Caye Caulker – Go Slow

So we are now in Caye Caulker, a much smaller island about 30 minutes boat ride south of Ambergris. We originally rented a little apartment (Valarosa) for the week but we’ve just extended for another 3 days. It’s bliss to be here, at the quiter south end of the island, surrounded by palm trees, bourganvillia and orleander trees and with our own kitchen to boot. Here we can try and reproduce some of the dishes we had in Mexico, including of course some of the fabulous varitions along the margarita theme!

The motto of the island is “Go Slow” and it is more than fitting. The pace of life here is several steps slower than elsewhere and positively snail-like compared to London. The island is pretty small, you can cycle from one end to the other in 15 minutes and everyone knows everyone. There are 3 ways of getting around, on foot, by bike or golf buggy. What passes for roads here are more potholes with bits of sand track linking them, it keeps the cycling interesting at least and almost like a game of Mario Cart when you throw in the children, dogs, chickens and random, traffic-oblivious tourists. Our little house comes with two bikes, rather salt rusted, St.John has the fetching pink one, oh and they’re dutch bikes so you have to remember to back pedal when you want to brake!

Days float gently by on the breeze, chilling, gently bicycling, exploring and frequently bobbing about in the azure waters up by The Split. The Split is a channel at the north of town, dividing the island in two, with a simple shack of a bar and some easy snorkelling – lots of baby fish, squid, angelfish, star fish, french grunts, small barraccuda…

The only thing marring the serenity here are the sandflies – yes, yet again I am a walking English breakfast/lunch/supper for more bitey things. They are absolutely tiny, a complete pest and almost impossible to deter, deet that’s just seasoning for them! In fact the only thing that vaguely seems to work for even a short length of time (bar never getting out of the water) is baby oil. Apparently they are so tiny that if they try and bite you while you have it on they drown. So yes, I am now a walking baby oil slick…

Leaving La Isla Bonita

Oh, did we forget to mention that, apparently San Pedro and Ambergris Caye is the Isla Bonita featured in the Madonna song.
While San Pedro was definitely an interesting place to pass a couple of days, we were going a little stir crazy by the end of a week there. It’s the sort of place that I’m sure would be great if you had the budget for a villa with a pool, boat and golf buggy, north of the main town, but if you are on a tighter budget in a hotel in town, it can be a little hectic. While there are lots of water sports available, diving, fishing, sailing (and don’t get me wrong this is a fantastic place to do all of these) there are days when the weather just wont play ball and the winds are really too strong to do at least the first two.
The only thing left to do at this stage is to ensconce yourselves in a bar or restaurant and drink! Now, it’s not like we are ones to shy away from a few bevys but it can quickly get expensive (it is an island after all, so everything has to be brought over from the mainland). The restaurants also have a fairly limited scope when it comes to food choices. Maybe we were spoilt by the huge variety of food in Mexico but after a while the restaurants all started to slightly blend together.
Belizean food incorporates influences from several countries, you’ll find variations of Mexican style cerviches, often with conch and burritos. A Caribbean slant is seen in favourites like blackened (spiced) fish/chicken/pork with rice and beans, chicken stew with rice and beans and fried chicken with, yes you guessed it, rice and beans! That said they do have excellent coffee and chocolate and some outstanding puddings and cakes (the English influence?) – rum cake, banana bread, key lime pie… Johnny cakes (reminded me somewhat of scones) and fried Jacks are also both popular at any time of day with fillings from fruit to ham and cheese and anything else in between, in fact they can pretty much accompany anything you like.

We tried a number of restaurants, so here are a couple of our favourites:

Estelles – on the beach, all day breakfast with a huge varitey of combinations and fantastic BBQ Challenge chicken wings and pulled pork. Its very laid back with live music and gets justifiably busy.
The Blue Water Grill – one of the more upmarket restaurants, we had an excellent supper here and St.John indulged in the Key Lime Pie which he was sad to finish.
Wild Mango – meant to be one of the best restaurants in Belize and while the chef’s salad I had for lunch one day was excellent, we were disappointed by one of their signature dishes, the Tres Amigos Cerviche, your choice of three of their cerviches. Perhaps we had just been spoilt by all the amazing cerviches we had tried in Mexico.
The last restaurant on our list is Waruguma. This was easily the cheapest of the lot and was in the middle of town rather than on the beach like the other three. I had delicious pork tacos and St.John pupusas (from El Salvador, like a thick stuffed corn tortilla) and the next night he went back for more.

St.John was very tempted…

Diving or Fishing

Well you can guess who did what!

I chose to do another two tank dive and even though it was pretty choppy and not the best visibility, I still had a great time. It really helped my diving confidence to do it independantly by myself rather than relying on St.John to be there and make sure I was doing everything right – don’t forget to breath!

Bones in Belize

There are Bone-fish in Ambergris Caye… Lots of them.They taunt you in the ports where you can’t get to them and then shoot off when stalking them on the flats.

You can go DIY here & walk or cycle a few miles north of the bridge from San Pedro then cast off a pier or wade out but the pickings are slim. I opted to rent a guide after negotiating with a a couple of companies. Most guides will charge between $250 – $350 (USD) for a full day. I managed to find an off duty guide from a fishing lodge for US$ 150 half day.

We headed out to the west side of the island and north up the coast for an hour along seemingly endless flats. The water is teeming with life from Barracudas, Shads, Bone-fish and the occasional shoal of Permit. Once the engines were switched off, Ricardo climed up onto the platform on top of the skiff and began poling us accross the flats in crystal clear water. The ‘Bones’ are difficult to spot at first and my guide, Ricardo, hopped up and down everytime I cast at a barracuda! The Bone-fish resemble mini blue torpedos and are capable of phenomenal turns of speed. Within a few casts I was in, a sizeable fish which annoyingly shook himself off the fly! It wasnt long before I had landed my first, then second…. and so it continued for the next few hours.
Most of the fish I landed were no more than 16 inches, but fought with the strength a fish 5 times their size, incredible sport fishing. If you’ve caught them before you’ll know what it’s like, if not, book a flight tomorrow as I’m in Central America for a few months still!!

Another Day, Another Dive or 2

We went out again the day after our refresher to do a two tank dive (really 2 seperate dives) and saw lots more fun things – spotted eagle rays, more nurse sharks, hawksbill turtles… The diving here really is fabulous.

Lunch after was at The Sunset Grill, where they feed the Tarpon off the jetty. These aren’t babies we’re talking about, these are things that probably weigh more than me! The restaurant keeps a bucket of sardines for the guests to feed to them and you take one and put it between your fingers before kneeling down and holding it over the water. At this stage you will have maybe ten or more of these huge fish circling beneath you and suddenly one will jump up and with amazing precision snatch the sardine from you without (hopefully) taking off your hand. They don’t have teeth but I was still wary and it took St.John rather a lot of persuading and demonstrating before I would do it but I eventualy conceeded and managed to get the biggest of the lot to jump up.

Scuba Diving at last – UnBelizeable!

Yes, you guessed it, that is another of the favourite slogans out here, they love their puns and as this is an English (mostly) speaking country we can actually understand them!

Third day in an we managed to get ourselves organised to go scuba diving at last (well the “fish part of the blog wasn’t just going to be about fishing!). There are a hundred different scuba outfits here but we eventually settled on Amigos del Mar, one of the biggest and most professional looking. We organised for a refresher course as it’s been about a year and a half since we last dived and were looked after extremely well by, our dive master, Papo. After going through all the basics we went out onto the reef.
The Mezoamerican reef, is the second biggest barrier reef in the world and runs the length of Belize and well beyond in either direction and, from what we have seen so far, it is stunning. St.John has considerably more dive experience than myself, though it doesn’t really matter too much and we are both Advanced divers, so able to do wreck dives, night dives and of course most importantly deep dives necessary for The Blue Hole…

Our first dive was a gentle one to ease us back in but we still saw a huge variety of marine life, including Hawksbill Turtles and Nurse Sharks. Now I have an absolute terror of sharks, only exceeded by my terror of crocodiles (which they also have out here I may add!!), and so had been understandably, what one might call, a little nervous about the idea of jumping off a boat (backwards) into any body of water which contained said creatures, no matter how harmless I was assured they were! Funnily enough though, while the idea of kayaking or snorkelling with sharks frightens the life out of me, there is something totally different about being under the water with them. I think part of this is that you can see everywhere around you much more easily, so know if anything is there, and the other part of the reason is that there are vey few recorded shark attacks on divers, they understandably prefer to bite surfers and swimmers. I was therefore extremely proud of myself when I managed not only to not have a complete heart attack when several appeared but to find myself fascinated and hugely enjoying watching them at close quarters. I was even more thrilled when our dive master hypnotised one for us and I got to stroke it. I know, I know, if you have looked Nurse Sharks up online you will find that they very, very rarely bite people and they’re pretty small, but that is besides the point and it is a good first step to being able to get in the water with some of the slightly more feisty ones – no, not Great Whites, we’re not that crazy but we met someone in Mexico who may come down to Honduras where he’s done a lot of diving with Tigers so watch this space!

Pelicans in the turquoise waters by the dive shop

You’d better Belize it!

Ok, I may have stolen the title of this post from the slogan on half the t-shirts here but it works. We arrived in Ambergris Caye after a fairly easy trip from Tulum – 8:30am bus to Chetumal, taxi to the port and then speed boat to San Pedro on Ambergris Caye where you can clear customs and get your visa as you disembark at the dock.

Ferry from Chetumal to Ambergris Caye

We’d booked into Pedro’s Hotel for the first night but were fairly open with our schedule and decided to play things by ear. Pedro himself is an Englishman, actually named Peter, who’s been out here for some 14 years, though this being a small world he used to live just a couple of streets away from us in London.

Second night in and we found ourselves participating in a bar crawl otherwise known as “The Poker Run”. This entailed driving from bar to bar on golf buggies and being given a playing card at each. On our return to Pedro’s the person with the highest poker hand would win the pot, it was BZ$25 per person entry (BZ$2=US$1) and the prize that night was BZ$1,200. Sadly we didn’t win but we did meet some interesting characters and I was introduced to golden rum and tonic – well we are on a Caribbean pirate island, so it would be rude not to have tried it!

A Month in Mexico – Parting Thoughts

We arrived on the 15th January and departed on the 15th February. Mexico had never really been on our itinery, we’d only flown into Mexico City as it was the easiest place to fly from the UK and we certainly hadn’t been expecting to fall in love with the place. Our intention had really been to have a whistle stop tour of part of it, staying a maximum of 2 and 1/2 weeks but we found ourselves being drawn in by so many facets of this fascinating country, reluctant to leave and even after a month we felt we had barely scratched the surface of this vast and varied region.
There have been many highlights, in this the begining leg of our adventure, as you will see if you look back at the last month of the blog. For us though there are a few things that really stood out.

Re-connecting with an old friend and meeting lots of new ones with their laid back attitudes to life and kindness was a joy.

The food has been a particular highlight and we are missing it already. What we think of as Mexican food in the UK, even at the better restaurants, hardly comes close to the real deal out here. Each region has it’s own identity and there is so much variety, there really is no reason to eat badly. We can’t wait to go back to eat more, there is still so much we haven’t tried!

The country, history and culture was fascinating and really we only covered a very “small” part of it. On top of which the ease at getting around was a huge surprise, ok maybe not the maps and lack of road signs, but whether traveling by metro in Mexico City or by bus between two points it was generally more comfortable than doing so in Europe.

If there were any negatives it would be the amount of bites I managed to accrue but this is a tropical country so that was only to be expected and the little buggers did seem to ease up a bit the longer we were there. I also learnt something – cockroaches bite, yes really, I didn’t belive it either until I looked it up online. I have an almost pathological hatred of the, not so little, sods, so typically I was the one that the bastard bit! The swelling was the half the size of a tennis ball, hot but thankfully not itchy!

In all Mexico has so much to offer and we will definitely be going back to do all the things we didn’t get time to (well some of them at least), re-visit the friends we made and eat more food.

From Tulum with Love

We arrived about midday back in Tulum where we were going to be meeting Lou, who was coming down to join us for a few days from Puerto Morelos. As we had an afternoon to kill we decided that we should probably visit the ruins. In comparison to the others we had visited they weren’t as impressive but it is really the setting here that makes them special, right on the cliffs of the coast and definitely worth the visit. Try and avoid them in the middle of the day (when we were there) to avoid the hoards of tourists.

Lou arrived the next day and we spent the morning in Ahau, a hotel with beach club and great food. Tulum isn’t the cheapest of places to visit and you pay even more if you are staying and eating on the beach. It is however very chilled and beautiful and has a completely different vibe from Playa del Carmen or Cancun (think The Blue Marlin in Ibiza/St.Tropez 30 years ago v. Ibiza Town/Magaluf).

In the afternoon Lou drove us out to a cenote, Dos Ojos. There are lots of them around the area so take your pick but again it is best to go there really early or later like we did at about 3pm. The colour was an incredible turquoise where the sun hit the water and unbelivably clear, with tiny little fish like the ones that you pay a fortune to have nibble your feet in London spas. Dos Ojos is actually 2 linked cenotes and you could in theory swim between one and the other through the cave and stalactites and stalacmites. The whole atmosphere of the place was of serenity

The next couple of days (including Valentines) were spent at Papaya Playa Project (www.papayplayaproject.com), a fabulous hotel on the beach where we were going to be staying in one of the palapas huts with ocean views. I can not rave about it enough so I’ll just tell you to go there. The food is seriously good, it’s spear-heading ecological and enviromental developements in the Yucatan and the design of the place is very cool, with an amphitheatre like seating area fo part of the restaurant, a dj booth made out of driftwood and a sand dancefloor for the nights they have parties…

Restaurant at Papaya Playa

Sunrise from our palapas (yes really we were up naturally and out of choice for it!)

Punta Allen and The Mermaid

After a brief over night stay in Tulum, we jumped on a collectivo (minibus) for a very bumpy, rather slow ride, to the remote fishing village of Punta Allen. These days it’s known for it’s sports fishing lodges but its origins lie with pirate legends of Edward Teach, better known as the early 17th century pirate, Blackbeard. How could we resist visting somewhere with that sort of history, (obviously St.John had other motives!). So the story goes he had his hide out in the lagoon that lies behind this long, deserted penisular, protected from any pursuing British Navy ships (he use to accost the English ships coming out of Virginia and Carolina laden with tabacco and sell it to the Dutch) by the dangerous reefs which lie along the coatstline, sailing in through secret passages of which only he knew. Punta Allen was named after his ship, The Allen.

We were staying in Pousada Sirena (www.casasirena.com), run by the indomitable La Sirena (The Mermaid), who has been shipwrecked 3 times, you can read all about her adventures up and down the coasts of Central America in a book she puts in all the rooms. The village itself is tiny with limited options for eating or really doing much except for fishing or boat trips.

Pousada Sirena, we stayed in Casa Cielo, with this huge mural of La Sirena

We only had one full day there so we got up early and walked down to the light house at the end of the spit of land on which the village is built. We took a slight detour on the way through the scrubby jungle to a lookout tower on one of the lagoons but after a becoming a snack for the voracious mozzies beat a hasty retreat back to the main track. The lighthouse itself is surrounded by a 10ft wall which they inconveniently forgot to put a door in and though you aren’t really meant to climb over it, there is a hastily placed tree branch on either side and fabulous views from the top.

View from the top of the lighthouse over coast and one of the smaller lagoons

We then got a lift about 8km up the coast the otherway, where we found deserted white sand beaches streching out as far as the eye can see, perfect for an afternoon of doing nothing but swimming (or in St.John’s case fishing) and sunbathing. We were advised that the best way to get back was to simply walk along the road and hitch a ride with anyone who drove past. This was easier said than done and while maybe 30 jeeps (day trips into the Sian Ka’an reserve) passed us going back towards Tulum only 2 cars passed the otherway with absolutely no intention of stopping – well may be we looked like we needed the exercise after all that lounging around!

Apparently the family business is still doing a roaring trade out here in the form of Worcestershire Sauce!

Stop on the way back, you can see how narrow the spit is in some areas with the sea on the left of the photo and the lagoon on the right

Uxmal, Caves and Campeche

The ruins at Uxmal was our next stop on our “little” road trip. They were far and away our favourites so far. Though the jungle has been cut back somewhat, they are not as manicured as Chitchen Itza and with not even close to as many tourists. It is a smaller site though spread over several courtyards and you are able to climb around and explore many parts of the various pyramids, though not (to my relief) the rather intimidatingly high Temple of the Magicians. At times it can almost appear as if you have the ruins to yourselves and they seemed to exude a serene and peaceful atmosphere as we happily sat and contemplated them poking up amongst the jungle.

Temple of the Magicians

St.John over looking the Courtyard of the Nuns

View from top of one pyramid towards the Temple of the Magicians

After a morning spent wandering gently round Uxmal, we set off again, this time our destination was the Loltun Caves. These are a series of caves formed by a long dried up river system, only about a kilometer is open to the public and they have so far explore at least 4km but it is thought that they may go on still further. Archeological finds have shown that they were being used by hunter-gathers by about 9,000BC and ceramic evidence has been found dating from 1000 BC -1250AD, it is possible to also see cave paintings, including hands in the negative, similar to ones found in European sites, though the sites in Europe are generally closed off to the public. It is belived that the Maya also used them for ceremonies and they would have used the booming echos that can be made by hitting some of the stalactites (some of which are hollow) to aid in meditation. The caves themselves are spectacular, towering, cathedral like spaces, up to 45 meters in height in some areas, with stalactites eveywhere, in some places reaching the ground to form vast twisted columns and galleries high ovehead. It is like something out of a fairytale, perhaps the entrance to some underground kingdom and when the guide turned out all the lights the blackness was absolute… (and I really wished I had never seen that awful film “The Descent”!).

Clare with huge stalactite columns

Cave paintings of hands in the negative

The last destination of our road trip was Campeche. Campeche is a city built by the Spanish as a port and the centre is full of charming cobbled streets and multicoloured buildings. The trick is actually finding the centre and your hotel! To say that there is a slight lack of road signs in most Mexican villages/towns/cities would be an understatement. During our whole driving tour we had been using a map that seemed to have been drawn by someone who had never been to Mexico. We managed to acquire another one from a tourist office but it wasn’t any better. It wasn’t helped that carnival is starting on the weekend and so most towns and villages had shut off their main squares (often the only place with any sort of indictation of the general direction of your next destination) and either just had a stop sign or the even more helpful “diversion” sign with an arrow pointing in two opposite directions. Somehow we had managed to make it this far (obviously my well-honed sense of direction) and (apart from bits of the coast road) on surprisingly good roads. That is untill we got to the edges of Campeche where the road turned into a potholed nightmare. After going round in circles for a while we found our hotel. Leaving was even harder and not because of the myriad charms of the place! We managed to drive out on the road we had come in on only to find they had closed the road we needed to take back to Merida and onto Cancun. This time there weren’t even diversion signs so we turned back and decided to see what happened if we followed the coast road… Well I’m writing this from Tulum so yes we did make it back and once clear of Campeche it was plain sailing back to Puerto Morelos.

The cobbled streets and colourful houses of Campeche

Two Angels