Four days and we're out of here!

Caye Caulker

Our borrowed bikes

Conch

Island Cemetery

Caves

Jon never listens to those signs!

Cave River

Swimming in our first Cenote

The Blue Hole

Yim- your own Restaurant and Asian Massage!!!!!  YIM SAAN!!!!

Wednesday, March 21 2012

I woke up this morning to a beautiful sunrise over the Caribbean, but I was in foul mood after last night’s events.  So when an Asian man jogging by asked me to move my truck because it was blocking the road he got the bare-chested death-stare.  When he passed by again after circling the block he stopped long enough to deliver in a bitchy tone “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time (knowing that of course I had) but can you please move your truck, its blocking the sidewalk” before scurrying off like a little rodent down the street.  I was through being the polite visitor.  Last night I was violated so now the gloves were off.  “Heard you loud and clear asshole” and the truck stayed right where it was. 

Pretty soon we were in a boat, without the truck, zooming across the ocean on a 45-minute ride out to Caye Caulker and I was still steaming.  But when the boat arrived and we stepped off on this small strip of sand and palm trees, maybe 1 mile long and 300 yards wide, I forgot all about it.  Caye Caulker has a ton of little guest houses and small hole in the wall restaurants serving fish, shrimp and conch with none of the chain hotel mega resorts of other beach vacation destinations.  There are still a lot of hustlers on the island but they are more of the relaxed, drunken rasta type rather than the crack head, kill you in an alley and take your money type from Belize City. 

After a couple of tries at places that were either too expensive or required a multi-night stay we found a nice guest house run by a white lady from Alberta and her black Belizean husband.  They were really nice people.  We bargin city’d them to throw in the use of their two bicycles.  After a much needed nap we biked around the island and found shady spots to beat the heat and read our books. 

There are lots of people in the street trying to get anyone who looks like a tourist (us) to come to their restaurant for dinner.  We listened to some prices and weighed some options.  One Chinese Belizean guy told us about his dinner special “Ceviche appetizer, fish in coconut curry sauce with coconut rice and garlic bread entrée and a fruit desert for 15 Belize”  That's $7.50 US for a decent spread so Marcie and I came back to that place later on and had some of the best food of the trip so far.  But when we got the bill it said the meal was 20 Belize.  I told them that was not the deal.  They said it’s 20 on the menu, which it was.  I told them no and we both sat there for a while.  I had already eaten but they had not been paid.  So I think that they realized that it was going to be 15 or nothing and they changed the bill.  This actually worked out better for us because we could now totally legitimately use their failed bait and switch as justification not to tip.

~Jon

Thursday, March 22 2012

Caye Chaulker was a nice relief from the hustling environment of Belize City and worked some of its Palm lined sandy streets magic to remove the bad taste that BC had left in my mouth.  We checked in at 9:30 am and spent a full 24 hours in our room at the guest house which was very relaxing. This place had all the amenities that I needed to veg out for a little while (private bath, hot shower, clean rooms, coffee maker, and English TV).  Jon even let me watch TV for like 2 hours without bugging me to go do something. 

This morning we woke up at a leisurely time, packed up and went to find some breakfast.  Things were a little expensive so I opted for a giant bottle of fresh squeezed pineapple, orange and banana juice for 5BZ.  I’m not sure if we’ve mentioned it or not yet but the exchange rate now in Belize is 2BZ dollars to 1$.  Jon got a coffee and a couple bananas.  We caught the water taxi back to BC at 10am and arrived back to check the status of our fridge and the security of our truck. 

Our fridge was taken apart when we arrived and the guy who was working on it said he had it working yesterday but not today.  He said the same thing that the guy in Mexico said and that is that we need a new circuit board which has to be ordered from the Edgestar company in Texas and then someone here should be able to install it.  The guy also removed the fan which appears to have a blade broken off of it and he said we need a new one of those too but that should come with the circuit board.  The fan seems to have been jarred out of its holding case and no longer sits flush with it, which is why I would imagine that it broke one of the blades off.  We really need to secure the fridge better if we ever get it fixed so that it doesn’t bounce around so much.  We are going to contact the company and see how long it will take us to have one mailed to us and then we begin the process of trying to figure out how that will happen. We decided to start a no meat/less carbs/less sugar diet for a little while and this works out well since we don’t have a fridge to keep stuff cold anyway.  Our truck was waiting for us just as we left it, thankfully.  We quickly headed out of BC and on our way to the country.

We had wanted to visit Dangriga on the coast to check out the Garifauna culture and hear some music but the road there isn’t paved so we opted out since we can’t be going on unpaved roads for a long distance.  We continued on to the Blue Hole National Park and went caving and swimming in a turquoise cenote.  The cave was nice but very steamy because it was deep in the jungle. The caves around here have rivers that run through them and lots of people do cave tubing.  The cenote was very refreshing and had a surprisingly strong current from where it came up out of the ground and then back down again into the cave.  We did both of these activities on our own which was great because we had feared that a cruise ship tour might be waiting for us when we arrived.  We checked out a couple places to do the cave tubing for tomorrow but they are all outrageously priced and we decided to get the heck out of Belize and head into Guatemala where the prices are supposed to be cheaper.

We stopped in San Ignacio and Jon went in to find a room for us but he forgot to ask about the internet so he paid and we don’t have internet today.  I have like four blogs to post next time we get the internet.  Tonight we need to prepare for the border crossing tomorrow and then we head to Tikal and lands beyond.

~Marcie