After breakfast, we all piled into The Jungle Bus. It is a splendidly painted vehicle. Perfect for its territory! Here, it is parked in the yard outside of Mr. and Mrs. Bo’s house.

Mrs. Bo showed everyone how to make corn tortillas the traditional Mayan way, from drying and husking the corn to rubbing the kernels off the cob. To save time, she had already heated and soaked the corn overnight, so another batch would be ready to put through the hand mill.

It’s tough grinding those kernels down. Most people took a hand at forming the tortillas that Mrs. Bo then cooked over the comal, a traditional metal plate that goes over the fire. Think of it as a griddle.

As the last were cooking, Mrs. Bo’s daughter peeled some hard-boiled eggs and put them on the table with a wonderful tomato mixture that we had with the warm tortillas. Yummm!

We then headed just down the road to the cooperative mill, and while others were photographing the ladies grinding their corn by a simple belt-powered machine, I found some tools over on

A couple of our group has come in, and we thought they would enjoy going to the National Park. It’s a ways away, so not something that we generally do with the workshop, but still, it’s fun and a beautiful feature of this part of Belize. In fact, one of the people had it on her “to do” list.

We piled into what we affectionately call The Jungle Bus, recently freshened up for our workshop. You’ll meet it in a later blog. We stopped at a main junction called, of all things, The Dump. It is actually very clean, so I’m not sure of the origin of the name. I couldn’t resist doing a photo of the gas station building. If you look carefully, you’ll see the thatched roof of a traditionally-built house out behind.

After lunch at the park headquarters, we walked the path down to Rio Blanco.

After getting up early to do some work before breakfast, Arnie and I headed off on horseback with Santiago to Santa Rosa Cave, a so-called “dry” cave. We started off on the dirt road out of Cotton Tree on Prince and Jackie who dutifully followed Stephanie.

In fact, every time I tried to get Jackie to speed up, he put on his mule shoes. It took some doing when I tried to come alongside Santiago to ask a question or just listen to his talking about the various plants and their healing powers.

I took off my flip-flops, lashed them to the saddle, and rode as close to bareback as was going to happen this round. Arnie and I are like the shoemaker’s children. We do photographs of our participants, but we don’t have that many of ourselves.

I brought up my camera. Hmmm. When was the last time you photographed from the saddle? Trying to keep everything focused and level is …