Belize - Caye Caulker

The next stop is Caye Caulker, so in the morning we headed for Belize City on another bus. The bus was quite big (old beaten up luxury liner - the other buses had been 15 capacity shuttle buses), and strangly only had three of us on it - apart from the occasional local who got on and off as we went. After about an hour and a half we pulled up about 2 minutes from the border. CONVENIENTLY, the bus had "broken down", and 3 or 4 of them proceeded to play with the engine for the next hour or so. They then  started telling us one of the injectors stopped working and we could not go any further, with no more buses coming through for the day, the guys running the show then proceded to give us 2 options; 1 - we could wait for a bus that might come the next day, or 2 - dump us at the border, get a taxi, then a local bus to Belize City, then another taxi to the main port to catch the water taxi.... So, without refund or being entirely confident with the situation, we were dumped at the border.... FUN....thank god it was 8am or we would have been in a little different state of mind.... Once we cleared customs and immigration we caught an unmarked taxi to a nearby town where the bus station was...We were lucky Belize is predominantly english speaking... We ended up catching the local bus to Belize city, which took a little over three hours. It was quite fun, although the journey ended up costing a little more than we had hoped. Finally we were on the water ferry to Caye Caulker.

Caye Caulker is a little tropical paradise about 40 minutes off the coast of  Belize City. It is the second biggest of 6 or so cayes, and has much more of a backbacker vibe -  is much more underdeveloped than San Pedro the biggest and most visited Caye. There are no cars on the island, only golf buggies and you can walk around the entire place in an hour or two. We had arranged a place to stay a couple days ealier, and arrived at around 3pm - a bit of an epic day after a 5am start. Starving, I found the local favorite for lunch - stewed chicken with rice and beans and Steph had a deep fried Snapper.....

Our House

Our view

mmmmm tasty snapper...

Belize is a bit of a shock after Guatemala - everything is much more expensive. We decided to do a snorkel trip the next day out to the Belize Barrier Reef - which is the second biggest barrier reef in the world.
The Snorkeling and Diving is world class, the two main reefs around the Cayes are protected, the one we visited had been for 20 or so years. It is patrolled day and night, requires permits for all the tour operators and tickets for all the divers which is great. Hol Chan Marine Reserve is about 25 minutes by boat and there are fish everywhere (helped by the guides feeding them constantly). We saw Turtles, Nurse sharks, Bararacuda, Sting Rays, Eagle Rays, Groupers, Lobsters, and millions of other big and small reef fish - a great days snorkeling for $40 a head including lunch..... (French Angel Expeditions, run by a great guy named Ash, just in case one of you get to Caye Caulker)

Steph & Ash

We booked a diving trip for Sunday to The Blue Hole, the dive site that makes Belize famous. The Blue Hole is almost perfectly round, 1000 ft wide and 400 ft deep. The dive is to around 42 meters, at 40 meters there is a small cave that contains giant stalectites that are 4 or 5 meters long. There are quite a few of these and the time is spent swimming in and around all the stalectites. This dive is known as a shark dive, if you are lucky you can see hammerheads, bull sharks, and many others. Unfortunately we only saw one unidentified shark swim past quickly in the distance.....It was an awesome dive, quite a few of us got a little "narced" on the dive, including me, which is quite a strange feeling. You are dropping down and all of a sudden you feel drunk...bizarre. Steph wants to go deeper cos she didn't feel any affects....

After an hour or so we had our second dive for the day, to a dive site called Half Moon Wall. This was another nice dive, seeing Eagle Rays, a couple of sharks, and heaps of fish and hard and soft coral. Steph could take her camera on this dive, so we got some nice photos....

After the second dive we had lunch on Half Moon Caye with an hour or so to explore the island. Totally unexpected was that the island is a breeding site for Red footed Boobies and Frigates. The park is well protected and they have built a viewing platform up into the tree tops where all the nests are. You could see all the baby booobies, and nesting frigates. They were nesting soo close together, which was strange as the frigates often try to steal the eggs and young chicks of the boobies. It was very cool....

 The last dive for the day was the Aquarium. As suggested by the name, there were fish everywhere, as well as the usual suspects - Turltes, Eagle Rays, Sharks, Barracuda, and the list goes on.....
Monday was another lazy day, had a run, swam, ate, found the internet, swam....At 5, we went for a Night Snorkel with Ash. There was just the three of us which was great, Steph took the camera and got a heap of nice shots....The small critters come out at night, heaps of lobsters, crabs, shrimp, and a big octopus.....We were out for quite a while, lucky the water is like a bath...On the way back we found the resident Croc.....

Next we headed to Placencia and then to the bay islands of Honduras.

Flores and TIkal

We caught the bus from Lanquin to Flores, another nice 8 hour bus ride.  This bus ride was very uneventful (finally), the weirdest things being a ferry trip across a river that would have been 30 meters wide (no bridge?) and the bus being washed at a petrol station while we waited.... We arrived in Flores without accomodation, so being the lazy people we are, we were led to the nearest hotel by a dodgy guy named Eddie. Eddie preceded to sweet talk his way into booking a tour of Tikal and our bus ride to Belize....and Kris a first class bus ticket to Rio Dulce....If we had only known.....

After a 4:30 am start we get to TIkal in the early hours of the morning.  We walked around the grounds for a couple of  hours, getting to play with a tarantula, seeing lots of cool animals including woodpeckers and monkeys, and of course the temples. Thank god we went early, by lunch time it was pretty warm. Our guide was really knowledgable about the Mayan people and their beliefs which was really interesting. We learnt about blood letting, beheading, sacrifices (both volunteered and not, if you volunteered they medicated you with local paralysing/anaesthetising plants, however if you had done something bad, look out) and the past time of the kings which was apparently, sitting on top of the pyramid, not eating or drinking but taking halucinagenic substances and performing self peircing to achieve a state of enlightenment.... now if only Eddy's bus company had been as good( they were 45 minutes late for pickup - which meant we missed the promised sunrise on top of the main temple and walk through the jungle).....It was still a great tour though.

Just for you Ceda....

We got back to Flores and found some lunch, and ran into a girl named Sanne - who we had gone to school with in Antigua. We went for a swim off a small jetty (Flores is a small island in a big lake) which was lovely, and were entertained by a crazy, drunk, stoned Mexican Alaskan who was singing and playing some spanish tunes with a bongo bashing buddy - including an odd version of la cucaracha - the lyrics included something along the lines of  the "cochroach cannot walk anymore because he isn't smoking any marijuana". After a stop at  bar for happy hour - 2 beers and 2 mojitos for $5 - we hunted down some dinner.

A little immature I know, but.....

Lanquin and Semuc Champey

After the few days in San Pedro, we caught the bus back to Antigua to meet up with Kris, to catch a bus north. The bus north to Lanquin involved 8 hours, four changes of bus, losing a couple of people to another bus, and on the fourth bus change jamming three more people into the bus, two onto home made seats for the last 2 hours of the trip...As they say here "Guatever"...
In Lanquin we stayed at a nice place called El Retiro,which has a bunch of bungalows and spreads out over large grounds that slope down to a river with a nice strong current to swim (luckily, because it is really hot). It really could of been anywhere, it really didn't feel very Guatemalan, english everywhere and Nutella on the menu...

After a lazy Sunday, we headed for a tour of Semuc Champey - which is a set of natural limestone pools, with beautiful warm torquise water that cascade down a hill and into a waterfall. The day started with a tour of the nearby Grutas K'anba caves where we waded, swam, climbed,  jumped and dropped our way through the caves by candlelight for an hour and a half, before heading up the river for some tubing. On the way to the tubing spot there was a giant swing into the river, which looked a tad dicey so we made the guide jump first. He survived, so we followed.

Semuc Champey from the lookout....

The next stop was Semuc Champey,  on the way to the pools we climbed up to the "EL Mirador" or lookout - a hefty 25 minute climb (Steph was beetroot red by the end of that one...) While at Semuc we had lunch and swam for the rest of the afternoon....It was really calm and relaxing. The transport there and back was fun, a group of us thrown into the back of a pickup truck driving along a bumpy unpaved road, with lovely views of the countryside....A couple of days at El Retiro was enough, so the next day we where back on the bus heading onto Flores and Tikal, the most famous tourist attraction in Guatemala - a group of ancient Mayan ruins.

Lake Atitlan - San Pedro La Laguna

Next stop was Lake Atitlan. Roughly a 3 hour bus ride from Antigua.....The bus ride in was a bit dicey at times with very tight hairpin bends, and very narrow steep roads (all at once!). The lake is very beautiful all the surrounding mountains are volcanic and they reach right down to the lakes shore. The Lake is 300 meters deep in some spots, and 8km by 18 km's (a big Fn lake). We stayed in a little hippie town called San Pedro La Laguna.

We took it pretty easy for most of the time, on the second morning we hired some kayaks for a few hours. About a 45 minute paddle away just next to a place called San Marcos there was a platform built into some rocks from which you could jump into the lake. So we paddled over and went for a swim. The platform was around 10 meters high, the water was very deep, you had to be careful jumping in or bits would sting....

Hew jumping.....aaaaaaaaghhhhhh....

The next morning, much to Hews' dismay, we went on a horse ride. The ride took us through jungle, mountains, a coffee plantation, and down to a nice 'beach' (more swimming). It was fun, lucky the horses new where they were going as Hew isn't exactly a jockey and our guide was all of three foot tall and 10 years old (Andreas). On our last night we headed to a bar and played some pool. After a couple of games we were introduced (whether we liked it or not) to an extremely drunk regular. He hails from Florida, but lives in Guatemala and was absolutely wasted. We played a few rounds of pool for shots of Tequila, Nester was quite the pool player even when he could barely walk straight.

"Nester" and Hew post match celebrations....

During the night (thanks to possibly a dodgy taco stand, the tequila or bad curry) we both proceeded to have a "few" gastrointestinal issues (yuk!)....The bus trip back to Antigua the next day was not fun, but we made it...Tomorrow we are off to Lanquin.