As I said in my previous entry, the first few days I spent
on this vacation were actually spent in Guatemala, seeing the ruins of old
Mayan cities. The third day was spent
exploring the ATM caves. The following
two days were spent exploring the Mayan ruins of Belize.
After that, the beaches.
The beaches are easier and less intensive to write about, so
I’ll start with them, and then write next about the four Mayan ruins that I
visited (two in Belize and two in Guatemala).
I arrived at the first beach, Caye Caulker, in the evening
on the sixth day of my vacation. I had
taken a bus from Orange Walk (where the final site of ruins I visited was
located) back to Belize City. From the
bus station it was supposed to be an easy walk to the water taxi that would
take me to Caye Caulker where I was meeting up with Julia again. It would have been an easy walk, and
realistically it was, only I had no real idea where I was going and none of the
streets are marked. I basically just
kept walking straight and then asking for directions every 100 yards or
so. It definitely made things easier
that people in Belize speak English, although I would have been fine if they
spoke Spanish as well. I ended up
finding the less advertised water taxi, the one that is used by Belizeans more
than tourists. It’s called Ocean Ferry
Belize and it cost me half as much as the other water taxi and was located
closer to the bus station. Perfect.
I arrived that night and found Julia outside our hotel, La
Cubana, which advertised “Sleeping Boxes”.
Sleeping Boxes was a very apt description for the room, which contained
three feet of space between the edge of the bunk beds and the sliding door
(which had to slide as a door wouldn’t have been able to open all the way). The room was as wide as the bunk beds. A box, indeed.
However, we were only planning on being there
for two nights and it cost $30 BZE (or $15 American) per night, so it was the
perfect place for us. Suffice it to say,
however, that we got to know each other quite a bit better staying in a room
like that. My personal favorite part of
the hotel was that one bathroom had no toilet, one had no lights, and the other
had no water. I took a very dark shower
there.
That night we met up with Angelica and Jan, a Czech woman
and a Swiss man we had previously met at our hostel in San Ignacio. We went out to dinner at a place that had a
free Daquari with dinner, and all ordered some blackened snapper. It was across from a place that offered tours during the day, which was named in Creole, and made us all laugh:
As we sat there drinking our blue drinks and eating
our spicy fish, Alice and James, a British couple that we had all befriended at
the hostel in San Ignacio, walked by. We
talked for a minute before they moved on.
After dinner Jan, Julia, and I went out to the local Sports Bar where we
bumped into a guy from his hostel. We
got a few drinks and danced for a while, bumping into even more people that we’d
met over the course of our trips. I ran
into the guy I met in San Ignacio the first night, before I’d left for
Guatemala. He tried to take me home with
him, and then picked another white girl when he struck out.
The only full day we spent in Caye Caulker we walked down
the beach toward all the resorts and private docks. We saw one that was extremely colorful and
bright, and found out from the security guard that it only cost $5 to use for
the whole day.
So we went out to the
covered area (my back was still slightly burned from my solo trip to Lamanai
the morning before). I laid in the
hammock and Julia swam out to the second dock that was further out in the water. We swam a bit, read our books, and tanned a
little (it was surprisingly easy to keep my upper back in the shade but get my
lower back and legs tanned). Pelicans
repeatedly landed on the dock and walked along it. Once while coming back from the bathroom I
even had a Mexican standoff with two halfway down the dock.
They refused to move, so I just edged past them
slowly while avoiding eye contact.
The birds obviously won that one.
After lunch we came back to find the dock occupied, so we
laid on chairs on the beach under the palm trees and waiting for the obnoxious
Americans to leave. “Let’s go get
wasted! Happy hour! Are these brownies special?” Haha, you’re super clever.
We headed down the beach later to grab cheap margaritas at
the Lazy Lizard, a bar at the end of the island. We watched the sunset, played cornhole, and
got hit on by a good-looking local. (“We
should make a Snickers bar. You can be
the nougat, she’s the caramel, and I’ll bring the chocolate and the nuts.” Yikes, that’s terrible and awesome at the
same time. Terriblawesome).
That night we planned to go out harder than the night
before, more dressed up and a few more drinks.
We spent a good amount of time getting ready to go out, and then went
for dinner at a great BBQ place on the beach.
When it was time to head to the bar, we discovered that that whole block
of the beach, including our hotel and the bar, had a brown out and no power. We walked around to try and find where people
were going, but it seemed like the whole island was pretty dead. The bracelets (which I usually buy when I
travel) were expensive, but I bought one anyway, so the Guatemalan man selling
them, delighted with my Spanish, made us free earrings.
The next morning we got up early and went down the street to
grab breakfast, since our hotel didn’t have power to make the free
breakfast. We walked around a while, ate
a cheap lunch at some food carts, then got beautiful but bland margaritas at
the Lazy Lizard before catching the water taxi to San Pedro. We rode on the top even though it was raining
lightly. Especially because it was
raining lightly, since it had been very hot and muggy for the whole trip. We found our new hostel, the Sandbar, which
is absolutely worth staying at if you’re in San Pedro. We walked about the beach, learned about
lionfish (a foreign species that has started to overtake the local reefs), and
then met a few people from our hostel. We
ended up getting dinner and playing cards with a guy named Hamlet and the
bartender from our hostel.
We kept hearing about something called the “Chicken Drop” so
we asked about it at breakfast the next morning. Apparently farther down the beach from us
there’s a place where they put a chicken in a pen with a grid and people bet
where the chicken is going to poop.
There are also hermit crab races some weekends, with all the house
proceeds from both going to the local food bank. We were going to check it out, but we never
got a chance. That morning after we ate
we walked around to see how expensive it was to rent a golf cart (the primary
means of transportation on the island).
The places we checked always had a price around $200 for the day, which
we didn’t want to spend, even once we spit it.
However, when we got back to our hotel to ask how to get to Secret Beach
(a local spot we’d heard was nice), they said they had a deal with the local
supermarket where we could get a cart for $50.
We rented the cart and drove it about an hour over unpaved,
uneven ground, bumpy and polka dotted with murky puddles, to the Secret Beach. We were the first ones there, at this beach
that popped out of nowhere, past all the nothingness and scrubby brush that had
littered the roadside. It was quite a
trek (we took a video on Julia’s GoPro, but I don’t have access to it so I can’t
post it here), so I was unsurprised that we were the first ones there at ten
am. We claimed the only dock that had
coverage and shade, and that also boasted the best water access.
We got good tans and I got a little sun rash
(curse this allergy of mine). Mostly we
did the same as we had done on the dock in Caye Caulker- reading and laying
around with an occasional break in the water.
It was one of the few places I encountered in Belize that had no seaweed
and hadn’t been obviously cleared of it.
More people came eventually, but they either set up on the other,
unshaded dock or the beach.
We stayed
most of the day and held down the dock until the late afternoon, before we took
a bumpy ass ride home, laughing all the way ha ha ha. The journey was the most fun.
We got back, showered, got dressed up, started drinking some
rum that Hamlet had left us, and played cards with a few guys from our
hostel. We didn’t end up going out like
we had planned because all the bars that were busy were far away.
I was really sick in the morning (I have a really fun,
medically unexplained condition that makes me faint and vomit profusely often,
with or without alcohol). We were
supposed to go snorkeling at Shark Ray Alley and Hol Chan Marine Reserve, but I
was too sick so we rescheduled for the afternoon. I tried to eat a sandwich at lunch, but could
only manage the fries. We finally went
snorkeling. The boat was called Bubbles
and our guide was named Blinky. It was
Julia and me, plus an older couple and a younger couple. We went to Hol Chan first, and were told we
would see at least one sea turtle but probably no manatees, since they aren’t
very common in the area. Blinky said he
only saw them about once a month. So of
course after five minutes of swimming in the water, seeing a lot of different
kinds of fishes, I looked up and realized there was a manatee about fifteen
feet in front of me. I pulled my head
out of the water and tried to call everyone over, but they couldn’t hear me
since their heads were in the water, so I waved at the guide underwater to get
his attention, and then pointed it out.
Everyone freaked out. It was
really cool, and extremely graceful considering its girth. Julia took a video on her GoPro, and since I
had already been so close to it, I’m in the entire video. Again, don’t have access. Then other groups started coming over and we
left to go find a sea turtle, which was beautiful.
Next we went to Shark Ray Alley, where other guides were
throwing chum over the sides of the boat to attract Nurse Sharks and Sting
Rays. The feeding frenzy was truly
something simultaneously gruesome and awesome, in the true meaning of the
word. The older couple from my group
kept having to be told not to touch the sharks and rays, and were generally
pretty terrible about it.
We showered when we got back and I ate my sandwich from
lunch. Then we went to a nearby bar for
a free Steve Miller Band concert.
We
were going to try to go to the Hermit Crab races, but were too tired and bailed
at the last second. The crabs are
usually raced only once per week and then released, and it’s for charity. The local food bank is really important
because a lot of the locals who live on the resort island can’t really afford
to live there, but have to be there to work.
So the food bank helps feed those kinds of families. I still wish we’d pushed ourselves to go, but
it was also pretty far down the beach.
We left the next morning to catch our flight (we were on the
same one to Houston). At the water taxi
was an obnoxious group of high schoolers obviously on their year-end trip. One funny exchange I head was between one of
the high school girls and one of the guys.
“The best decision I made last night was not wearing a bra.” Guy: “You
can make that decision any time.”
Our cab driver in Belize City put the radio on a show about
local arts education which featured a lot of children singing live, which was
cute. We had been told there was an exit
fee, and so had saved money, but it turned out the exit fee was included in our
airline ticket, so we had a lot of cash for a nice breakfast and
souvenirs.
Overall the trip was amazing, and the beach was the perfect
way to relax at the end of a hectic beginning of travel and trekking. Next up is a write up of all the ruins I
visited in Guatemala and Belize.
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