THIS COUNTRY SURPRISED ME!! (Belize)

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:10]I'd heard there's a country in Central America with over a thousand ancient pyramids, but few people have ever heard of it, and even fewer have ever seen them because they're not in cities.

[00:00:21]They're hidden deep in the jungle, largely untouched and many undiscovered.

[00:00:27]No roads, no signs, just miles of dense rainforest and whatever's inside it. And the deeper you go, the harder it is to turn back. But somewhere out there are ruins that have been standing for thousands of years. Still holding secrets no one fully understands.

[00:00:47]So I decided to go find them. Not just to see the pyramids, but to meet the people who still carry the legacy of the Maya today. Because deep in Bleise's Mayan territory, far from the tourist trails, there are communities keeping an ancient culture alive in the modern world. And to get there, I'd have to go further than most people ever do.

[00:01:17]After landing in Bise, picking up my rental car, and spending the night trying to get some rest in Biz City, I set off early the next morning and began driving straight towards the far north of the country. A journey that would take around 3 hours. We've been on this dirt track for about an hour now, and it is amazing the scenery. There are literally just fields of sugarcane. So, I'm heading north to the coast and the border with Mexico first because I've heard that there are some secret ruins there that not a lot of people know about. So, I'm very anxious to get there and see what it looks like.

[00:02:01]Once I'd turned off the main highway, the road became more of a dirt track with quite big rocks and gravel. I hadn't rented a 4x4, so I already started doubting whether or not I was going to make it. But little did I know that was just the beginning of my worries.

[00:02:18]Oh my god. No way.

[00:02:22]It looks like I'm going to have to drive over this road, which is kind of like half a river. I've never done this before, but I'm just I'm going to have to go for it. Ah.

[00:02:34]Oh my god. This is crazy.

[00:02:36]Whoa.

[00:02:38]Oh my god. Whoa.

[00:02:42]Woo. I've never done anything like that before. I mean, to get to this ruin, honestly, it's quite the effort.

[00:02:57]After what felt like an eternity, I finally made it to the town of Sartinea.

[00:03:01]Right at the northern tip of the country, you can see Mexico from across the water. It's a sleepy fishing village of around 3,000 residents. So, I decided to grab some breakfast and ask the locals about this lost pyramid that I was searching for.

[00:03:23]Got a local breakfast. Scrambled eggs, little fry jacks, beans, just to refuel before I continue my journey.

[00:03:35]>> Are you Raquel?

[00:03:36]>> Yes, I am.

[00:03:36]>> Oh, okay. Beautiful. Very nice breakfast.

[00:03:39]>> The coiner. Really nice breakfast. Thank you.

[00:03:41]>> And you speak Spanish?

[00:03:42]>> Yes. In the village, everybody speaks Spanish.

[00:03:44]>> How come?

[00:03:45]>> Our ancestor like my grandpa and his papa, they come from Mexico.

[00:03:50]>> Ah. Any Mayan?

[00:03:52]>> Uh, yes.

[00:03:53]>> Yes.

[00:03:54]>> Yes. my grandma and mother's side.

[00:03:57]>> Oh, yeah.

[00:03:58]>> Yes. She was a Maya.

[00:03:59]>> Oh, wow. Right.

[00:04:00]>> Like a Yuk Maya.

[00:04:01]>> Yucate Maya.

[00:04:02]>> Yes.

[00:04:03]>> Well, I'm heading to uh try to find some Mayan ruins.

[00:04:07]>> I've heard there are some >> near the sea.

[00:04:11]>> Yes.

[00:04:11]>> Oh, okay. Cool. Thank you. Thanks so much.

[00:04:14]>> Yes. Okay.

[00:04:16]>> Well, that was great. I'm wellfed.

[00:04:20]Checked out the town, which is incredible.

[00:04:24]And now I'm going to continue my journey to try and find these pyramids. Let's hope that we get there.

[00:04:35]Feeling more refreshed and with my energy back, I continued my journey. And soon I was on a narrow dirt track that would hopefully lead me to the ancient Mayan complex of Seros.

[00:04:52]Okay, so I just got here and I'm starting to walk through the complex at the moment. I can just see kind of mounds of rubble and I think these are part of the Mayan ruins that have just kind of been taken over by the growth of the trees and the jungle. And this place is right on the waterfront. So I'm just going to walk through and try and find some of these secret Mayan pyramids.

[00:05:21]Whoa.

[00:05:23]I think I found the first pyramid from here. It looks incredible.

[00:05:38]Wow. This is incredible. This pyramid is just here all by itself. There's nobody here. It's got these amazing faces.

[00:05:47]carved into it. I've never seen anything like this. Just looks so majestic standing here in front of the coast. And that wasn't by accident. This was like a thriving coastal trading community. And it was built here strategically to control and benefit from trade routes connecting the Caribbean coast to the inland Mayan cities. This city dates back to 400 BC. sort of late pre-classic period, which means it was already flourishing and developing more than 2,000 years ago.

[00:06:26]The view from up here is amazing. You got the whole of the bay. On the other side is Mexico. You could just really feel the history in a place like this.

[00:06:39]You can imagine in the ancient times the Mayan traders coming in on canoes, trading things like jade, pottery, obsidian. You just have to use your imagination to think about what it would have been like in those times.

[00:06:54]This is the most insane place. There's literally a beautiful secluded little beach here.

[00:07:02]Palm trees, white sand, amazing water, secret mine ruins. I don't think I've been anywhere this amazing before.

[00:07:20]You have got to be kidding me. There's an even bigger pyramid here. I did not expect this at all. Wow. I have to climb this one because the view from the top is just going to be amazing.

[00:07:37]It's quite tough. They definitely built these pyramids tall, but it's worth it to see the views.

[00:07:50]My god.

[00:07:56]Wow.

[00:07:58]I made it.

[00:08:07]Standing at the top of this pyramid, I really feel a sense of awe and humility.

[00:08:14]Awe at the sheer vision and intelligence of a civilization that could engineer cities like this thousands of years ago.

[00:08:23]And humility because it kind of makes you realize how temporary power can be.

[00:08:30]Cities like this flourished and they rose and then eventually they just faded into the earth like this one did.

[00:08:55]I just want to say a huge thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video.

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[00:10:32]The next morning, I woke up with a different kind of energy. I felt more confident than ever for the next part of my journey, which would take me to a town called Orange Walk in the west of the country in search of one of Ble's most ancient Maya cities, Lamini, buried deep in Ble's lush rainforest. But there was just one issue.

[00:10:58]I've heard that there are some ruins deep in the jungle here in Bise and I have to get a boat apparently for an hour down the river to reach them. So I've come to the landing point. Just arranging to get a boat over now and hopefully I can find these ruins.

[00:11:20]Lamini means submerged crocodile. And the only way to reach this hidden city is by water. taking a boat down the New River and keeping an eye out for the very creature that the ruins take their name from.

[00:11:45]That is really terrifying.

[00:11:48]He got scared.

[00:11:53]After about an hour, we finally arrived at the landing. But there was still a hike through the jungle to reach the temple.

[00:12:15]This is the proper rainforest now. So jungly.

[00:12:20]And I think the ruins are through here somewhere. But all you can hear is just the sound of nature, birds. I even think I can hear some howler monkeys. This place was just insane. Imagine building a city shrouded in the jungle.

[00:12:41]It's so humid. Like the air is just so thick and dense here.

[00:12:49]I was just looking up at the trees and I spotted a family of monkeys and it's so funny cuz they're all sleeping. So, they're all sort of sleepily draped over the branches and there's a little baby with one of them. It's so cute.

[00:13:09]Just walking through somewhere which was inhabited more than 3,000 years ago was already giving me the chills. At the height of the civilization, it's believed up to 60,000 people lived in this ancient Mayan city. This is one of the coolest adventures I've been on. And just to know that there are pyramids, temples just hiding somewhere around here, it's insane.

[00:13:40]Oh my gosh, I've never seen anything like it. It looks insane.

[00:13:49]The two masks on the front of the pyramid. It's just so majestic. It's magical.

[00:13:58]It's so unique. This is the face of the king, the person who ruled over this powerful Mayan city. And they found his tomb here thousands of years ago. But just think about coming across this pyramid, standing still in time and finding the tomb of the king inside.

[00:14:19]Just look at the difference in size between me and the masked face of this king, this ruler of this Mayan city.

[00:14:29]Kings were seen almost as semi godlike.

[00:14:34]They were the intermediary between the people of the towns and the gods. So this is how they raised them up. It's not that dissimilar to Egypt and the pharaohs. That's what's so interesting about this whole thing.

[00:14:59]What I found even harder to believe is that less than 1% of this site has been excavated, which means there are hundreds of temples and structures that lie hidden, buried by the dense jungle.

[00:15:12]I'm looking for the second pyramid, which apparently is even bigger than the masked temple. So, I'm just wandering through this jungle trying to find it.

[00:15:27]I've just come out of the jungle and oh my god, this is insane.

[00:15:45]This is the highest temple in Lammoni and it is dedicated to the rain god Cha.

[00:15:52]And you can imagine back then rain for the Mayans was so important. It was what they needed obviously to grow their crops and to survive. So was probably the most important god for them. I'm going to climb up this pyramid and see more of it.

[00:16:14]Wow.

[00:16:16]We're talking 100red years before Christ that this temple was built. Just the ingenuity of the Mayans to be able to engineer such a thing with no technology.

[00:16:32]And here on either side of these steps, you can see the rain god track. It's just kind of been withered away, but you can still make out the outline of this god that everybody in this city would have worshiped.

[00:16:55]Oh my gosh, I've reached the top of the pyramid. It's quite the climb.

[00:17:04]Wow, the views are insane.

[00:17:15]This is where you would have the king, the royalty making sacrifices at the top of the pyramid. So, what would have happened at the bottom of the temple is essentially the ceremony. So you can still see the ruins of the benches where the town's people would have all been sitting to watch the performance. They would have been smoking tobacco, drinking cocoa.

[00:17:38]There would have been music. The Mayans, they've proven were very good when it came to acoustics. And then you would have had the ballcourt game being played. And all of this was an offering to the rain god Shaq. So whoever won the ball game would actually be the one to be sacrificed. It wasn't the common people that were sacrificed. It was actually the important people, royalty, the kings. And they needed to keep that up because they were trying to keep up this facade. And they needed to sacrifice themselves because the town's people believed that the kings and that royalty were truly godlike. Very different to royalty today cuz they don't sacrifice themselves for anything and they live in a lot of comfort and luxury.

[00:18:20]Standing above the jungle at Lamini, looking out over a landscape that has remained unchanged for thousands of years, I couldn't help but feel how small I really am. Long before me, this was a thriving city. And somehow that energy is still here. And as the jungle stretches endlessly into the distance, I realized that this isn't just a place you visit. It's a place that stays with you.

[00:18:49]Don't forget to join my YouTube memberships for access to bonus footage from my trips and personal Q&As's with me where I answer your questions like where I'm from and how I got started with content creation. The link to join is in the description box below.

[00:19:04]To understand more about how the Mayan people lived and get as close to them as possible, I had to go where few tourists venture to the remote far south of the country.

[00:19:18]This is Mayan territory where the ancestors of this ancient civilization continue the traditions of those long gone.

[00:19:27]I'd arranged to meet a local Mayan villager who lives in a traditional Mayan hut and has embraced the lifestyle of his ancestors living in a way that most of us no longer know how. Connected to nature, self-sufficient and removed from modern society. So southern part of bise is where the Mayan people lives.

[00:19:47]This is their home from way back from homeland. We have three dialect dialect in Maya languages. Okay. Mukan maya which is my first native language. We have echaya that's a very big population also. And we have yucatkaya that that most of those are found in the western part and northern part of the country.

[00:20:07]So here we have three different variety of cacao. Look at this one here. Okay, look at the color of this guy here. See how the beautiful they are? These are about 14 years old.

[00:20:18]>> 14 years.

[00:20:19]>> 14 years old. Yes.

[00:20:20]>> So, what you do? You don't want to hurt your tree, by the way, cuz then from where you harvest the next one, see what happens.

[00:20:27]>> It's heavy.

[00:20:28]>> Yes.

[00:20:33]>> Wow. Oh, that was easy.

[00:20:36]So that's the inside of the inside. This is the bean.

[00:20:39]>> So you just And that's the seed or something.

[00:20:41]>> Seed. Yeah.

[00:20:42]>> Never seen this.

[00:20:42]>> Sweet and sour. Okay.

[00:20:45]>> You don't you don't eat the whole thing.

[00:20:46]You just >> you can eat the beans is bitter. It's a little more sweeter. Okay.

[00:20:50]>> Oh >> yeah.

[00:20:55]>> M.

[00:20:57]It's delicious. That's the sea that you becomes chocolate.

[00:21:01]>> Mhm.

[00:21:02]>> Eventually.

[00:21:09]This is my wife, Hilda. Welcome.

[00:21:11]Welcome.

[00:21:11]>> Very nice to meet you, Molini. Very nice to meet you. Oh, so wife and husband and wife.

[00:21:16]>> Yes. Yes. This is my beautiful wife here. All right. Welcome in. Welcome.

[00:21:21]Welcome to into our into our home, into our kitchen. This is where we spend our daily lives with my family, with my kids. So, if you notice here, if you look around, everything's from nature.

[00:21:31]The roofing is a palm leaf. Is this going back to the times of your ancestors? Is this how they would also build and construct their homes?

[00:21:41]>> Right.

[00:21:41]>> This is a traditional way.

[00:21:43]>> Yes, exactly. She's roasting the cacao beans.

[00:21:46]>> Oh, she's roasting the cacao beans.

[00:21:48]>> She's roasting the cacao beans. See the heat under there?

[00:21:50]>> Yeah.

[00:21:51]>> Women get do the cooking. The men are doing the touching. Everybody gets serve a meal together.

[00:21:57]>> That's so nice.

[00:21:58]>> That's very traditional. We have a special dish today. You're going to experience with us our daily life. What do we eat for our daily life?

[00:22:04]>> So, this is now the cacao paste.

[00:22:07]>> Yeah.

[00:22:08]>> And it's sitting on the tamale leaf.

[00:22:11]>> Yes.

[00:22:13]>> So, she's going to take it into the um opening where you can see a bright >> Oh, yes.

[00:22:19]>> See? See the oilish part on top. So, this one here is much more tastable. You want to go ahead and taste it.

[00:22:23]>> And this one's much more tasty.

[00:22:25]>> Yes. See, it's already cacao paste.

[00:22:31]That's already them. Dark chocolate, papy. M >> dark chocolate.

[00:22:37]>> Wow.

[00:22:38]>> 100% pure chocolate.

[00:22:39]>> Pure cacao.

[00:22:40]>> Mhm.

[00:22:41]>> How do you like it?

[00:22:43]>> Yeah, it's amazing.

[00:22:44]>> See, >> it's just so natural.

[00:22:46]>> Mhm.

[00:22:47]>> Right.

[00:22:49]>> So, here she's going to make tortilla for you guys.

[00:22:51]>> How many years have you been making tortilla >> from very child?

[00:22:55]>> I make it on my age. Yep.

[00:22:58]>> Eight. So you learn when you were a child from your parents.

[00:23:02]>> Wow.

[00:23:03]>> Yeah.

[00:23:04]>> Well, you do it very quickly.

[00:23:05]>> Yes.

[00:23:06]>> Very fast.

[00:23:07]>> She can make at least uh 15 or 20 in a minute.

[00:23:10]>> Wow.

[00:23:11]>> So corn is a really important part of the part of the Mayan diet.

[00:23:16]>> Yes.

[00:23:16]>> Really?

[00:23:17]>> Yes.

[00:23:18]>> He likes it.

[00:23:20]>> Yeah. He likes corn. This corner is very nice. Freshly made.

[00:23:25]>> That's amazing. This food here is what we would eat for a daily basis. Okay.

[00:23:29]The white one is the heart of palm.

[00:23:31]Okay. It's called kal jipi japa. This one here is green. The green one is kalaloo coco yam and cassava root.

[00:23:37]>> Oh, it's all so nice.

[00:23:38]>> Everything is freshly harvested this morning in your farm.

[00:23:40]>> Steamed at the farm. Okay.

[00:23:42]>> What would you say is um special about being a Mayan person in Bise? What does it mean to you to be Mayan?

[00:23:51]>> It's very it's very um I'm very proud of myself. I'm very proud of us May people.

[00:23:55]Yes, maybe we don't have money, but we have the rich land. We can harvest our rich food.

[00:24:01]>> I feel like it's very special to be able to experience, you know, the Mayan culture cuz like you said, I think a lot of people talk about the Mayans like they are no longer around or it's something of the past.

[00:24:14]>> But actually, the Mayan community is very much alive and still alive. We're still here. The Mayans are here and not everybody knows that. Yeah, >> you know, >> it's very important, you know, we believe that um uh in the future if we don't preserve it, if we don't, you know, uh pass on the knowledge, um it's going to be lost.

[00:24:37]After everything this journey took to get here, the long drives, the uncertainty, the moments where I wasn't even sure it was worth continuing, I realized it was never just about finding hidden pyramids. Because standing among these ancient structures deep in the jungle, you start to understand that the Maya world was never truly lost. It's still here. And meeting people who continue to carry those traditions today, who live with the same connection to the land, the history, and their ancestors makes you see this place differently. It's not just ruins. It's not just history. It's a living culture.

[00:25:14]You have to come here to experience it for yourself, to feel it. And in doing that, you realize that the real discovery was never just the pyramids hidden in the jungle, but the people and stories that have been here all along.