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.....
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| Our House |
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| Our view |
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| 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)
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| 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.
