Belize Day 3: to Caracol, May 29, 2025

 Antiquities Day 1!. Up at 6 a.m., and ready at 6:30 for the longish drive S and then SW to Caracol, with Julio Tut, our guide. The Belize - Caracol road is still under construction; the idea, apparently, is to take cruise passengers from Belize City to the Mayan ruins by bus, through that seems like a long drive to me. 

After passing Mountain Pine, we stopped to see and photograph a beautiful Laughing Falcon, perched on a high dead tree.

Apparently a million dollar bridge, but not done yet. 

Bridge under construction

As seems to be true elsewhere in Belize, the roads are either recently-completed and excellent, or unimproved and execrable. About a third of our trip was on the latter. Nevertheless we arrived; the site itself is also still under construction, with the visitor’s center and museum still incomplete. The Mayan pyramids were finished a couple of millennia ago; of which more anon. And the oropendola colony had already moved on…

Belize Day 2; May 28, 2025

Up at 5 a.m. to do a pre-breakfast birdwalk. Saw two species of parrots (red-lored and white-fronted), a black capped trogon, and miscellaneous small fry. 

After a decent breakfast, we boarded Julio's brother's car and drove 4 miles up the Macal river, to start our canoe trip. I was initially confused, thinking we'd paddle upstream against a steady current, just so we could return to the car, but instead Julio said he was driving, sitting in the stern while Marjorie and I kibitzed. And so we paddled 4 miles downriver, back to the resort. A very pleasant little jungle river.

Saw Amazon and Green Kingfishers, Neotropic Cormorants, Northern Rough-winged Swallows, river otters, and a lot of Russet-napped Wood Rails, which I didn’t at all expect.

That afternoon, we repaired to our air-conditioned room, so I could struggle with Affinity Photo 2. More anon.

Day 1: to Belize

Up at 4:50 p.m. to catch the 5:30 airport shuttle. Far too early, as always. Flight left 7:57 for Miami, and we have a 2 hour connection to Belize. Miami airport Is looking cleaner than I remember (from a long time ago). Found our business class seat allows us into the Admiral’s Club, and a free Bloody Mary.

On-time take-off, and thanks to Belize being GMT+7 instead of +5, we should land before we set off. Yay! 

We didn’t stop at the Belize Zoo, but took a turn-off at the Monky Bay Reserve, to break up the long, hot, dusty ride up to Chrystal Paradise resort. There, Julio our guide found us ruddy ground doves, tody flycatchers, great kiskadees, social flycatchers, spot-breasted wrens and sulphur-bellied flycatchers.

Sulphur-bellied flycatcher 

Black-headed saltator

Julio had some interesting stories about the Modern Mennonites, who came to Belize from Canada in 1958. Apparently they didn’t like Hispanics, and so their town is called Spanish Lookout, which originated as a warning. Neither very Canadian nor very Anabaptist, I would have said. But maybe the two congenital politenesses cancel each other out. We also saw a regular Amish buggy; not all the Mennonites are modern. 

Crystal Paradise, just south of San Ignacio is a beautifully kept resort, and the time before dinner we whiled away watching the vast number of birds that visit their feeders. I’m still trying to make my graphics software work on my iPad — I decided to leave behind the laptop because it might have drawn the attention of the Trumpkin CBP goons — but the learning curve for Affinity Photo 2 on the iPad is steep. Still, to tide you over, here’s a red-legged honeycreeper. 

And, of course, one can’t show too many pictures of Collared Aracaris!

Collared Aracari

We collapsed into bed, after a passable chicken dinner, at 7 p.m.; I was helped by two antihistamines I took to quell the itch from the fire-ants I stood on the day we left. 

Day 26, August 19: Cape Town

 A much better day. Sue at the Grovesvenor hotel cooked us a delicious breakfast, and then we walked across the Simon's Town cemetery to the Boulders Beach penguin reserve. And penguins there were a plenty. One was waddling around the entrance booth. Others were walking around the reserve, making huge amounts of noise, and posing photogenically. 

They were completely comfortable with humans, and even with my 75 -300 mm lens I could take really close shots.

They showed very convincingly why they were once called jackass penguins.

Some were actually in the water, fishing.

Delightful little birds. Other lifers: Kelp Gulls...

...a Karoo Prinia...

and, not new, but a nice shot of a Helmeted Guineafowl, in the front garden of a house adjacent to the cemetery. .

Day 24, August 17: Victoria Falls

 We woke at 5 a.m., only to discover the power was out. We struggled with flashlights and eventually I went downstairs to see if I could get outside. All the exterior doors were locked; we were imprisoned. I tried the key they'd given us, but it didn't open the doors. 

At around 5:30 a.m., the owners turned up. They struggled for about 10 minutes with the front door, eventually managed to get the lock to cooperate, and then turned on the generator, much too late  to provide hot water for a shower, but at least making coffee possible. I told Her Highness that locking people into a building was a feature of a prison, not a lodge. She argued she had shown me how to unlock the front door (she hadn't, and in any case the key didn't turn when I tried it). I told her I adamantly refused to be locked in for another night, and would sleep out on the deck if necessary. She said go ahead', but I noticed after we returned from our safari drive all the locks had been freshly oiled, and turned smoothly, and there was a key in one of the doors. The squeaky wheel quite literally got the oil this time.  

The real problem, of course, was the antiquated locks, which had no option to lock the outside while allowing exit from the inside. I am sure these violate all sorts of safety regulations -- locking people into a building has a long and terrible history -- but who knows in the corrupt state of Zimbabwe?

The madame of the house insisted that power outages are rare in Victoria Falls. Apparently the corruptocrats spare VF because it's a tourist Mecca. However, this is the weekend of the international SADC summit, and local theory is they choked off the power to VF to keep it on in Harare and con the local dictators of neighboring countries into thinking that Zimbabwe has a functioning electric grid. 

Anyway, the safari drive was surprisingly good, probably because we changed plans on the fly and drove down a long grassy valley and not through the miambo. Some critters, photos taken with my 75 - 300 mm lens because I broke the UV filter on my 200-800 mm and can't get it off in a lodge room...

Spotted hyena

Southern yellow billed hyena

Blue waxbill

Natal spurfowl.

Dinner, at Dusty Roads, was OK. They were pushing native township cuisine, which features spiced meat stews and rather crunchy, tart green kale-like stuff -- not bad at all. Oh, and caterpillars, which I refused. Talked to the maitresse-d, who extolled the virtues of the previous white hegemony and the ineptitude and corruption of black rule. Honestly can't say she's wrong about the latter, though I suspect Ian Smith's crowd were not quite as beneficent as she claims. But Zimbabwe can't go on like this, with an exploding population, massive unemployment and crumbling infrastructure. Harare probably has a population of 2.5 million, but no one knows. Newcomers won't admit they live there, because they needed permission from the gummint to migrate in from rural provinces and didn't have it. 

A country with incessant sunshine should be able to manage solar power. 

Day 19, August 12: Aberfoyle Lodge, Honde Valley

 A day from Hell. It started OK; we checked out of Seldomseen Lodge, only slightly singed by the charge for wine, and birded the Mambo for a couple of hours...A black-headed oriole...

A crowned hornbill

....and the ever popular Retz's helmetshrike.

...fortified afterward by some bacon-and-egg sandwiches ken and Sue had obligingly made.Then we headed north for Mutarazi falls, which Frank had visited 10 years previously. They are supposedly the second-highest in Africa. Beyond Mutes, the road through the pine plantations was heavily rutted dirt, and it took over an hour-an-a-half to get to the entrance...

Where we discover the entire place had changed. In 2019 they built a zipline and a skywalk (rope-bridge) over the falls. The gummint wanted $50 to cross the skywalk (special high price for international visitors!). We asked to walk out the 500 m to the view point, but all we could see was a small stream coursing over boulders and disappearing over the edge of the mountain. I wouldn't say I was disappointed, since I expected very little, and had already characterized this is Frank's lamest idea yet. Frank eagerly encouraged us to try the second viewpoint, a mere 800 m hike away. I resoundingly refused.  So Marjorie and I chugged down some vodka and soda concoction, Zimbabwe priced at $2 each, and then clambered back into the bus, The drivers discovered the real entrance, used by the Zimbabwean hordes. Just as rutted, but significantly shorter. 

It was nearly dark when we drove through the tea-plantations to Aberfoyle Lodge, a rather beautiful hotel founded, it turns out, by an Irishman, Bill Igoe. Bill had to sell out in the 1970s and then part of the property was a grabbed by Mugabe's goons. But the hotel, now under the management of a British company, survived, and is being managed by Ken and Sue's daughter and her English husband.

Day 16, August 9: Seldomseen Lodge

We birded York Lodge at 7 a.m. and saw pied crows, miombo and variable sunbirds, turacos, African green dove and red-eyed dove, palm swift. Others saw white barbet, but I didn't.

pied crows

African green pigeon

arrow-marked babbler

We left for the Highlands about 9 a.m. The Highlands really aren't highlands at all; they're where the Zimbabwe plateau descends towards the Mozambique lowlands, in a series of valleys and small mountain ranges.

 It was a long, boring slow drive along the R5. At about 100 km, we stopped at something called the Halfway House, and saw house sparrows, Southern black tits, and weavers. There were also some very old and interesting steam tractors, built some time after 1914, and shipped laboriously via ship to Cape Town, and then on land up to what was then Southern Rhodesia. 

spectacled weaver

southern black tit

Also, eastern miombo sunbird

We lunched about 2 p.m. just north of the town of Mutare. By this time I was thoroughly sick of York Lodge's sandwiches -- they had made about four times too many. However, wandering around the tiny park,  I saw a Southern hyliota, which made up for the sandwiches and the stray dogs roaming the picnic location.

Mutare itself was a busy little town. We were delayed about 30 minutes because FunGuy, our navigator, had to stop and pick up Pepsi and food, something he could have done earlier. Then he directed the driver to take a wrong turn, and so we didn't get into Seldomseen Lodge until 3:30 pm. Our lodging, in a little detached cottage called Twinsprings, had a bit of a climb up to the main lodge, but in compensation we had a lot of privacy. The cottage itself was spartan, cold, with no dried coffee. But I cured the cold by lighting a fire.

An evening bird walk near the lodge, and through Ken (our host's) shrub nursery. We heard Roberts' warbler and the orange ground thrush, a highland specialty.

Also, variable sunbird

flat-tailed drongo

white-eared barbet