Eight cyclists scrambled up the moonlit stone steps of Caana, Caracol's tallest temple, to assemble under its curved ceiling of night sky, contemplate its 1,300-year-old ghosts, and practise the Downward Facing Dog. Yellow, our group's bike mechanic, sits a few steps above us with four headlamps strapped to his head. He illuminates Taj's movements as she patiently guides our wisecracking group from one yoga pose to another.
At the beginning of the eighth century, about 150,000 people, 30,000 structures and 88 square kilometres of bustling Mayan civilization would have surrounded us. Now, only howler monkeys and the dark, tropical jungle of Belize bear witness to our awkward attempts to raise our tail bones. It's taken five days and almost 500 kilometres of pedalling to get to this remote mountain plateau and we're goofy and giddy, but not untouched by the sacredness of this place. The ghosts will make sure of that.
"Did any of you sleep up there?" asks a groundskeeper the next morning, sternly motioning up at the pyramid's site. This is a touchy topic for Michael de Jong, the Toronto-based organizer of this "Temple To Temple" bike event. He negotiated for six months with the archeology department of Belize's National Institute of Culture and History to gain permission for our group of 30 cyclists and support staff to camp here.
Two riders, Anthony and Stephanie, pause in their packing, and the groundskeeper shakes his head. "If you sleep up there," he warns, "your parts will fall off!"
Everyone cracks up, though Anthony looks as if he's not sure if this joke might apply to his bike or his body.
This January was the first of what de Jong hopes will be an annual 750-kilometre tour of Belize. The entrepreneur, adventurer and founder of the 100-day Tour d'Afrique, a bike trip from Cairo to Cape Town, created the temple event to be both a competitive adventure race and a fully supported tour. The task of shepherding our assortment of professional racers, triathletes-in-training, two-wheeled travellers and bike commuters has kept him hopping.
"I liked the idea of bringing different kinds of cyclists together," de Jong said before the race. He also wanted them to explore Belize's Route of the Mayas.
True to its name, the race started at the Acropolis-like Lubaantun temple in the country's south, then headed northwest to Caracol in the Mayan Mountains. Rather than have his racers take a direct route on two-lane asphalt, de Jong had devised a mixed-surface course that sent riders zigzagging across this small (280 kilometres long and 100 kilometres wide) Central American country on dirt, gravel and paved roads.
Our seven-day Belize sampler would take us through Mayan villages, banana and orange groves, jaguar reserves and pine forests during the day; and into jungle campgrounds, river lodges, beachfront hotels and archeological sites overnight.
Like Caracol, the Lubaantun site stands empty now, but ethnic Mayans still live and farm in the rolling hills that surround it. A quiet network of red-dirt rural roads not only offers cyclists access to hidden communities such as San Pedro Columbia, Conejo and Blue Creek (where we camped for the first night), but allows villagers to bus into coastal towns to sell their hand-crafted baskets, jewellery and needlework.
Belize's shoreline also attracts its share of international visitors. Towns such as Placencia and Hopkins offer relaxed all-inclusive and backpacker-style amenities and act as a departure point for snorkellers, divers, kite-surfers and fishers. They use the hundreds of nearby palm-treed islets to access the Western Hemisphere's longest barrier reef.
The closest our group came to island ambience was a couple of hammocks in front of Hopkins's Jaguar Reef Lodge, where we stayed on our second night. We grudgingly left the eco-retreat's white-sand beach the next morning to turn inland, and happily discovered that heading away from the Caribbean did not lead us away from water.
