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Published: July 27th 2008
The youth hostel we stayed at in Livingston turned out to be not quite so cool as we'd thought at first after all. When we arrived, myself, Sam, Angie, Sarah and an American called Miguel who we'd met in Semuc Champay we were offered a private room which could fit 3 or 4, and 2 dormitory beds. Obviously we decided us girls could have the private room (with it's own shower woo!) and the 2 boys would sleep in the dormitory. Our room had a double bed and a hammock which Angie said she'd sleep in. In the middle of the night she got out and into the bed with me and Sarah. I was convinced the reason was because Miguel had come in and said he couldn't sleep in his bed so could he have our hammock...but no. How strange we thought.
The next day we went on a jungle tour with a Garifuna man called Francis who kept offering us drugs. We think might have been a gangster because he had a tear drop tattood underneath his eye...apart from that he was very nice and quite popular, we started off slowly because he was hungover and stopped to
River Canoe
When travelling by these things sit still, facing forward and DO NOT MOVE!chat with every second person that we passed. The tour was no way as good as the Semuc Champay near death experience but we walked through the town and the jungle to a river. Sarah's flip flop broke about 20 minutes in so she had to go barefoot nearly all day. The beach was FULL of rubbish, lots of plastic bottles and an unusually high number of flip flops so I kept trying to salvage her a new pair. Unfortunately they'd all been abandoned singly once broken. I don't really understand why the owners of the flip flops would want to keep the fully functioning one on it's own but they do! Odd. I'm pleased to report Sarah abandoned hers together. Sensible.
We walked along the beach, which is really an incredibly skinny beach, the jungle ends, there is about 2 meters of sand and then the sea starts, to yet another water feature. This one was called las 7 Altares and like Semuc Shampay was a series of pools and waterfalls (funnily enough 7 in total) which we climbed from the bottom and swam in the top. Sarah tripped over a tree root or something and became convinced
she'd broken her toe, as I would have also done, but bravely soldiered on over the rocks, limping slightly. We swam at the top...which was nice and then descended and went back to the hostel for the nights family dinner...yum! (It was thai green chicken curry...Irish stew and mash the previous night!)
After the family dinner we heard there was a traditional Garifuni band playing in a traditional Garifuni pub that night at 9:30 so decided to go. The traditional music was heavily drum based with some shouting over the top, intreresting! I was expecting Bob Marley. The bar staff claimed there was no beer, only coconut with a traditional Garifuni rum concoction inside. I did think this was strange as the other people in the bar were all in posession of a bottle of Gallo. Strangley when we didn't buy the manky rum coconut (Sam and Miguel did and it was gross!) some Gallos mysteriously appeared, nice and frio!
On the way home it was revealed that the boys had rats in their dormitory. Apparently I was told earlier in the day but I can't have been listening! They said that when they went to bed they
could hear them scurrying about, pretended they couldn't and went to sleep. All was well until about 2am when one FELL out of the roof onto Miguel's bed. EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKK! I would have been SO upset. He claims he just kicked it off, no screams, and the girl in the bed next to him said that it'd happened to her the night before. From this point he couldn't sleep, understandably, and eventually went to the reception to ask the covern of gay men who ran the place if he could sleep in a hammock because he couldn't sleep in his bed. THAT'S WHAT I HEARD!!! I'm not going mad!!! But they said no...meanies!
Luckily, to my knowledge, there weren't any rats in our room. Just strange tiny crabs which live in burrows and have one huge claw, bigger than they are, which I found skulking around under the bed. We left early in the morning to catch the boat to Belize. It was a small lancha and as soon as we'd reached what I'd class as open sea water, the point from which it becomes impossible to swim to shore, it slowed down and the engiene cut out. Good news
though, after a few attempts the driver restarted it and we continued on our journey.
We weren't there for long but I really really liked Belize! Somehow it seemed so much more colourful than Guatemala or Mexico. I suppose it's because it's slightly richer, at least everything's more expensive. The majority of people there are black and speak creole as their first language, it sounds like English at first, but it's not! They do also speak English, but it's a kind of Caribbean hip hop English which is cool. I got called baby a lot, which is wierd, not a lot of people at home would get away with that one but there it sounds right. We arrived in Punta Gorda, got breakfast, and left at 9am on a bus to Belize City. The ticket promised me "the swellest ride beneath the Southern skies" which to be honest was a bit of a big lie on an old US school bus rammed with people on a 10 hour journey. A few hours in a big group of real backpackers hopped on. They put us to shame really, they had all kinds of special equipment we didn't know what was
Gallo.
Triumph! for strapped onto their bags and looked kind of grubby all over. The bus's 2 foot wide "boot" for luggage was already pretty full, but some men arranged the real travellers bags until there was no more space and they started coming down the aisle, trapping me and Sarah in the back seat. It's a good job I'm not claustrophobic!
From Belize City we caught another boat to an island called Caye Caulker. It was soooo lovely! The sea was so blue and clear and the sand so white and the buildings like something from a movie set. It's a pretty small island so you can walk anywhere but there were golf cart taxis avaliable for the lazy. Every restaurant had a lobster special, and lobster was served barbacued, with spaguetti, in salads, in burgers....in lasagne. The island was split in 2 a few years ago by Hurricane Hatty, and "the split" as it's called serves perfectly for swimming. Although the current's so strong it's a bit like swimming on a treadmill!
Caye Caulker is really popular for backpackers, it's main attractions being water based, diving the Blue Hole, and scuba diving on the reef just off the
shore. We decided the done thing was to go snorkelling, oh we looked cool! Armed with our Finding Nemo knowledge we girls left Sam hammocking and did the snorkel. I've never been snorkelling before apart from about 2 minutes on holiday in Lanzarote but I couldn't see any fish so I got bored. Here though there were thousands of them. The reef wasn't quite as cool as Nemo's, but that might be because Finding Nemo is an animation and not real life, but it was still pretty amazing. We had 3 stops, the first a guided reef tour, the second stop at a place where Sting Rays fed. Yes they are one and the same as the fish that killed Steve Irwin. Our guy tried to convince us they were nice and harmless, and you generally don't die when stung by them. He picked one up and made us stroke it (it was slimy and squidgy) but I'm still not convinced. He did hold the sting ray for far far far longer than was necessary, I can't decide if he just liked sting rays a lot or if he was scared of it stinging him through the heart when he
let it go. Maybe the latter. One touched my leg in the water so I got out fast!
The third and final stop we were allowed to explore the reef alone. By this time though I was getting pretty annoyed at the amount of sea water I seemed to constantly have in my mouth, I stopped to spit another mouthful out and rearrange my snorkel and the reef attacked me!!!!! I did feel pretty bad about that but I was more worried about having been shredded to pieces on my knee and finger but that and the profuse bleeding the man told me about turned out to be a lie, I just got a scratch for a while. How rude! After that I kept far away from the high bits...
Something terrible happened when we were snorkelling. Sarah left her bag on the boat, and a puddle of sea water came and sat itself under it, wetting all her things. It wouldn't have been so bad if her passport wasn't in there. Her stamps got quite ruined. Understandably she was very upset about this, the stamps not the passport!
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