An adventure traveler—whose motto is If not now, when?—ditches her worries about the economy and seizes the moment to search for the elusive cat in Belize.
See photos from the trip.If you are on a quest to track jaguars in the jungles of Belize, you could do worse than to contemplate your mission while sitting on top of the Jaguar Temple in the Mayan ruins of Lamanai, on the northern side of this Central American country.
Dawn is a particularly fine hour up here. The sun starts to play on the broken limestone steps below, and if you crane your head to the east, you can spy the lagoon of the New River. Listen to the birds: The chachalacas are always the first up in the jungle, but the brown jays are the land’s guardians and they are cawing, alerting everyone and everything to your presence.
If you’ve already made your assault on the nearby High Temple and its almost 110 feet of steeply raked stairs, skipping up the Jaguar Temple is like climbing a Mayan wedding cake decorated with lichen and moss and two distinctive stone jaguar faces.
Some guides titillate tourists by telling them the temple was used as a site for bloodletting ceremonies, but on this particular March morning, it is the site for a midlife woman to lean back in her sweat-stained clothes, study the robin’s egg blue sky and wonder:
When in the hell is that cat going to show up?
I am not normally a cat person. Then again, the jaguar isn’t a normal cat. To the early Mayans, the jaguar connoted power, and the rosettes on its pelt symbolized the night stars. Sleek, mysterious, beautiful, the jaguar eludes the very species that once worshipped it.
Smart cat. While still sometimes hunted, jaguars face an even bigger threat in loss of habitat, a decline conservationists hope to reverse by establishing a jaguar corridor to stretch from Mexico to Argentina. Giving the cat the room it needs to roam and reproduce helps the whole cycle of life in the forest, right down to the leafcutter ant. Save the jaguar and you save the planet.
When I started the research for this trip, I was in need of a little salvation myself, surrounded by people who felt just as I did: that, somehow, when we weren’t looking, our own lives had slipped onto an endangered list. Perhaps the only good thing about an economy that looks like a big-cat scratching post is that you start thinking about what really matters: time, love, life, travel.
