UnBelizeable

These plays on words between "believe"and "Belize" abound around here, but they still make me smile. :)

Our first full day in Belize we were woken up by the sun rising over the ocean through our cabana windows - at 6am. Well, actually it was only me who was woken up by it, as Gavin can sleep through anything the world can provide in light or noise, a skill which I have yet to acquire... I let him sleep for a couple more hours, since who in their right mind gets up at 6am on vacation? When he finally woke up, we walked down the beach to have breakfast at a lovely beachside restaurant attacked Estel's. The huevos rancheros were really tasty, and I had my first experience with Belizan "fry jacks.". Basically, they are like our east coast fried dough, but served for breakfast EVERY DAY, not only at the Big E. :). I am also totally hooked on the fresh watermelon juice that is served at every restaurant here; so perfectly refreshing on a hot Belize day!

After breakfast we wandered around the small downtown area, doing a little shopping and exploring. Gavin actually bought a pair of sunglasses - the first he has owned in his life - because it is so bright and sunny here! I told him he is getting soft in his "old age" since previously he had refused to wear sunglasses on principle. :). For lunch we stopped at a little roadside stand and bought some rice and beans. I asked for just a little, and the woman gave me probably a good three pounds of the stuff! Gavin and I ate it as we walked to the south side of downtown for our first water activities of the trip; I had scheduled a diving and snorkeling trip to Hol Chan Marine Reserve and Shark Ray alley.

Belize is lined on its east side with a barrier coral reef, and Hol Chan is a channel through the coral reef that is a little "highway" for a ton of marine life. It is not very deep - the dive is only about thirty feet - so I thought it would be a good "starter" dive for me with my trouble equalizing my ears. Our dive master named Eddie took us first to see some sea turtles - we could get within a few feet of them as they fed on the sea grass that covered the bottom. We were about a mile away from shore, but the water was still only about 6-12 feet deep! After floating with the sea turtles for a bit, Eddie started to take us into the channel. Through the channel we swam near to HUGE grouper, many schools of fish, saw a couple stingrays and reef sharks...

It was apparent that Eddie liked to "mess with" the marine life. He poked a little metal pin he had into the sand under a hole in the coral, and then a moray eel came out! He did this at several different holes, spending almost 5 minutes at one, at which point Gavin gave me the "cuckoo" hand signal, circling his finger around his ear. It is hard to laugh with a regulator in your mouth. :) Gavin got bored of waiting for him to stop playing and forgot to be mindful of the coral and got stung when his knee hit an innocent looking frond. After Eddie got bored with tormenting eels, he took us through a small cave/archway in the coral, barely big enough for two people to be inside at once. Inside was a HUGE school of yellow and silver fish each about twice the size of my hand that didn't even swim away at our approach; they weren't scared of us at all! That was probably my favorite part of the whole dive! When we came out of the cave, Eddie found another poor little thing to torture: a jellyfish. It was pristine transparent white and probably 1.5 times as big as my head - really beautiful to see one in the ocean. So Eddie floated over to the poor thing and put his bare hand on the top of it and started pushing it around - the poor thing turned WRONG SIDE OUT, like a contact when you accidentally flip it wrong side out. I guess if you touch its head it can't sting you. Gavin approached and was about to touch it on the tentacles, and Eddie gave him the "get back" and "it will hurt your skin" hand signs, and I had to laugh through my regulator again. :) Another thing I observed about the current through the channel is all the different temperatures of water; I could be completely still, and I would feel the water suddenly get as warm as bath water, then just as suddenly it would turn into ice water! The coral itself was not all that colorful; we have been to the Great Barrier Reef, so pretty much no coral has impressed us since then. :) But we did get to swim with so many creatures that we had never seen SCUBA diving before: the eels, sea turtles, stingrays, jellyfish...

After the dive, we got back into the boat for a few minutes to travel over to Shark Ray Alley, a place where fishermen used to clean their catches, which attracted sharks and stingrays to pick up the scraps. Nowadays nobody cleans fish, but enough tourist boats arrive and feed them that many still approach every boat that arrives... Eddie didn't actually chum the water, he just encouraged us to snorkel over to the next boat over where the boat captain was throwing all kinds of stuff into the water, attracting a feeding frenzy of sharks and rays. The sharks at Shark Ray Alley are the "harmless" kind, just nurse sharks that aren't interested in eating humans, so they said... Eddie followed us over to where the sharks and rays were feeding and continued his trend of messing with the marine life. He actually CAUGHT a shark in his arms; the nurse sharks are about three feet long. He told us to only pet it behind the gills, otherwise it will bite. No crap, Eddie. The shark felt rough and scratchy, almost like sandpaper. The next thing he caught was a stingray, which we also got to pet; it felt soft and slimy like a wet mushroom. (Eddie told us not to pet the stinger. Thank you, Captain Obvious...) The stingrays were all around us, having stayed around to nibble the fish bits that were continuously being thrown into the water. These were HUGE stingrays - the biggest we saw was around four feet or more in "wingspan!" It was really amazing to be surrounded by so many of these beautiful, dangerous, graceful creatures.

After the snorkeling/diving trip, we went back to town and decided to try out DandE's Custard, a highly recommended custard shop by Lonely Planet. Basically, custard is soft serve ice cream on crack, and this was no exception! I had some really tasty scoops of mint-chocolate chip and coconut flavors. The perfect treat for a hot Belize day!

After custard, we went to dinner at a beach restaurant named Lily's Hidden Treasure, which had been highly recommended to us by a couple that snorkled with us. Sea food is supposed to be fresh and amazing here, so I tried out their shrimp ceviche, which had RAW habanero peppers as a garnish! Now I can take a decent amount of spicy food, but I was definietely "feeling it" after a few bites with raw habaneros. but the funny thing about habaneros is that they hit you hard, but the heat is gone quickly. I also had some fresh snapper, which would have been really good had I not already been full from the large portion of ceviche... But this is typically how our eating goes on vacation; we eat until we're stuffed, then keep on eating. :) (it also doesn't help that doing any kind of water activity makes me RAVENOUS!) Being completely stuffed and not in the mood for drinking, we took the romantic, moon lit walk along the beach back to our cabana to dream sweet, Belizan dreams.