June 7 – Tulum to Caye Caulker
Today was a fairly long travel day. We had a 3 hour bus ride and two 1 ½ hour boat rides to get to Caye Caulker. It is a small island in Belize, known mostly for snorkeling, diving and eating amazing seafood. For dinner tonight we had fresh caught fish that had been grilled and it was incredible. The island is so hot and humid, I feel like there is no way to get cold. There is no air conditioning anywhere, so you just get used to feeling sticky all the time. When I was packing I had all kinds of plans about how cute I was going to dress, and those thoughts went out the window as soon as the weather made me realize comfort is more important than cute.
June 8 – The Blue Hole
The day started quite early – we had to be at the dive shop at 5:30! It was the best way to do it though, because you arrive at the first dive site before anyone else. I have been so excited to scuba dive in the Blue Hole, it is one of the main reasons I got my scuba certification. I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to dive because I don’t have my advanced open water certification, but I was lucky that they don’t require it. You take a boat about 2 hours into the ocean to get to the Blue Hole. When you get there isn’t not as evident as it is in all the postcards – you know there is coral all around you, but it’s not as striking of a picture from the boat. The blue hole is a old sinkhole that is now filled with water which is why it’s so different than the ocean around it (picture below courtesy of Google!).
There were a total of 9 of us diving and we had 3 dive masters with us. When you get there, they very quickly get everyone into the water and you start the dive. Everything is very fast paced, but it was okay because they had explained in advance exactly what we were going to do. As soon as everyone is in the water, we started going down – you go down SO quickly. We dropped to 130 feet (40 meters) in just under 5 minutes. That is by far the deepest I have ever dived, and it right on the limit of how deep you can do recreational scuba diving. The water was dark and pretty murky, but just after we got down, we looked to our right and saw a reef shark!!! It was absolutely amazing. You can only be down that deep for about 8 minutes - we were swimming in under a small overhang, going around these huge stalagmites (they must have been 2 feet in diameter) and seeing the amazing formations that exist down there. Once your time at the bottom is over, you go back up really slowly to make sure you don’t get decompression sickness. On the way back up we saw another reef shark, but much closer and clearer this time. The blue hole was so incredible!
Next we were in the boat for about an hour before the next dive sit. That one wasn’t quite a deep – about 80 feet. It was a place called Half Moon Wall, so it is a huge wall of coral where there are many different kinds of fish. My favorite were these huge tube corals. I would swim over them and you could look in – some were 4 feet deep, 2 feet wide and they had tons of plants growing in them or fish hiding. We went to a small island for lunch and a quick afternoon nap, then went for our third dive. This one was even shallower, but we were lucky to see 4 stingrays swim just in front of us. All and all, I would say that the scuba diving today was just so perfect.
June 9th – Caye Caulker to San Ignacious
We weren’t leaving until midday so we had a while to see the town. Caye Caulker is a tiny little island, with only about 2000 people who live there. The island is small – about 4 blocks wide, and you could walk from one end to the other in about 20 minutes. There were tons of little restaurants, clothing shops and snorkeling companies. All the buildings were painted the vibrant colors that you think of when you think of the Carabbean. There were orangs, purples, blues and greens, and some houses had all of the colors on them. It was just such a quaint little place, I wish we had longer here.
After grabbing a quick breakfast we headed over to “The Split”. It is the best place on the island to take a swim. The island used to be a little larger, but Hurricane Hattie came through and created a division between the two parts of the island. The North section doesn’t have any houses or businesses, so it is now just a protected area of land. They call the water between the two sections the split, where you can jump in and have a lazy float. I also had a rum punch at this great little bar next to the spit called the Lazy Lizard. They play a bunch of reggie music and the whole atmosphere is just chill – a great place to spend an afternoon.
Unfortunately, it was time to leave the beach areas and head inland to San Ignacious. We took a 2 hour boat ride and two 2 hour bus ride to reach it. They have taken old school busses from the US and painted them cool colors, and they stuff as many people as possible before letting it leave. Got to love the transportation in Belize!
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