San Ignacio daytrip - Belize Zoo

Lesson #1 today: when you go to a zoo in the rain, the pictures will be boring. Anyway, here's the national bird of Belize - the Toucan.

Belize Zoo is somewhere in between Belize City and Belmopan. Most people think that Belize City is the capital (I know I did), but it is actually “only” the largest city as well as the business center. When a hurricane in the 60’s more or less destroyed downtown Belize City, the government decided to move the capital to a small village called Belmopan.

At the time it was around 15 families living there, and some people say that there is no more living there now! Seems like someone forgot to tell the government officials that there jobs would be moving or something, because most people who works there still lives in Belize City. The upside to that is that there are lots of buses going between the cities, so doing the daytrip ourselves was very easy.

Belize Zoo has a slightly weird background. Sometime in the ‘80s they shot a wildlife movie in Belize. When the movie was done, 17 of the animals used for the film was half-domesticated, and their caretaker during the movie knew they would not make it on their own in the jungle. So she took it upon herself to create a safe environment for the animals, and what better way than a zoo!

Today the zoo has expanded of course, but all the inhabitants are animals that has had a hard time in the wild and would not make it otherwise. There’s several animals (including a jaguar!) that people has had as pets, but they were somehow mistreated.

It’s not a “sensational” kind of zoo, like San Diego or Busch Gardens, but rather what I would like to call an “eco-zoo”, focusing very much on educating people about ecology and the animals’ role in maintaining our habitat. I guess that is very useful for the (many!) schoolkids who come there, but for me it was more about the animals!

The obvious cool ones is of course the Jaguar and the Toucan bird, both sometimes mentioned as the national animal, but although both the crocs (except for a baby one and they don’t really count :-)) and the puma was hiding from the rain, we saw many other lovely animals. (But then I had already seen crocs in the wild, so... Nyah, nyah nyah, Raquel!)

One of my favorites was the Baird’s Tapirs I think. Looks like a large pig, but with a snout that looks that is a short version of an elephant’s trunk. People say the tapir is related to the horse and the rhino, but form the way they were using the snouts, I am convinced they are related to elephants!

Since this was our only day of rain, I was first somewhat disappointed that we did not postpone for another day, but on the bus we met Esteban, and without him, our experience of San Ignacio would have been nothing like what it became!