And the mud isn't the only thing affecting these tour guides. The rain in December caused them hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses collectively since many of the popular sites were closed. While Juan says they can't fight the rain, he believes certain infrastructure could be put in place that would allow the site to remain open even in the rain. He lamented the fact that they had to turn back hundreds of guests after a dreadful low season.
Aaron Juan, Owner, Maya Walk Tours
"When it comes to that, we know we can't fight nature. A lot of people look forward to the Christmas time. Most people that are not in tourism look forward to their holiday, their two weeks holiday or whatever vacation time they get. Us in tourism, we suffer during the low season which is September, October, November some of the worst times so when December comes around everyone's patiently waiting, all the tour guides are waiting for the groups to come, and the people come, the people arrive. This year I think it's definitely one of our busiest years when we compare it to pre COVID and so it seems like our numbers are getting back to normal and so you know a lot of people are coming. For some days, we had 70 people, 80 people for just one tour. Some of the sites that were canceled because of floods which were Nohoch Che'en, Barton Creek, ATM and even Xunantunich, just for our company we're looking at over 150 people per day that we had to basically cancel because of the floods. I personalluy think that Xunantunich needs a bridge. I think the ferry is nice, it looks nice, we know it's historic but we have to also consider all these people coming to Belize and their vacations are basically ruined. If you spend 2, 3 days waiting and you have 3 or 4 sites that are not passable because of the floods, it ruins people's vacations and of course next year they're not going to come back to Belize, they're going to start looking for other destinations that don't suffer these big floods so although we cannot fight nature, but I think for the ATM cave specifically we had at least ten days of cancellations and so that resulted in a lot of loss of income especially at the peak time of tourism so on a daily basis I estimate just the entrance fees that NICH would have gotten to about $15,000 per day so you're looking at at least $150,000 loss on their side. For all the guides together, we're looking at at least $700,000 in those ten days. So if you combine that with entrance fees, definitely over a million dollars."
