TOUR HIGHLIGHTS

Xunantunich Mayan ruins are located on top of a ridge next to the Mopan River. The site is compact and so is easy to walk around and explore with your guide. As with many ancient ruins, it can be hard to decipher what you are seeing and understand what structures were for. This is why a good guide is so helpful as they can explain how things would have been and help you get a better understanding of this amazing Mayan City.

You will visit several stops around the site with the climb of the pyramid El Castillo the highlight of the tour. The pyramid is over 130 feet (30 m) high and has impressive stucco friezes around part of it that depict stories from Mayan mythology.

On the way back to the ship, the tour stops at a local restaurant for a Belizean style lunch with Marimba band. 

PRE-TOUR

If booked as a cruise excursion, the tours start at many station points along the quay, your ticket should explain roughly where your point will be. Then it is a matter of finding your tour name amongst the many, many, tours on offer! This is not as hard as it might sound, they are all well signed and there are many people around who can offer assistance. Once you’ve checked in, we waited a short while before being transferred to the coach for our journey out to the ruins which 2.5-3 hours.

JOURNEY TO THE RUINS

Xunantunich is a long way from the cruise port, in fact, it’s less than a mile from the Guatemala border. So be prepared for the long coach ride and bring some snacks and drinks with you. On the way out to the ruins, the guide provided information about the country and the ruins that we were headed out to see. Including explaining why all the graves we could see were above ground, if you dig more than a foot down then water seeps up.

On our journey to the ruins, our coach blew a tyre and a new coach was needed. We were impressed with the guides ability to make everything work and keep us seeing all that was on the itinerary despite this issue. It also meant we had the added bonus of seeing a couple of magnificent tigers that were being transported on the back of a lorry at the petrol station we stopped at to await our replacement coach.

Once almost at the ruins, you will get to cross the Mopan River on a hand-cranked ferry. The coach cannot travel on this, so you will walk on and off the ferry and then be taken the final distance to the ruins in mini-buses.

XUNANTUNICH MAYAN RUINS

Once up to the visitor’s centre for the ruins, you will walk the short distance the rest of the way up to the ruins The guide will explain several aspects of the layout of the ruins which is made up of six major plazas and more than 25 temples and palaces. They might also including, the story of the “Stone Lady” which is what Xunantunich means in Mayan. It comes from stories from people who have claimed to see the ghost of a woman dressed completely in white, with fire-red glowing eyes, that appears in front of El Castillo, climbs the stairs and then disappears into a stone wall.

CLIMB EL CASTILLO

The climb to the top of El Castillo is definitely the highlight of the visit to Xunantunich.  The tallest pyramid on the site, El Castillo (the Castle), stands 130 feet tall with detailed frieze carvings on the east and west sides and dates back to about 800 AD. From the top you get a great view across the site as well as views out to Guatemala just to the west.

All told, you spend around one and a half to two hours exploring the ruins.

VISITOR’S CENTRE

At the entrance to the ruins is a small visitor’s centre. Inside you can see a model of the entire site, a few Mayan artefacts and a mock up and some explanation of the famous Mayan Ball Courts with their hoops up the side of the court on a slope.

HOW TO BOOK THE TOUR

For Royal Caribbean, from your reservations page on the website or through your Crown and Anchor account, you can goto to the excursions section and find this tour. You can enter the number of tickets you want to purchase and your tickets for the excursion will be in your stateroom when you board the ship.

WHAT TO BRING WITH YOU

For our tour with Royal Caribbean, we could leave items on the bus between stops, so if you do the same tour then at each stop, we would suggest you should bring as little as possible and leave backpacks and bigger bags on the coach or back on the cruise ship.

Things to remember to bring are:

• Your ship access card and government-issued photo identification
• Water: The tour lasts around two hours and can be very warm, however, you can purchase drinks at the Mayan ruins.
• Camera! You’re allowed to bring cameras and phones and there will be lots of opportunities for photos and videos.
• Insect repellent: The area is a natural home to bugs which might see you as lunch, so bug spray is worth bringing.
• Sturdy/grippy shoes to walk around the ruins, the ground is not especially rough, but it is not the same as a paved path. Climbing the pyramid in anything other than sturdy shoes is not advisable.

CHECK-IN

You need to arrive at your assigned meeting point within the port compound around 10-15 minutes before your tour is due to depart. Check your excursion tickets to identify the precise meeting point for your tour, once in the vicinity, all the tours are well signed and you should find “Xunantunich & Marimba Lunch” quite easily and be able to make contact with your guide.

WAS IT WORTH IT?

We feel this tour is a good value for what you get, though the time spent on the coach is unavoidably long due to the distance of the ruins from the port. It was well organised and the guide we got was great, especially when the coach tyre blew and we all thought the whole tour might be abandoned. The time at the ruins was enough to see a good chunk of the available sights and the guide described the places we stopped well. The ride across the river in a hand-cranked ferry is an interesting experience and the lunch was simple but tasty.