Excursions Part 1

For some reason, I am having difficulty posting pictures. I managed to get some posted, so we'll go with this as an abbreviated version, and if I can get more up, I will. I have tried to post several times and once it started having problems, it erased everything I had managed to upload to the post already, and I don't want to risk losing these pics yet again. So, here we go.

This is Roatan, Honduras. It is a beautiful island just north of the mainland, and on the second largest reef system in the world (behind, only, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia). It is long and skinny (that is the technical term, I'm sure), so at several high points along the middle of the island (the mountains are kind of like a spine down the center), you can see ocean on both sides at once. Beautiful. Did I say that already?

The water looks like shades of turquoise, but when you step into it, it is as clear as glass.

Maddie loved the beaches. Who doesn't love sand, sea, and sun? And coconuts.

Here are two pictures of a jellyfish we saw swimming around just off a pier.

Our trip was similar to "Planes, Trains, and Automobiles" because we were in every type of transportation: airplanes, cruise ship, little boats, buses, vans, train, taxi, truck. But, we didn't have everything going wrong. Everything actually seemed to go right! This tour bus took us from a banana plantation and a train ride (more pictures on that later) to a river where we were spotting all kinds of interesting wildlife from our boat as we cruised along. On the way, our bus driver saw some sloths hanging around in the trees above us, so we got out to take some pictures. The sloths are so small, that you have to blow the pictures up really big to see them, so I'm not going to post them. I did print them out in 8x10 so I can cut them down to 4x6 and they look pretty great.

Here are a couple of pictures from a tour that took us from the furthest East lock on the Panama Canal, up to the Gatun Lake (a huge manmade lake partway through the lock system) to spot wildlife. We saw bunches of monkeys and some more sloths, along with interesting birds. No crocodiles or snakes, much to Madeline's relief. Anyway, the lock was amazing. The picture above shows the largest size of ship allowed through. It has two feet of clearance on either side. They are going to build a parallel lock system next to this on that will accomodate much larger ships. The actual gates (as shown below) that operate the locks are original from the early 1900s.

Here is what a bunch of bananas looks like when picked from the tree. Each bunch weighs 100 lbs. The trees have to be tied upright to support the weight. When the bananas are cut down, the entire tree is cut down. Each tree grows one bunch of bananas in 9 months. The bananas are always picked green. We watched, at the banana plantation, the workers cut these bunches down to five or six bananas per bunch, weigh them, weed out the "bad" bananas, wash them in huge holding tanks of water. There were two ladies whose entire job was to put a sticker on each bunch of bananas to come along the conveyor. The bunch pictured above is around 3.5 - 4 feet tall.