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Flores :: Guatemala

A postscript: the best single day of diving in my life. Ever.

Places: Caye Caulker & Flores.

Coolest thing I did: The. Blue. Hole.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Breaking the PADI limit of 18m isn't actually that hard, so long as you play by the rules.

If you couldn't care less about diving you can probably stop reading now.

The wake up call was at 5am, which was actually the first time I've been up early enough to see a sunrise in quite some time and the one that lights up the sky over Caye Caulker was a perfect melange of reds and yellows. Not a single cloud in the sky and enough to make me remember to go back to the hostel and grab my camera. 5am starts really don't agree with getting my brain into gear.

I'd see pictures of the Blue Hole on postcards all week (put it into google images) and to be honest when the boat first slows down after the 2 hour trip from Caulker to get there you can't quite make out what you're looking at, but you do notice a large patch of water that's a much deeper blue than the turquoise around it. What you're looking into is a sink hole 100ish m deep which was probably formed when an underwater cave collapsed on itself about 50,000 years ago. I'd dived something similar off Dahab, in Egypt and was a little annoyed at half of Russia being already in the water by the time we got there. At this time of day (say 9am) there was one other dive boat and those guys were already on their way out, massive smiles on their faces. That bodes well.

The dive consists of a drop to a sandy ledge at 10m, then a quick descent to 35m where there's an overhang of stalactites that you can swim under to exactly 40m. For those of you who dive that's pretty much the far edge of the PADI tables and more than double the limit for Open Water divers, which of course we all were. The diver masters were very professional and did tell us that doing this as the first of 3 dives was pushing the tables as far as they'd go but they were always sure to corral us to the right depth at the right time and to make sure we did our saftey stops. Very impressed with the skill, but if you do come, bring your own dive computer. I told the time by counting in my head and wasn't 100% sure the mechanical dial on the gauges were very acurate.

Enough physics and technobabble.

The highlight of the dive, besides the eerie feeling of floating through caves or being suspended in blue light is the reef sharks that seem to congregate at about 20m down, where the water temp drops most suddenly. I'd say we saw a dozen swimming around us and one got so close that it bumped one of the diver masters tanks. A unique experience and the icing on the cake for this one.

The two other dives of the day, at Half Moon Wall and The Aquarium could have been the best to dives on any other day I've done so far. Eagle Rays, Turtles and more reef sharks were the highlights. While none of the three dives have topped individual dives I've been on at home or in Egypt, the whole day combined was probably the best I've ever experienced. If you're out in Belize, make a special attempt to do it.

As an aside, lunch was on Half Moon Caye, which is a bird sanctuary, but more interestingly (I thought) a coral caye much younger than some of the others, so much that you keep tripping over rocks that have a brain pattern or rows on parallel lines and realise what you've stubbing your toe on is dead coral that hasn't had time to be worn down yet. Quite something else.

Right, in Guatamala now, but I'll save more for next time.

Go slow

Caye Caulker :: Belize

Is it possible to be any more laid back?

Places: Belize City, San Pedro and Caye Caulker.

Coolest thing I did: Saw many, many stingrays whilst snorkeling and managed to not get Steve Irwin-ed in the process.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: Belize is far more like Jamaica than Mexico. It's hard to find Spanish speakers and people who generally don't like Bob Marley.

Should you ever be in a position to arrive in Belize City by land here's a tip, don't arrive on Sunday. After Mexico, where everything is open pretty much all the time it was a bit of a shock to find that arriving in Belize practically the whole country is closed on a Sunday, no restaurants, no corner shops, nothing. That would have been fine had I not decided to walk the 800m from the bus station to find a guest house. Turns out I was not only the only white guy walking the streets with a backpack but the bus station (well, really a field where buses stop) was in the most ghetto part of town. As it was only the young, male and destitute walking the streets of what could be described as a shanty town (the sign saying "Welcome to Belize City. pop 70,000" was hidden partially by jungle) I got everything from nasty stares to pretty aggressive requests for change. Not the best start. Add to that the guest house looked like a gaol and it wasn't the best first impression of a country. I only really stepped out to get money from the ATM to pay the woman that owned the place and even that was a bit of a trial. The second I went behind the glass doors to use the ATM about 5 blokes started hanging around waiting for me to get out. I ended up sucking it up, stuffing the money down the front of my pants and attempting a bit of a stare down as I passed through the middle of them all to get back to the guest house. Scary stuff.

Thank God the next place I went sucked me in so bad I'm already 4 days overdue leaving. I took a speed boat out to Caye Caulker, which is a sandy topped coral island perched right on the world's second biggest barrier reef (after our very own in Oz) lacking roads and any kind of stress at all. The whole place has a very Caribbean feel as the inhabitants are mostly descended from the same slaves that were brought to the British Caribbean (Jamaica mostly) and English and Scottish pirates that took refuge here in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was nominally part of the Spanish colony of Neuva Espania with Mexico and Guatemala but due to it's reef that helped hide risk happy pirates and hinder pursuit by the Spanish navy the place took on a very criminal, independent feel. In the end the Poms made it all official and claimed it as a colony (and made an effort to stop the pirates flogging all that Spanish gold), giving this little stretch of jungle and reef a very different feel from it's neighbors. For one thing, all that Spanglish I've been mangling for the last 3 weeks isn't needed. Some Mexican looking types (Mayan refugees from some colonial war or another, mostly) do speak Spanish, but pretty much only to each other.

The island's unofficial motto is "Go Slow", which is posted all over the place. If you first get here and rush around looking for somewhere to stay with a great big pack on your back everyone is pretty forward with giving you this advice. After a while it takes you most of the day to walk the 800m of packed sand road that divides the island, going suitably slow. It's the kind of place where you have to take it down a few notches otherwise you'd go nuts with boredom. The biggest dangers here are being hit by golf carts (there's no cars) or being hit with a coconut falling from a tree. Hectic stuff.

So, what do you do here? Well there didn't used to be a beach but a hurricane in the 60s cut the island in two and created a small swimable section of beach at the south end of the new gap, which is called the Split. There's not much sand there but there's a disused concrete dock that's been turned into a bar so you can sun yourself on that if you like. They've dropped picnic tables into a foot of water so you can sit in the water and write postcards or drink beers or whatever you like. Fish swim around your ankles and you can go snorkeling right off the beach.

However, that wouldn't be doing it justice. The water is like glass, warm as a bath and there's a bigger coral reef than Egypt's to explore. This makes the diving some of the best you're ever going to do, and that's before you try the Blue Hole (which at the time of this writing I'm one day off doing myself). There's an abundance of sharks, turtles, rays, eels and the like and the coral, while not nearly as good as that in Oz, is still amazing. Even if you don't dive, you can get on a half day boat cruise that takes you to some snorkeling spots that are amazingly abundant for being not even 1km offshore and only a few meters deep. I'd recommend it as a place to do your dive course if you don't know how, it'd be 5 days well spent even if you decided at the end of it all that diving isn't for you.

I'm having some trouble leaving, to tell the truth. I was seriously going to try and do some exploring of more of Belize but I've been enjoying this all too much. I did think about splitting my time between Caye Caulker and the much bigger San Pedro which is a 15 min boat ride away but I'm kind of glad I didn't. We spent our surface interval between two of the dives I did one morning walking around San Pedro and it was big enough to have cars and tarmac roads. Totally not the scene I'm looking for at the moment.

So tomorrow I'm taking my final chance to do the 3 dive day they do out to the Blue Hole (look it up on google, it's spectacular), including a personal deepest for me of 40m. I'm a little anxious but excited at the same time. Everyone who's done any diving on this island I've spoken too has claimed it to be the highlight, and from what I've seen so far then that's a huge call.

After that, I'm going to have to put some km between me and Belize if I want to not have to tear through Guatemala. Swapped my left over pesos and and Lonely Planet of Mexico for a Guatemalan LP and some Quetzals with a bloke I went diving with the other day so I'm all set.

Musica en vivo!

Playa de Carmen :: Mexico

Getting mostly wet.

Places: Cozumel and Playa de Carmen.

Coolest thing I did: Really didn´t do much but dive over and over again.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: So tequila is of such good quality you can actually drink it neat without lemon and salt.

Tomorrow Mexico is going to give way to Belize and as a result I´m in Playa de Carmen, which is pretty much baby Cancun. Lovely white beach running into turquoise water but totally geared up for extracting the maximum USD from everyone here. I spent a bit of time in Cozumel depressed about the whole thing, but in the end I´ve decided that I´m encroaching on the cruise ship holiday maker´s turf and shouldn´t be too judgemental or concerned about the whole thing. Most of Mexico isn´t like this, as the last three weeks have shown me, and having all the cruise ships dock in one place is better than having more baby Cauncuns popping up all down both coasts. After all, the Mexicans would be mad not to try and get as much money out of the Yanks as they can, it´s just the result of the differing incomes being so close together that it´s possible for the smart Mexicans to expoilt the different and get ahead.

It didn´t take me long to work out how to avoid the touts and those-who-wear-floral-shirts-without-irony and pretty much make my way between dive boat, cheap taco house and hostel. I found a pretty good operation to go on two dives with every morning and despite it being a fairly wild time to dive here I had a pretty good warm up for Belize. The same barrier reef stretches from the Yucatan all the way down to Honduras so every dive is along coral reefs and in bath warm, crystal clear water (if you dive, we were getting something in the order of 40m visibility). The highlights were rays, turtles and barracudas, the last of which I don´t think I´ve seen anywhere else. It was good to get back in the water and do some fairly shallow and easy dives, but this time of year there´s big problems with the currents shifting suddenly. As we´re going from dry season and building up for the hurricanes right now the weather patterns affect the currents minute to minute and on one dive we had to abandon the whole thing when we saw divers being washed 30 to 40m off the edge of the wall we were supposed to be following by currents ripping through gaps in the coral.

The scene on Cozumel is pretty much drunk day trippers from cruise ships or getting underwater. The hostel crowd was divided into people who were diving, learning to dive, instructing divers or who pretty much got the hell out of there on the first day. The waterfront in town goes for several kilometres in both directions meaning there´s no beach to lie on any more and after you´ve been conned into hiring a moped to cruise around the island you realise what a pain in the arse it is to even go for a swim. It´s well worth staying on Cozumel if you dive or snorkel and not at all if you don´t. Unless you do enjoy doing body shots off Texans in Senor Frogs. Then you´d be ok too.

I have to say Mexico has exceeded all my expectations as a place to travel and you could quite easily spend several months here. I´ve only had a small taste of it all and I could see how people spend half a year following the surf down the Pacific or diving their way from the tip of the Yucatan all the way down the Carribean. That also discounts the nightlife of Mexico City, or the relaxed vibe of the colonial towns in the highlands, both of which I encountered lots of travelers and ex-pats in for the long haul, either volunteering or learning Spanish the hardcore way.

While I found the people very warm and easy with their "amigos" or "buenos" I do feel like this is a country that is always going to be a bit tense with itself under the surface. The fact that the police at all levels carry machine guns and the army is deployed through much of the highlands shows theres something going on with the diverging incomes and the feeling that while Mexico overall is growing into a full fledged developing nation there´s a frustration with those being left behind. A country that has exported an estimated 15m people north of it´s border in the hope of getting ahead of those left behind farming the dustbowls of Northern Mexico shows there is still a lot of people being left out in the cold. Any country with a history so full of revolutions as this one doesn´t lend to having it´s people grumble quietly forever. I think Mexico is a country with lots of potential to continue to improve it´s place in the world, but it´s always going to be at least a little behind it´s northern sibling, with all the tensions that brings.

So hopefully I´ll be writing the next one of these from somewhere in Belize.