You Better Belize It!

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.

Tags: Caye Caulker, Uncategorized

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 13th, 2011 at 1:05 am and is filed under Caye Caulker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.