Belize 2012
How can we describe Caye Caulker… Heaven. It’s small, it’s quiet, and there’s not much to do other than lay in the sun, snorkel, eat jerk chicken, cheap seafood and drink rum… Like I said, heaven.
When we arrived via ferry we went for a stroll along the main (and basically only) strip to see if we could find accommodation. A man on a bike came by and told us “he knew a place”. Being new to travelling and sceptical of EVERYONE we weren’t sure whether to follow him, but after a little bit of conversation we let him lead us to Jeremiah’s Inn. Here we hired a room for one night just to see what it was like.
Once we’d paid for our accommodation we dumped our belongings, chucked on our swimmers and went for an explore. We walked to the north end of the island to the Split, a deep fast flowing channel caused via a huge storm many years ago that cut the previous island in two. On the split was a colourful bar called Lazy Lizards that served cheap rum and tasty frozen strawberry daiquiris.
On day 2 of island life woke up for THE FIRST TME of our entire trip without an alarm. We strolled to the split for a swim and an explore and on our way back to our room we came across our hostels owner who had just returned from collecting his lobster traps. He had caught heaps! We bought a whole lobster each from him for $5AUD and grilled them on the wood fire bbq made from an old drum at the back of our hostel. Delicious!
On our 5th day on Caye Caulker we went on a snorkel tour for $100 Belize Dollars (~$50AUD) which was EXPENSIVE comparatively to the rest of our activities thus far on the trip. On the tour we visited coral gardens, shark & ray alley and Hol Chan Marine reserve. All of which were beautiful and lots of fun. We had some amazing snorkelling. We saw huge grouper, tarpon, and plenty of sea turtles and moray eels. We also saw some beautiful coral formations including a very cool underwater tunnel swim through. The day included an endless supply of fresh fruit, a rice and chicken lunch as well as plenty of rum to drink on the boat trip back to the island.
We originally planned to stay only 2 nights, and ended up staying 5 (which was A LOT on our extremely tight time schedule) before embarking on an island hopping sail with Raggamuffin Tours to Placencia in the south of Belize.
Our Raggamuffin 3 day/2night sail begun in Caye Caulker and spent one night at Rendezvous Caye and one night at Tobacco Caye (both tiny islands south of Caye Caulker). Unfortunately the weather wasn’t great during the sail however it didn’t stop us having a great time with plenty of snorkelling, eating, drinking and spear fishing. Sean even caught a lobster! The night we spent on Rendezvous Caye was unlike anything we had even imagined. This tiny “island” was smaller than a football field and realistically wasn’t much more than a sandbar with a dock and a few palm trees. We camped out under the stars on this tiny speck of land in the middle of the Caribbean.
Once we got to Placencia we planned our journey to Honduras. Did someone say 3 countries in one day?