We’ve come to the end of our time here in Caye Caulker, Belize. Final assessment, four days in the mainland was spot on. Had a good time and got to see a bit of Belize. Ten days on Caye Caulker, that’s hard to say. In general it’s probably too many days. There’s not a lot you can do on your own. You are at the mercy of needing a boat to take you to all the good places. There are a lot of good places though during the high season a person could probably get to do a lot of trips out to the reef and see a lot. During the low season a person may need all those days to get some good ones. In Jamaica during the low season it rained just in the afternoon and we were able to do what the resort had to offer with nap time in the afternoon, here when it rains it rains basically all day. I think from what San Pedro looked like I would prefer Caye Caulker over Ambergris Caye even though there is more tourist shops and things to do over there.

I’m packed (minus what I need in the morning) and ready for our travel day tomorrow. I’m stressing about getting to the airport some. We are going to have to make sure we’re on the 9 o’clock water taxi to get to Belize City and then get a taxi to the airport 30-45 minutes away. We will end up at the airport really early for our flight but the next water taxi wouldn’t get us to Belize City until 11:30 and then we’d be at the airport after the recommended time to be there. I’d rather be early than late.

I think in the future when we have to take multiple modes of transportation to get to the airport I would prefer to cut it down to one by relocating the day before closer to the airport. It would give us more time before the flight and get us to one taxi away from the airport. We had thought of this when we were looking at Panama but that would have involved in county flights, we didn’t give the water taxi as high of a schedule and timing issue. It probably isn’t a big deal overall I just think it would cut down on travel day stress. A little cushion is nice.

I’m glad I got to dive at least once while we were here. I need to see about some local options to get more time and maybe do a buoyancy class. It’s not something that I will get to do a lot of and I wonder if it would be just as good just doing more snorkeling trips. You can see mostly the same stuff. Scuba is cool though. It’s neat to be able to go down to the bottom and see things from a closer angle. Free diving can only get you so far for the average person.

Hopefully everyone is doing well and planning a trip somewhere they haven’t been before! Get out and make some memories! Remember if you ever want to travel with us or meet up at a destination we can try and work something out.

I’m glad I ran into the YouTube guy as I have thought about doing video with our blog as well and a YouTube channel would be a great way to do it. It would probably be something like a 15 minute video of different days during our trip. Probably once or twice a month between our trips. I’m not sure yet but if we do it won’t be until after our next trip, the only videos I have now are from the tour, segments around most of the pictures,snorkeling and my dive. Most of the pictures are frames from the GoPro I have selected.

Be safe, be good or be good at it!

We did a three stop tour with Frenchies Diving today. They start early die to the long trip out. They have you meet at 5:30, they do offer a breakfast. They could have also said come at six if you don’t want breakfast and things would have been fine. The spread was nothing to write home about.

They gave a good snack offering after the first dive, huge box of junk food and fruit on plates. There was lunch after the second dive. Some chicken concoction with rice, pasta salad and a layered salad. It was okay Emily and I walked out after lunch to see the boobies, they are birds and not that interesting. A bird watcher I am not. We did see lizards and crabs along the way.

Was the trip worth the price and length of boat ride? Hard to say. We did get to see a lot and we can say we’ve been out to the Blue Hole. There may be closer and less expensive trips here but the weather shut those down. Frenchies did a good job. I will probably say maybe.

The Blue Wave dive shop decided to give me half my money back instead of all of it, or the kid at the counter said so and pocketed the other half for himself.

I got to go night snorkeling last night and it was one of the best snorkel trips I’ve done! We saw so many animals. There were 2 octopuses – one was bright blue and turned a molted shade of bluish-brown while we were watching. The other was just a baby and it only had it’s head poked out of the coral so it was hard to tell what color it was. I saw two baby puffer fish. I caught one in my hand and it puffed up. There were huge lobsters and crabs, eels of various sorts, a little squid, starfish, rays, and other things that I’m probably forgetting. Our guide also let us turn off our lights so we could see the bioluminescent creatures. That was awesome! If you wave your hand through the water, it sparkles. The bioluminescent plankton light up when you hit them. The coral also sparkles with little bio-lumens. It’s really amazing.

I don’t have any pictures of this trip because my new ProShot case for my iPhone was missing a piece, it flooded as soon as I jumped in the water and my phone is now fried. I used it in Costa Rica in December and it worked great, but at some point, a critical piece fell off and now neither the case nor my phone work. The ProShot case has a year warranty, they say they will replace your phone if there is a structural problem with the case, so I’m planning to file a complaint with them as soon as I get home. I tried blow drying the phone and I let it sit in a bag of rice to try to pull out the moisture, but it’s dead. Fortunately, I’ve had it for a few years and they don’t last that long so at least I didn’t ruin a new one. If anyone was thinking about texting me, don’t bother because I can’t currently get texts on my iPad either. Email still works.

Bill and I got up at 4:45am this morning to go on an all day snorkel trip to the blue hole. Off the coast of Belize, there is a huge crater surrounded by a coral reef shelf. The water in the hole is deep blue so it’s popular with divers. It took a 2 hour boat ride on a boat that was just a step up from a small fishing boat. It rained and was pretty cold for part of the way and the water was choppy. One poor guy was hung over from last night, got sea sick, passed out, and turned as white as I’ve ever seen anyone. We gave him some Dramamine.

I was really concerned that it was going to rain the whole time. I was wet and chilled by the time we got to our first location, but the rain stopped for most to the day and it was just cloudy. Overall, it was a pretty good snorkel day. We saw several turtles, a few sharks, some rays, a bunch of colorful fish and colorful coral. I’m glad we went, especially since we got to see some turtles up close, but it was a long day and I’m exhausted. It rained on the boat trip back too, but we were at least under the covered part of the boat. Weirdly, I still feel like I’m rocking in a boat.

We stopped on the way back to our apartment to get a pizza since we were too tired for anything else. I stayed and waited on our pizza while Bill took our stuff back to the apartment. Apparently, it rained all day here on Caye Caulker too because the roads were muddy mess with huge potholes full of mud. I had to balance a big pizza box on my bike basket while I rode through muddy, pothole filled streets to get to the apartment. My bike is coated in mud and I was too, but the pizza survived unscathed.

Tomorrow, we have to get things ready to come home. We have to get Covid tested and we are hoping to get laundry done. It’s Sunday so I don’t know how that will go. We also have to make sure we can get a spot on the water taxi back to Belize City. Hopefully, that all goes smoothly.

Bill should have some pictures eventually of our snorkel trip today. We might do another night snorkel tomorrow night. After all day on the water today, we are happy to be clean and dry right now.

I finally got to do a scuba dive. Sadly it ended up being just one. It was a good dive though and I am okay with things. Technically I did dive a second time and made it to the bottom but had to return to the surface due to a malfunctioning regulator. My spare had a leak. Sometimes the water pressure will close it once you in the water and go down. The divemaster Rodney was willing to switch the regulator in the water for me but I made the decision to not dive. When I was learning in Jamaica I was given the advice if it isn’t right then don’t dive. The first thing that happened before my second dive was the tank hadn’t been switched or if it had it leaked out so when doing as I was told to get the buoyancy control device on and check the tank, it was empty. I had to get out of my BCD, they switched tanks and when it was opened the spare regulator was leaking. They said go down and it will close, I went down, it did not close. As I was going down and about to the bottom I realized that I never put the strap on my GoPro and it wasn’t in my pocket. Luckily the divemaster had seen it after I entered the water and brought it to me and checked the regulator. He couldn’t get it to stop so we went back up. He offered that I continue the dive with the leak and just have to surface earlier than my normal 35 minutes and I said that I was not going, he offered to switch it and I had already made the decision to stay topside. Too much going against the dive to continue comfortably.

Blue Wave Diving did give me options and most often if you opt out of a dive you lose out on your money. Blue Wave is refunding all my money for the dive I didn’t get to do and the one I did. They were apologetic on the boat and after. The crew called the owner when we got back before I had left to see what was to be done. I would have been okay paying for the first dive as it was good and I understand that they did make an effort to get me on some of the second dive. Equipment can be temperamental and is part of the game. There was an issue and it wasn’t life threatening but it was still the right thing to do before it did become a problem.

So… spending 50 minutes on a dive boat in very rough water is not something that I will recommend, a good time it is not. The captain sits and watches for any sign of a dive buoy from the group and moves the boat along the expected course. He did three moves. When not going forward the boat rocks with the waves. The watermelon and limeade I had during our 30 minute surface interval was given up to the Caribbean.

Now for the fun stuff. The dive was very good, water temperature was around 81 degrees so I opted out of a wetsuit, clarity was in the 50-60 feet range. We had a max depth of 24 meters which is 78 feet. There may have been some that hit 80 feet. I have to say that when you are down the difference between 20 feet is not very noticeable. Especially when you can make out shadows on the surface of the boat or looking down at other divers from less depth. I didn’t get any pictures of the lobster or of a little shrimp that I spotted but I did get a bunch with sharks! The dive had four certified divers, a gal from the Netherlands, one from Israel and a guy from Wisconsin. The couple doing their open water certification was from Germany. The gals were add ons this morning. Yesterday it was just the guy from Wisconsin and I along with the students.

Bill finally got to go diving this morning. The weather looked pretty bad when we got up so we were concerned that he wouldn’t get to go again today. He was really hoping to dive at least once so it’s great that he got to go. He’s almost out of days.

I had the morning on my own, so I decided to go for a bike ride. It’s cloudy and windy, which actually made things better for me. It’s not quite as hot and I’m trying to let my skin heal from being burned before I get too much sun again. The clouds were welcome. Yesterday, Bill noticed a tour shop offering night snorkeling for tonight. I really enjoyed the night snorkeling that I did in Jamaica, so I booked a tour for myself tonight. The weather still looks iffy, but it hasn’t rained yet, so hopefully I get to go. We are supposed to do an all day snorkel trip tomorrow, but it’s supposed to rain so we’ll have to see what happens. I bought a t-shirt to wear during that trip so I don’t burn my back again. It’s a really cute t-shirt and it’s light enough to swim in so I’m happy to have it. I tried on a rash guard, but it’s wasn’t very comfortable. The t-shirt will be better.

I also went to watch the seahorses again this morning. They are adorable and right next to the dock so they are easy to see. I met a very nice Dutch lady from Amsterdam who was also looking at the seahorses. Her husband also dives so they came because he wanted to dive with whale sharks. He got to go out today, but all his other dives got canceled too because of the weather. She doesn’t like the water, which is too bad because there is really nothing else to do here. They tried bird watching on the mainland but didn’t see much. I recommended that they try Costa Rica next time. They are retired now. She worked as a medical administrator and he worked in the wind turbine industry, which is big in the Netherlands. I haven’t had a chance to meet a lot of people here so it was nice to have someone new to talk to.

After I finished watching seahorses, I did a bit of tourist shopping. I try to get a coffee cup from all the places I visit so I got a cup and a coaster. I didn’t love my cup options but the one I bought is fine and it’s a size and shape I like. At least it’s practical. The coaster is super neat. It’s etched slate and has a seahorse in the middle and I think symbols of the Mayan calendar around the edges.

The shop where I bought the cup had a funny sign warning people not to shoplift.

It was about 11:30 by the time I finished my bike ride so I stopped by Kareems BBQ and got BBQ chicken take out for lunch. It was a lot of food for lunch, but it was good.

I had planned to snorkel off the beach somewhere this afternoon, but now that I have a trip planned for 5:45pm I’m not sure I want to go snorkel, come in and take a shower, then head back out to snorkel again this evening. I’m reading another pretty good book and I’ve been watching some good documentaries, so I may camp out on the sofa until my snorkel trip this evening. If it rains and I don’t get to go, I’ll wish I had snorkeled this afternoon, but that’s how it goes.

I snorkeled off the boat dock yesterday afternoon. There’s not a lot to see but the water is warm and the sea floor is covered in sea grass. It’s like a big, underwater prairie. Bill saw an eagle ray and there are probably a lot of ray and turtles but it’s a huge area, so you need to be in the right place at the right time to see them.

I might do another short post this evening if I get to go snorkeling. I’m not sure how I’ll do trying to take pictures, swim and hold my flash light at the same time so we’ll have to see how that goes.

Hello all!

Not much going on today. We rode bikes this morning to go get a few bucks from the ATM and check on my scuba diving for tomorrow. The dive shop was closed. We got some treats from the Belize Chocolate shop, brownies are excellent, the raspberry tort is good but not worth the cost, just get the brownies!

We stopped at the gift shop to look for rash guards for snorkeling all day. I got a cool one with an octopus on it. Emily opted out but did find a t-shirt later to use. Rash guard shirts are what the divers wear, just a light man made material, long sleeve shirt. Mine is white with a Buoyancy Control Device ( it holds the scuba tank) with an octopus on it.

We swam off the dock by our apartment. The water wasn’t clear closer to shore. I got a few pictures.

I am signed up for a two tank dive tomorrow. The original company said they couldn’t do it as the other divers I was going to go with ended up with dengue fever. I think she’s full of crap. Sunrise has a lot of excuses. Tomorrow I will be with Blue Wave Diving . I will say the gal from Sunrise did make some calls and found me a couple options. One of the guys said the weather slowed things down a lot. I’m not sure why, did everyone not come to the island because of it? Did they just give up trying to go? Are they all leaving Saturday and Sunday so they won’t have enough surface time after diving?

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.

We finally had a bright, sunny day and reasonably good weather for snorkeling! It took a while for everyone to get snorkel gear and fins at Caveman Snorkel Tours so we left in boats a little before 11am. On the way out out, they gave us some fish and let us hand feed some frigate birds. If you hold a fish up in the air, the birds will swoop down and take it from you. They are excellent thieves. They don’t swim but they regularly steal food from birds that dive and bring food up to the surface. We also got to feed some terrapin fish. They jump out of the water and take fish out of your hand.

The reef is about a mile away from shore here. You can see the waves breaking over it way out in the ocean. They took us to a shallow spot first where boats bring tourists to feed nurse sharks and rays. There were a lot of sharks and rays. They know to come when they hear the boats and they are completely used to people. We have been seeing mostly gray short-tail stingrays here. It was neat to see them and be so close to them, but it’s also a little artificial since they come to get fed. It’s more interesting to see them in more natural settings.

In the second snorkel location we got to see manatees! That was super neat. My goggles kept fogging up so that wasn’t as good of an experience as I’d hoped but I’m lucky that I got to see them at all. After we finished snorkeling, we also saw them surfacing to breath too.

The water here is as clear and blue as pool water. It’s really amazing. It’s like snorkeling in a super clean aquarium. It almost doesn’t seem real. The corals are really pretty, we saw a lot of brightly colored fish and there are tons of conch shells, and some of them are occupied by mollusks.

We did a half day trip and both Bill and I are glad we didn’t do the full day trip. It was a great trip, but lot of time to be in the sun and water. I had thick 50+ sunscreen but my back is still pretty badly burned. I’ve done a lot of snorkeling but this is the worst burn I’ve had. I would have been completely fried if we had done a full day trip.

It was about 1:30 when we finished so we stopped a Karem’s BBQ before we came back to our apartment. Karem has a tiny food truck with a BBQ grill out front. He and his partner do BBQ and curry. Bill had BBQ pork steak and I had an Afro-Caribbean chicken curry. It’s the best food we’ve had here. We also bought banana break and coconut cake from a street vender and we got chocolate chip cookies and brownies from the chocolate shop. The brownies are delicious!

I was wiped out by the time I got back and took a shower. I fell asleep on the sofa around 4pm and woke up about the time Bill finished making shake-n-bake chicken for supper. I was dead to the world and didn’t even know he had gone down to cook. It’s really nice and much less expensive to eat in sometimes here, especially if someone else is doing the cooking!

We woke up this morning to more rain, and initially our day didn’t look very promising. At about 9am, a hotel employee came to tell us that all of our snorkeling trips had been canceled at least through tomorrow.

Bill had been suggesting for a few days that we take a Golf Cart Taxi tour of the island. I wasn’t initially very excited about that since the island is tiny and I thought we had seen everything on our bikes. Since we didn’t have much going on this morning, we decided to take the tour, and it turned out to be really interesting and useful! There were parts of the island that I didn’t know existed and our guide had a lot of interesting information about how the island is developing. We saw one part that used to be a bayou but has been filled in and now has winter homes for rich Americans. I wish I was a rich American.

Our guide took us to a beach where you can swim. The owner of the bar/hotel on the beach has created a habitat for sea horses so we got to see the sea horses. I’ve never seen any in the wild, so that was really exciting. We also learned that the bar owner regularly feeds sting rays on the beach at around 4:30 so every afternoon the rays show up for snacks. They are used to people, and they let you pet them. They are basically like the squirrels at home that people feed.

While we were on our tour, we saw boats bringing people in from snorkeling. That was interesting since our snorkel and Bill’s diving trips have all been canceled. We asked which companies were still taking people out and our guide took us over to a shop that’s willing to take us out tomorrow, rain or not. So, we are booked with Caveman Snorkel tours for tomorrow and probably Wednesday. I talked to some people who went out today and they said it was fine. This guy probably doesn’t have a lot of rules, so I think it will work out really well.

After lunch, we took our snorkel gear and went to the beach we had seen earlier. It’s not the best location I’ve been, but I saw a little brown nurse shark, a crab, and we stayed to see the rays come in. That was awesome! The picture below is a nurse shark. I didn’t have my camera with me, so I got this from Google.

After snorkeling, we ate at a restaurant on the beach. So far, the food here is nothing to be excited about. We both got a chocolate milkshake for dessert. They make milk shakes here by putting chocolate milk in a blender with some ice. It’s not good. I don’t recommend it.

Bill took his GoPro so he has most of the pictures. I had to ask for a couple to put at the top of my blog. We should have good stories tomorrow after our trip with Caveman Tours!

I should have brought the selfie stick!

Today our luck with Mother Nature has not improved. While I was prepping my gear for our trip the gal from the desk came a knocking at our door. She was apologetic about the weather and that they would have to cancel our snorkeling for today. She also said tomorrow is not looking good, there’s a system in the Caribbean right now that they expect to finish up in a couple of days. It is unfortunate but weather does play a role with this type of vacation. We could have picked a place that has more consistent weather but we didn’t. Hopefully our gamble will still pay off in the next few days.

They canceled my dives for Wednesday and Thursday. It’s possible that I can dive on Friday. I have requested that they add me to that day. We’re going to see about doing some snorkeling with caveman tours, our taxi driver guide had us chat with the guy, sounds like he does Sketchy tours, he tried horribly to guess were Emily is from, starting with California.

I do think that traveling at the start of the the low season is a good time to get good deals on nice accommodations and not have as many tourists to deal with. You do run the risk of being somewhere when conditions are less than ideal in other ways, most weather. It can be extremely hot, humid, rainy or all the above in Latin America.

We did ask about a good place to get in the ocean on our own and it was recommended to go to the Iguana Reef on the other side of the island. There is a resort there that looks like a nice option for those looking at coming to Caye Caulker and I would consider if we are to return for a future visit.

The other side of the island is more what we look for if we had known. We are think that in the future we will look for western side accommodations on islands in the Caribbean if possible. I do need to do more research on this topic.

Our need for an activity precipitated a golf cart tour of the south side of the split. South of the split the island has a few vehicles besides golf carts. The fire department has a pumper truck and a smaller truck as well. The power company has a bucket truck and I’ve seen a couple motorcycles at the police station. There’s an airport that is just a block south of our resort.

I’ve added a video about Caye Caulker, it’s well done and at the end there are some hotels, tour companies and restaurants with names and contact numbers.

We had lunch after our tour at a nice place that overlooks the ocean and then went back to our apartment and hung out for a bit. After we took our bikes to sign up at the caveman tour place and I talked with the gal where I was supposed to dive tomorrow. Once we got things taken care of we rode over to the Iguana Reef and did some snorkeling and watched the rays. The guy feeds the rays so the come everyday about 4-4:30. We stopped off for dinner on the way back to the apartment. I had a cuban that had all the correct ingredients this time but they used pulled pork and it was too greasy. We tried to have some chocolate milkshakes but what passes for a milkshake here is milk, ice and chocolate syrup. Not the best.

The staff at our resort are very friendly and they do a good job. They do leave the door open when they are here which wouldn’t be bad if we were out and about when they came. I have told them twice that they don’t have to empty the one days worth of trash from the bathroom but they always do.

Today we also rounded up laundry and had it done here at the resort. I highly recommend that you use this option when traveling and cut down on the amount of stuff you need to pack. I’m getting to where I can get all my clothes on just one side of my bag. I still bring more shorts than I end up needing. My travel wardrobe is going to end up being standardized, you will have to look at Emily’s outfit to know if our pictures are from different days or trips.

I don’t remember if I have said anything about the dry bags I picked up last fall. I got two that actually cam be blown up and used as a floating marker of people in the water and as a swim aid. They come with a belt and a short tether. I added a length of paracord with some reflective stripes in it.