You Better Belize It!

Well, it’s a nice quiet Sunday Nite here in San Pedro, & we just had our final dinner here in Belize. We head out early tomorrow am to catch a water taxi at 7am from the island to Belize City, and from there we fly out to Houston, onto Denver, and finally back to Jackson Hole tomorrow night. Been a pretty relaxing couple of days here in San Pedro…lotta beach time, reading time, eating & drinking time, you get the picture. On Saturday we rented some bikes and kinda cruised around the island, went outside the sorta downtown-ish area where we are staying. That would probably be the highlight of the weekend, physically moving-wise, but other than that we’ve kinda just explored town/the beach, etc. Unfortunately I don’t have all of our pictures organized completely yet (we’ve been terribly busy with all this stuff, you see), and we would hate to send out a hastily put together, inferior product…so we’re thinking of putting together one more Picasa photo album with all the later stuff and sending it out once we get back to Jackson. It’s been a pleasure keeping you all updated of our trip in Blog-land, and we certainly have appreciated all of your comments! It’s been a great trip and we had a really fun time, but we both ready to head back to Jackson tomorrow (We miss our dog!). We’ll talk to you all soon!
Cheers
Mike & Cheryl

Well, today (Friday) is a time of change here for us at this fledgiling blog in Belize. For one we’re actually writing on this blog, for a change. And yesterday, we sadly said goodbye to Doug & Donna (who flew back to the US), two crafty veterans who were not only the senior-most members of ‘You Better Belize It’ but also our largest financial backers to date. And finally, we find ourselves in the beautiful yet uber-touristy island/town of San Pedro for the remainder of our stay this weekend. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it’s Friday afternoon here at Caye Reef Hotel…Caye Caulker headquarters for ‘You Better Belize It’ for one more night. After a excruciating day of eating, reading, swimming, more eating, drinking coffee/strawberry daiquiri’s & laying in hammocks, we are happy to finally be posting on this blog again. Needless to say, we had a pretty relaxed day here, our final day on the island. The past two days, however, were action packed as we had two exhilarating days out on the water both snorkeling & deep sea ocean fishing. Read the rest of this entry »

Had two pretty incredible days out on the Ocean, decided to save it for a super-post hopefully tomorrow. Needless to say, our days w/Carlos went about as well as we could ask for, save for the comedy of errors fishing trip we had today (the errors/lack of actually catching fish were mostly, if not entirely, on our part). But the snorkeling expedition was fantastic yesterday, and today’s fishing trip was actually great (even if at times Carlos was basically catching the fish and letting us pull/reel them in…and counting it as a caught fish for us). We have tons of pics, and tomorrow (Friday) is our last day on the island before we catch a water taxi back to the mainland on Saturday AM. I think the plan for tomorrow is to basically just take it easy and pack/get ready to head out of here, so I’ll hopefully have sifted through most of the pics and put together a nice Round 1 of photos for you all to enjoy…until then…

We are coming to you live from from the beautiful island of Caye Caulker, Belize, re-booting this long dormant TravelBlog for you all to enjoy while Cheryl, Mike, Doug & Donna begin a two week jaunt through the gorgeous little country of Belize. We will have pictures, stories, quirky anecdotes, and colorful comments as often as possible for your enjoyment, however it is important to keep in mind that some time has passed since we have kept a steady travel blog, so some time may be needed to find our groove. Our flights on Monday were all relatively smooth, and we were all able to rendezvous at the airport in Belize City around three o’clock (quick note: as far as time goes, we’re basically on Mtn Standard Time down here, so 2 hours behind east coast. Standard O.P. for Mike & Cheryl.)

A quick map of Belize as a refresher, followed by some Belize fun facts, all courtesy of the internet in some various fashion…

As you can see, Belize is tucked right below Mexico, snuggled up right next to Guatemala, and surrounded by the Carribbean Sea. Also,

-is a constitutional monarchy, and the northernmost Central American nation

-Belize is the only country in Central America where English is the official language

-Belize’s mainland is about 180 miles long and 68 miles wide

-it is the only nation in the region with a British colonial heritage

-Before the arrival of Europeans, the Maya civilization spread itself over Belize beginning around 1500 BC and flourished until about A.D. 800.

-A combination of natural factors—climate, the Belize Barrier Reef, over 1,000 offshore Cayes (islands), excellent fishing, safe waters for boating, scuba diving, and snorkeling, numerous rivers for rafting, and kayaking, various jungle and wildlife reserves of fauna and flora, for hiking, bird watching, and helicopter touring, as well as many Maya ruins—support the thriving tourism and ecotourism industry

-The structure of government is based on the British parliamentary system, and the legal system is modelled on the Common Law of England

…and so on and so on. Upon our arrival, our first order of business was to procure a cab from the airport to the water taxi that we would be needing to catch to head out to Caye Caulker (pronounced KEY Caulker), the tiny island that would be our first stop on our journey for about 5 days of sun, snorkeling, & fishing. We were all a little wary of the water taxi idea since our last experience with this form of transportation was extremely nauseating, however, undaunted we actually ended up enjoying the 45 minute ride (complete with two men who appeared to be prisoners of some kind sitting in the back, handcuffed to each other and being completely belligerent. Doug declared that was where my seating section was.) Caye Caulker doesn’t disappoint. A tiny, teeny, narrow, fishing/snorkeling/no automobiles allowed but golf carts island basically has one sandy ‘road’ (I call it the Strip) where all the restaurants/shanty’s/gift stores are aligned, right along the beach/reef. Gorgeous. And our accommodations have been incredible. For those who know how we normally travel, these next five days are going to be the lap of luxury. A two bedroom/two bathroom condo, with Kitchen, A/C, Pool, rooftop deck etc etc etc is far above what we usually stay in. After a quick meal (fresh fish everywhere, and all these great beach side restaurants are basically open air one story buildings with some patio furniture outside for seating), we were basically done for the night.

Today was our ‘walk around town/check everything out/maybe swim a bit take it easy day. After a staggered start to our morning, we basically cruised up and down the main street, nibbled a bit here and there, swam/read at the condo pool a bit, and did some quick snorkeling off the beach for about an hour…and that’s about it. Our big accomplishment today was booking an all day snorkeling trip tomorrow with a heralded local named Carlos, who seems to be well recommended by our as well as the locals around town. The plan is to go out in a small group tomorrow on a speedboat to do some serious snorkeling and hopefully see some pretty cool fish.

So this wraps up the into Mega-Post…tomorrow we’ll have more, we already have some pretty good pics and hopefully we get some good shots from our trip tomorrow. Also, I know there’s probably some serious gramattical/nonsensical typos & errors in this, just bear with us as we get our blogging legs back. Until then.