive crazy and are super bumpy! There is a person that stands at the front of the bus and opens the door when the bus stops. You just walk on the bus and sit down and then eventually the person at the front comes and charges you money, depending on where you are getting off. It was a fun experience and we loved the scenery on the drive, everything was so lush and green! It took about 2 1/2 hours to get to San Ignacio. Then we took a taxi to our hotel, Maya Mountain Lodge. This was one of my favorite places that we stayed! It was right in the rainforest and totally surrounded by trees, flowers, vines, and sooo many birds! Our room had the cutest little bouquets of flowers and hibiscus flowers in the bathroom. It had a huge open deck area with 2 hammocks. Every morning we would wake up to the sound of birds, which was nice. One night we both woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of the loudest cricket ever! It sounded like it was right next to us and by a microphone!! We could not sleep the whole night because of that cricket... haha!
One of my other favorite things about the hotel was the food there! They had the prettiest outside eating area. Every morning we had breakfast there. They always gave us fresh fruit and the most amazing breakfast. We had banana pancakes, fresh tortillas, huevos rancheros, fresh fruit, everything was sooo good! For dinner, they had 5 course dinners and we loved everything they gave us! I kept getting attached to all of the places we stayed and never wanted to leave any of them!!

Our first full day in San Ignacio we went to the Saturday Market in town. We browsed all of the booths and ended up buying a hammock and some fresh coconut juice (which came in a plastic baggy with a straw), and pupusas.
Then we took the bus to Xunantunich, a Mayan ruin site. Once we got off the bus, we took a hand cranked ferry across a river(you have to do that to get to the ruins). The man cranking the ferry was so old and so cute! Then we hiked up the looong hill (as other people who had taken a tour bus on the ferry zoomed by us). Once we got to the top of the hill we spotted some howler monkeys! Then we walked all around and up and down the ruins. It was so amazing to see so many ruins and think that they were built so long ago and still standing. We were in awe.

The next day we went cave tubing in Jaguar Paw. We signed up for a tour and were with one other couple, from Canada. When we got to the spot (about an hour from San Ignacio) Nate and I went to go rent some water shoes. Just my luck, the only kind of shoes they had were Crocs, my least favorites shoes in the whole world!! We had no option so I chose between sparkly pink crocs that were too small or camo green ones. I chose the camo. We hiked on a little trail for about 45 mins. to get to the spot we would start floating. On the way, we stopped at a tree and our tour guide said it was full of termites and that Mayans used to eat them. Everyone else ate one so of course I had to! I I shouldn't have trusted the tour guide who said it tasted like mint. It was gross and tasted like dirt. Then we got to a place where we could jump off some rocks. It was fun and the water felt perfect and was the prettiest blue! We hopped on our tubes, put on headlamps, and started to float. The floating is actually pretty slow, it was nice and relaxing. We floated through 2 caves. The first one was about and hour long and the second one was about 1 1/2 hours long. It was really cool floating through the caves, but my favorite part was actually when we were out of the caves because it was sooo pretty! At one part, our tour guide had us get out of the tubes and climb up the side of one of the caves. We had to lay all the way down to squeeze under one part, kind of freaky! Then we hiked up to this little area, the guide wanted us to scare people below. We waited and waited but no one came so we hiked back down. Kind of a strange detour... After the second cave we floated down aways to the part where we got off. We had lunch and then headed back to San Ignacio. This was our last full day in San Ignacio and at Maya Mountain Lodge and we were sad to leave!