Day 2-3 - Caye Caulker

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I spent all of day 2 travelling from Tulum to Caye Caulker and I’ve including the details in the boring bits below for those of you who do not venture this way in the future.

At night I was faced with the usual problem of finding a veggie meal and ended up ordering a veggie burger that did’t actually contain a burger! Just salad, wouldn’t that be a sandwich!

The next day I had booked a whole day snorkelling package which was amazing and ticked off another thing on my bucker list - swimming with sharks:-)

The tour started at the Hol shan marine reserve and the guide took us across some fab coral with plenty of marine life. At one point I swam down to within 50 cm of a green moray eel they are very ugly creatures – not sure what he was thinking about me though!! Then we stopped in San Pedro on Ambergris Caye for lunch and I bored everyone by explaining what Ambergris is – basically it’s whale snot that used to be put in ladies perfumes!.

After lunch we visited shark Ray alley which is full of nurse sharks and stingrays (surprisingly) and due to their constant contact with humans have become quite domesticated (although they can always be killers as the sad tale of Steve Irwin shows). There were lots of stingrays around too and they are truly graceful fish which makes me want to swim with Manta rays even more apparent. The guide put some bait in the water and about 7 nurse sharks surrounded it immediately so we all jumped into the water for a play with them. The guide held the sharks and turned them upside down, I had read about this and if you turn any shark upside down in goes into a trance and doesn’t move at all so we could all stroke his belly which was cool. There are instance of killer whales attacking great whites in this way and while one has it held upside down the other come in to finish them off. The ingenuity of killer whales is startling easily my favourite marine mammal.

After the sharks we sped off to coral gardens where we could all go off and have a wander and I bumped into another nurse shark and a green turtle and followed it for a while.

Boring bits

Bus from Tulum to Chetumal (at border with Beliz M$200 need to buy this a day in advance.There are reguar buses and they take 3hr 30 mins.

I then took the San Pedro Water Jet Taxi from Chetumal to Caye Caulker, the price was $45, it also goes to Sna Pedro for $37. You can book it in advance on their website. However that isn’t the only price you have to pay. In addition to the above they charge you M$100 port departure tax, and the robbing customs also refused to double stamp my passport despite having an argument with him and as a result I had to pay the M$294 departure tax for leaving the country. As I have to come back to Cancun I’ll now be paying this twice!! Some travellers elsewhere have said that the customs will double stamp the passport but it didn’t work for me.

In total the journey took 2 ½ hours as it stopped at the customs in San Pedro first and we had to change boats.

My Summary of this journey is if money isn’t a problem or you don’t have much time then get the taxi but if you’re on a tight budget you might want to get a bus on to Belize City and then get the ferry over to Caye Caulker. This is a great site for info on Belize travel: : http://belizebus.wordpress.com/

Yumas is the best hostel on the island but it books up fast, I checked into the MiraMar hotel on the front st and it’s the same price as the hostels but you can have a room all to yourself!

Day 3 – Booked tour with Carlos tours which was recommended in Trip advisor and I couldn’t fault it the Guide Romero was great and you can buy a CD of the experience at the end if you don’t have an underwater camera – the cost was B$100 which is about £33.

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