Belize

We took a mini-van from Flores to Belize, which took 6 hours with a lunch stop. We were dropped off at the Ferry terminal in Belize City and caught a boat to Ambergris Caye. We had booked a dive package a few months ago which turned out to be a good deal, 7 nights in a hotel and 11 dives, including the blue hole for USD$600 each. It was a bit of an indulgence, but I have always wanted to dive in Belize, being the second biggest barrier reef in the world, the Great Barrier Reef being the biggest. Ambergris Caye, is the biggest island off Belize and is also the most full of tourists. Even though the beach is lined with hotels, restaurants and dive shops I couldn’t help loving it. The water is Caribbean turquoise and blue and there are wooden piers everywhere leading to the water, usually with a hammock or two at the end. Pretty much all the locals are Rasta’s and Bob Marley is playing everywhere you go. We had heard from a lot of people that tourism had ruined the islands charm, which I’m sure it has but I really enjoyed the plethora of great restaurants and funky bars. The seafood is amazingly good, especially the fish, all with yummy sauces like Creole, jerk or coconut. The only drawback is that everything is expensive here when you’re traveling on a budget. The hotel we stayed at was lovely, not the fanciest but the staff were friendly and it came with breakfast. We were on the beach and just a 10 minute walk into town.
The highlight of the week though was of course the diving, the coral was very good, colorful and lots of big fans, tubes and stag horn. We saw lots of nurse sharks and got to swim with them and touch them, we also did the same with stingrays. We saw a few turtles, tarpin, barracuda, eels, parrot fish, lobsters and angelfish. One dive we got to do lots of swim throughs, which are little caves and tunnels through the coral. We did one night dive, which was fun, and we spent a day at the Blue Hole. The Blue Hole was fantastic, it is a 100 meter deep water-filled limestone sinkhole. We dived down to 40m and there is a cave at that depth where stalactites and stalagmites have formed. There are also sharks which we could see swimming below us. The whole experience was surreal, probably because I was a little narked! We also dove at Half-Moon Caye and the Aquarium while we were out there.
We had a great week and it was great to dive again, we were really sad to leave our island but the week was up, so we decided to visit the other caye. Caye Caulker is much smaller and caters to the backpacker crowd, it’s also way more chilled out and the pace of things almost slows to a stop. We stayed in a really cheap place with individual bungalows, not on the beach but the island is so small the beach is never far away. The ocean is just as beautiful, and swimming is mostly done at the split. The split is where hurricane Hattie swept through and tore the northern part of the island off. There is a cool bar there with a diving board and sunken tables in the water to sit at. Caye Caulker definitely is a good place to relax. Unfortunately our 2 days here were full of bad luck, the first day Ken wasn’t feeling well and on the second I got mild food poisoning from a Papaya, we also got eaten alive by mosquitoes, due to me needing to throw up in the mangroves and we found maggots in our already eaten packet of 2 minute noodles!
We were thinking of exploring the interior of Belize more, but after looking at the bank balance we decided it was time to get back to Guatemala.

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