More from the taxi and snorkeling

Our guide/ taxi driver Reynaldo from the Barefoot resort told us that the Chinese are buying up a lot of the properties here, they possibly get financing though Chinese banks/ government that then take the business if they miss some payments. The first thing they do after acquiring property is to put up a concrete building, stores or hotels. They have built a five story building that The guide said was the first. Before people here could only go to four. Now everyone is going to be adding floors. His tone said he didn’t think the Chinese investment was a positive. He was quick to tell us that it only takes $60k to get started here in Belize.

The south end has probably available in the $75k range. They were offered utilities out to the very end where there’s some nice housing but the homeowners said no. They all use solar and collect their rain water in big tanks. They don’t want the utilities because people will buy property and develop it for rentals and commercial hotels.

Just in from the south end that the people who live there call Eden, is where a lot of locals live. The whole south end was mangroves and swamp they’ve filled in with about anything they can get. The guide said the sargassum is actually useful for this purpose. Yesterday we seen a crew shoveling it off the beach. They also were using what looks like a manure spreader but I couldn’t tell what they were actually doing with it. The part where the locals live does have utilities and the government is building a new health center in the area for the locals. The guide said currently there’s just one that everyone uses unless they go private.

Our guide said that in the area the locals live one used to be able to buy land for $30k and now it’s $60k and the area by our resort but not on the beach the property is running $250k. He said that if you put a hotel on it it will make money and then like the people who own our resort you buy more and put more rentals on them. It sounds like our resort owners have at least 4 properties.

I highly recommend talking to your drivers anytime you are traveling. They have a lot of information that is useful or sometimes it’s just a good story. On our trip to Belize City our driver told us about when he was younger his grandfather had taught him about fishing. He’d been watching all these fishermen out early catching bait and he wanted to go but his grandfather said no and just relaxed. After a few hours his grandfather went and tossed his bait net once and caught a full net. Then they loaded up the sailboat and out they went. They fished for an hour and caught 250 pounds of fish, he said that his grandfather said that they were done and they went back in. He didn’t understand why they were leaving since they were still catching some fish it had only slowed down a little bit. But he said that after a while he learned that he could spend a lot of time working hard for a little bit of bait or more fish or he could use that time for other stuff.

I’m not sure but I’m fairly certain that my dive days weren’t canceled from the weather. We went snorkeling with Caveman Snorkeling and it’s right next door to the Sunrise Scuba, I thought it looked like they were filling tanks so I went in to ask if things had changed and the gal working there said that they still were doing their 3 day private dive but Friday was going to be good there had been enough interest in diving. I think I got bumped. I will probably not have good things to say about them.

Caveman Snorkeling, they were very good. We did half a day with them and were pleased with the service. I was a little skeptical with how the exterior looked, they probably haven’t spent much time keeping it up and it was probably done on their own. The Caveman himself was an interesting character. He seems to care about the environment and he did a little prayer before we went out.

We made a few stops today, one to see the tarpon we already seen yesterday on the tour was first. Emily did some feeding of the birds and tarpon. I did feed a tarpon as well.

Next we went and swam with sharks and stingrays. Stingrays can only sting you hard once like a bee and the stinger stays in. It was neat to swim with the sharks and rays.

Then we had two stops along the reef, one was by where the manatees hang out and then the channel. The water was pretty clear and not all that deep.

Overall it was a good day out. We stopped after our snorkeling to eat at Chef Kareem’s, though I think his wife does the majority of things! It was good food. Definitely recommend. When we got back I went down to the pool for a while. I got a few pictures of it. The pools here are deeper than back home. The one at the hotel is long and narrow. No shallow end. The other place had three different pools and they had one that was walk in, one that was sort of shallow and then the third was deeper like the current hotel’s.