Tuesday, March 25, 2014
San Pedro, Belize Cayes, Belize
Off snorkeling today with Ragga-muffin Boat tours. It's a full day on the boat and snorkeling in 3 places around the Caye Caulker Great Barrier Reef. The Caye Caulker Reef is the second largest reef next in size to the Aussie Great Barrier Reef.
Heading out and about at 10:30, we traveled for roughly an hour or so to our first snorkeling spot. This consisted of going snorkeling with a bunch of sting rays, fish, the occasional shark as well as a almost completely blind 20 year old turtle named Wish Willy (the same name of the place we had dinner at last night).
It was times like this that I really wished I had invested in an underwater camera to get some photos of this, I had Rays swimmig over my legs, fish swimming all around me and even the turtle popped oer to say hello. Sabrina had the privalage of swimming with the tutle by grabbing onto it's shell as it swam by.
The next stop took us South for 5 minutes where we stopped and had a chance to swim with the sharks and some more fish, initially I was a bit apprehensive about jumping into the water with so many sharks and no cage, but a minute or two later after Andres jumped in, that's what I did... I figured if they wouldn't eat him, they wouldn't eat me. Everyone eventually jumped in with the sharks after they had a chance to get their snorkeling gear on. Some of us even swam down and touched some of the stingrays on their back and sharks as well.
It way amazing that when you touched the stingrays on their wings, you could see the sand and stuff move off it, I actually saw one swim past that had something writing on one of the wings, not exactly sure what it said, but I think it said Shane, funny stuff.
It was another 40 minutes before we reached our 3rd and final stop. This one was probably the longest stop of them all, it involved swimming around part of the reef and seeing a heap more marine life, such as more turtles, Green Moray Eels, more sharks, a porcupine fish and a heap of other fish.
During this swim we came across a small underwater cave which, if you were game you could swim though, it was probably about 5 meters down, so you had to make sure you had a good breath as you went down. I was about half way though when my foot hit the side of the cave and I lost a fin, needless to say, this got me panicking a little and I decided it was safer to leave the fin there and attempt to get it after I got back to the top, however it was certainly a lot harder to continue on with only one fin. In the end the tour guide swam down and got the fin, two reasons, it was a lot easier seeing he had two fins, and.... He could hold his breath way longer than I could.
The snorkeling part all over, it was time to head back, this was time we started drinking, Rum Punch. The steering of the sailboat was all on Phyllis to do, she had asked earlier, so she was lucky enough to get to steer. We nicked named her Captain Phyllis, which I guess isn't technically a nickname, but it has a similar ring to Captain Philips (like the movie), however we didn't get attacked by pirates, so that's a plus.
Upon hitting the shore most of us disembarked the sailboat, while most of the girls stayed about the boat to finish off the rum punch that us "GUYS" apparently couldn't finish. Needless to say, by the time I caught up with them later, some of them were very happy.
Dinner at a local Pizza joint that night, apparently the pizza's were really good, but to be honest, I wasn't that impressed, the service was pretty slow and the guy who ran the place was either drunk off his head, stoned, or on something, because he didn't really seem quite with it. Later on he ended up getting in a fight with from what I understand one of his ex staff.
After that, some of us decided to hit the local night life, I decided I'd tag along, despite my feet feeling really bad. The first place we went was the local sports bar, that place was alright despite the local entertainment having one really bad singer, the other guys wasn't too bad and the music actually sounded alright when he was singing and the other dude just played the instruments. From there we headed down to the 'I and I Reggie bar' where it was happening for the rest of the night. Some dude in the bar started up a conversation with me asking where I was from, etc, he then came out quite bluntly and said "If you need Gunja or Cocaine come and see me", wow, they are so open about it here, I thanked him for his offer but let him know I don't so that kind of stuff. I ended up coming back to the hotel early, while the others continued on dancing the night away, while I was sitting here typing this Blog, Andres, Thomas and Peter came back and then decided to take off on a couple of push bikes sitting outside the hotel. Funny, randomly taking off on the bikes from one end of the island to the other.