Back on the mainland, as I said, there's very little to Punta Gorda... It's a one gas station, couple of resteraunts kinda place (population 6,000). We went there basically to get as far from civilization as possible, and to see where the road ends... we drove to the south west corner of belize off-road in our rental car (rally style... it was pretty fun), and did day and night hiking out in the middle of nowhere with a 'native' guide.

There are, however, quite lovely Mayan ruins throughout the land, and the further south and west you go, the more there seem to be. The 'night hike' we took was actually in an area where there were supposed to be zip lines and bridges through the trees... we drove all the way out there only to find that the last hurricaine took them all out, and now there were just remnants... But the river that ran under ex-zip-lines pours out of a huge cave near the top of a hill... it's quite spectacular... and our 'native' guide took us to the cave system's 'back entrance' waaay up in the hills, where there was a tiny hole in a cave that I birthed myself through to emerge into an underground cave rivaling anything you saw in Lord Of The Rings (no shit). It was apparently an archealogical site that had just been mapped but not really explored, so I saw a couple of very rough and fairly uninterestingancient artifacts in the cave (again, no shit). I'm proud to say I didn't take the broken clay bowl piece that I found, which anyone visiting my house would look at and go "eh", and instead left it for science. But the underground caves were very cool. Belize is cool for caves...

Another great thing as you certainly know is that ENGLISH is the official language of Belize (unlike the U.S.) so everyone speaks it... even the 'natives' who are literally living in cinder block houses and sometimes HUTS. Yes. Huts. (the further from the city you get the more you see this).

We drove to the Guatemalan border (not so interesting), of which there is only one road because the Guatemalans are bastards and no one likes them (there are also only two roads from mexico into Guatemala. No body likes them... they should sulk). Near the border there are towns called Santa Elena/San Ignacio... all quite uninteresting, but there are hanging suspension bridges that you can walk through the 'jungle' and see some lovely waterfalls from. Not worth driving there for that, but if you're going to the border anyway, it's worth a stop.

About half way to the Guatemalan border, there there's an area called Caves Branch River and a 'resort' called Jaguar Paw. There are fabled to be Jaguar out in this area, although we never saw any. but what we did find we loved... That was CAVE TUBING.

Ah cave tubing.

You see, there are all these underground aquifers pulsing with tons of water because this is, after all, the tropics. But belize is quite jagged, with small, sharp peaks and underground caves, and what happens is the ground collapses all over the place, and the aquifer is exposed... So what is a tourist such as yourself to do?