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Hurricane!! Well, sort of.

Caye Caulker is a beautiful little island about 45min North of Belize City by high speed water taxi. We spent a few days there chilling out and waiting to go snorkelling on the second biggest reef in the world.

I say waiting because Hurricane Ivan was being cheeky and had turned North later then everyone had expected, squeezing between the Yucatan and the East coast of Cuba. Consequently it did interesting things to the currents and meant that the Belizean Cayes got hit by the tail of storms that follows a Hurricane. As a result, all of the waters got muddied up, meaning snorkelling and scuba were off the agenda for the time being. It also meant that our hostel´s water pump got flooded by seawater meaning that we were without showers for 12 hours. In my case, it was nearer 36 hours because I´d been a lazy shit and not bothered showering all day. ha ha ha!!

We passed the time eating the most delicious seafood - lobster, snapper and shrimp at Rasta Pasta, talking to the friendly locals who speak a Creole dialect of English, and in my case being offered drugs by somebody everytime we walked in a bar. I must have ¨one of those faces¨.

Eventually we got to go snorkelling on our last day when the weather improved. We signed up for a daytrip on a big yacht. Because most of the island had been waiting to go out for 3 days it was pretty busy and it ended up being two boats going out. Nevertheless it was a great day. We made three stops along the reef, with the last two being the most memorable at Hol Chan Marine Park and Shark Ray Alley. The latter was great because we got to swim with Nurse Sharks (which if I´m being honest are basically massive catfish) and Stingrays. We also saw a ton of other pescados like barracuda, snapper and groupers.

We weren´t without casualties though. Andrew watched as a girl in our group vomited - underwater. I asked him if the fish ate it. A Swedish guy from our hostel got seasick too, but held it down. Paul cut his leg up on coral and Andrew got bad sunburn on his back!! I was fine, and contented myself with drinking 3 glasses of rum punch as we headed back to the Caye.

Our entire hostel left the next day and took the taxi back to Belize City. It was an uncomfortable ride back because there were a load of us crammed into a small boat, with us in the undercover section meaning we were away from the ocean breezes. I was sat next to some weird German farmers called Mennonites though who looked like they had stepped straight out of ¨The Grapes of Wrath¨ or something, with chequered shirts and braces. Apparently there is a small community of a 1000 or so who live in Belize.

We got back to the bus station, said farewell to a few of the people from our hostel who were Mexico bound, and took the bus to San Ignacio in Western Belize.

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