Belize: Scuba Diving

Scuba diving was really the main point of our trip, and we loved it. We used Belize Diving Services on Caye Caulker, who did a great job. They had nice new equipment  great staff, nice boats, and we felt very comfortable with them. Every morning we'd meet at the boat, drive 30-60 minutes, drop in for our first dive, come up for lunch/snacks/swim/surface interval, and then head down for another dive before going back to the island. Most of the dives are what are called 'wall dives'. You head out to a coral reef where you drop into the water so about 50' and then there is a sharp wall that drops off. Could be 50 feet, could be thousands of feet. There's lots of coral and fishies and other sea life. yay. Out waterproof camera only manages 40 feet so we were way over its range. I've got some photos from the boat, and I'm a bad person and stole a few from the internet to give you an idea of what some of the pieces were like.

We saw a spotted eagle ray, lots of barracuda, lion fish, lots of nurse sharks, reef sharks, a turtle, and lots of other fishies and wildlife.

Our first dive we had been told we might see some nurse sharks at the end of the dive. Instead we dropped in and immediately saw 5 nurse sharks below us. Minor hyperventilation later, we were all good.

The last day we went out the the 'Great Blue Hole' which is one of the big things Belize is famous for. It used to be a cave system and when water levels rose, it went underwater and one of the cave roofs collapsed, creating a 400 foot deep hole. There are reallllly cool, huge stalactites at 125' feet. Which is way deeper than we had gone before, but was so worth the 8 minutes of bottom time. Coming up, we saw a number of reef sharks as well. We also did two dives at Half Moon Caye that day, and had lunch on the island, which is a Red Footed Booby reserve.

Caye Caulker Belize

Caye Caulker was the perfect island. A few miles long, very narrow, not too touristy, but plenty of places to eat and drink. There were no cars on the island, just a lot of beach cruisers and some golf carts. The roads are 'paved' in sand, the cute houses are on stilts, and 90% of the tourist population is under 40 which (with apologies to my elders) means a pretty laid back crowd. Ambergis Caye is the next island over, has a lot more going on, and has all the fancy resorts. Caye Caulker has nothing that qualifies as 'fancy' or 'resort' so the crowd that shows up is chill. We loved it.

We stayed one night at Yumas House Hostel and three nights at Island Magic Beach Resort (which, despite the name is perfectly nice but decidedly not a resort). We arrived early morning and left in the afternoon, so had essentially 5 days on the island. We spent most mornings and early afternoons out on the dive boat, leaving us afternoons, evenings, and morning coffee to enjoy the island life.

read it. too funny

We rented bikes for a day to circumnavigate the island on a tiny trail (an easy feat considering the size), wandered the airstrip, ate lots of delicious seafood, lounged in the hammocks reading, went for walks, laid by the pool, and generally relaxed.

The people of Belize (everywhere, not just the island) are the nicest I've ever met, anywhere. That's a pretty strong statement. We've been to a lot of different places around the world, and everywhere we've gone we've encountered some extremely wonderful people who have gone out of their way to help us or just to enjoy hanging out with. We've also encountered a lot of people trying to take advantage of us, sell things to us (unrelentingly), or who simply dislike tourists. I consider myself friendly, but on my guard when traveling - keeping an eye out for pickpockets, wary of random people on the street trying to help, etc. Its hard to explain, but everyone we encountered in Belize wanted to say hi just for the sake of saying hi, help us find something just to help out, tell us about a party going on down the street just because we might enjoy it, or be perfectly fine leaving off immediately when we said we weren't interested in whatever they were selling. It took a few days to figure it out, but the population as a whole was just genuinely nice. It was refreshing.

Everyone spoke great English in Belize. It's their national language, so I expected people to speak English, but its also the national language of South Africa and we ran into a heck of a lot of language barriers there. Everyone actually spoke fantastic English (which, while I would have loved to practice Spanish, it at least made life easy). Most people also spoke Creole (more common) or Spanish. Belize dollar is the currency, which is always 2 Belize dollars to 1 USD, and they take and frequently use USD as well, so you really cant think of an easier trip.

can you spy matt?

We'll have one more post coming up on 'diving' but its really mostly boat pics since the dives were deep and our camera can't go down that far. It was awesome though!