Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

All rights reserved

This version was compiled on 30 March 2024

This work has been released under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means you are free to distribute this work to others as long as you retain this copyright notice, do not use the work for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon this work. For more details please read the full licence.

Front cover: Looking towards Ambergris Caye from the Split on Caye Caulker

See www.moxon.net for more information

Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering a two-week trip I made to Belize in 2013. This was part of a larger, six-month journey that took me through Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia during 2013 and 2014.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled through Central America for six months, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon

June 2014

The Caribbean

Playa del Carmen to Caye Caulker

Written: 22 November 2013

To be honest, I didn’t have a clue how far we were going to get when we set off from Playa del Carmen in the general direction of Belize. I’d promised Peta that eventually we’d end up on the reportedly laid-back paradise island of Caye Caulker (pronounced ‘key corker’), but that it might take a few long journeys to get there. I had visions of being trapped in dusty Mexican border towns, or stuck in a fleapit hotel room in Belize’s infamously earthy capital city, waiting for a ferry to the northern islands; but I kept these visions to myself as we trudged to the bus station in Playa to catch the 7.20am bus for the border town of Chetumal.

The bus journey was uneventful, though as with all the first class buses in Mexico, we had to sit through a Spanish-language version of yet another Hollywood blockbuster (I can’t even remember what the film was, and it was only a few hours ago, it was that engaging). On the way the heavens opened and the rain lashed against the windows so hard that even the windscreen wipers could hardly clear a view through the onslaught, though it did clear enough for us to see an overturned lorry that had jack-knifed onto the verge, ploughing a dark brown furrow into the surrounding forest where a pickup crane was trying to drag it into an upright position. The rain continued on and off all the way south to the border town of Chetumal, where we arrived in the bus terminal just a little before midday.

I knew that from Chetumal, there were apparently some boat services plying their trade to the northern cayes in Belize (cayes being low, sandy islands that form on top of coral reefs). But I didn’t realise that they’d have a little kiosk in the bus station, where they sold tickets on the ferry to Caye Caulker via Ambergris Caye (pronounced ‘am-bur-grease key’), departing from the port at 3pm, in plenty of time for us to catch. Even better, the man at the desk spoke good English and I had just enough pesos in my wallet to grab two tickets to Caye Caulker, and suddenly things were looking up; it looked as if we weren’t going to have to go via Belize City after all, or make an overnight stop at Ambergris Caye. The man even wrote down the name of the ferry terminal in Spanish on the back of the ticket, so we could grab a taxi there by simply asking for muelle fiscal (or ‘local pier’). This was all a bit too easy.

I had just enough Mexican money left in my wallet to grab a taxi, and as we pulled out of the bus terminal and shuddered off in the direction of the ferry, the heavens opened once more and water poured from the sky. The little Mexican driver squinted over his half-moon spectacles through windows that steamed up within seconds, and with one hand on the wheel and the other smearing the condensation into dirty streaks with a woefully inadequate cloth, he drove us through the streets of Chetumal, screeching to a halt at junctions where nobody seemed to know who had right of way, let alone who was coming straight at them out of the murk. Within minutes the roads had become canals and our taxi rode its own bow wave towards the port, though quite where the port began and Chetumal ended was no longer clear, and eventually we pulled up at a kerbside where a sign claimed that on the other side of a miniature lake was the office of the San Pedro Belize Express.

The taxi driver looked around at the steamy windows as the humidity in the cab rose past condensation point, pulled on a tired sweater and opened his door a fraction to see how deep the water was, and his expression said it all; we were effectively at sea, and he indicated that perhaps we should wait to see if the water was going to go down. This was kind of him, as he could have simply turfed us out at our destination, but after five minutes we figured that the rain wasn’t going to give up and we were going to have to brave the storm surge, so we paid him his 50 pesos, jumped out into the ankle-deep torrent, grabbed our backpacks from the boot and sloshed our way to the pavement, where the water was only slightly shallower, but at least there was a small wall with a ledge that we could perch on while we got our bearings.

Luckily the water taxi office was open, so we put on our packs and jumped through the lake with giant astronaut-size leaps, eventually collapsing through the door to find a small group of other equally soaked travellers drying off in the relative shelter of the office. We were greeted by the friendly Belizean staff in Caribbean English, and it felt like we’d been rescued by Noah as I handed over our passports and the tickets we’d bought, and started filling in the immigration and customs forms for our entry into Belize.

Unfortunately, Mexico had one last curveball to throw at us before we could escape. As a UK citizen you don’t need a visa to enter Mexico, and instead you get a little card inserted into your passport that’s effectively a tourist visa, allowing you to stay for your allotted time. What they don’t tell you – at least, not on the way in – is that this tourist visa is not free, and actually costs 295 pesos. Some airlines include the cost of this visa in their ticket price and some don’t, so when you exit the country by land, you either have to prove that your air ticket into the country included the Mexican tourist visa charge, or you have to cough up 295 pesos in cash. The irritating thing is that in these modern days of e-tickets for flights, it isn’t possible to prove from your standard air ticket email that you’ve already paid the visa fee as part of the ticket; instead you have to ask your airline or travel agent to send you a breakdown of all the taxes that are included in your ticket, so you can show this to the Mexican border police.

Our air ticket receipt said ‘all taxes included’, but that isn’t enough; if it doesn’t specifically mention the Mexican tourist visa fee, you have to pay, and the border guards have bigger guns and twitchier moustaches than most tourists, so you do what they say. So I had to wade out of the water taxi office, hop across the flooded but still busy dual carriageway like a renegade videogame character from the 1980s, and take out another fistful of pesos to hand over to the border police. Oh, and there was another 65 pesos of ‘port tax’ that we each had to pay as well, just for good measure, but after smiling through the whole thing with the good grace that you need to show to the man wielding The Power, we had our passports stamped and we were ready to go.

Out of the Frying Pan

Luckily the rain dried up soon after we’d jumped through all the fiery hoops of Mexican bureaucracy, and at about 2.30pm we were called over to a little 50-seater speedboat that was tucked away at the end of the pier. The crew laid out our luggage in a line on the dock while an army truck pulled up beside us and a group of burly Mexican soldiers jumped out with guns at the ready and casually cordoned us off at the end of the pier, and then they asked us to drop our hand luggage into a second line on the dock while one of the soldiers brought out a sniffer dog to go through everything. Up the line, down the line, back again and in and out went the dog, stopping every now and then to have a good poke around, though the only bit of drama was when an American we’d been chatting to pulled out his camera to snap the dog, and one of the soldiers cut him dead with an authoritative, ‘Señor, no!’ So, having passed the final test to exit Mexico, we climbed into the bowels of the boat and took our seats for the 90-minute ride to San Pedro on Ambergris Caye.

The journey was surprisingly smooth and fast, and by 5.30pm we’d arrived in Ambergris Caye, where we queued up for immigration on a ramshackle wooden pier and passed through customs with Caribbean smiles and happy hello’s rather than the grimaces and gracias’s of the Mexican border. This is perhaps not surprising, as Ambergris Caye is a bone fide Caribbean paradise island; the islanders claim that the caye was the subject of Madonna’s 1987 song ‘La Isla Bonita’, which I’ve always thought is her best song until she matured into a proper artist with 1997’s Ray of Light. Whether or not this is true is open to debate – the song name-checks San Pedro, which is the little town where we went through customs and immigration – but it hardly matters, because when the Queen of Pop sings ‘Tropical the island breeze, all of nature wild and free, this is where I long to be, La Isla Bonita’, you’re with her all the way, irrespective of the facts.

Unfortunately this is still the tropics, and as we waited for everyone to pass through customs, the sky started rumbling and flashing in the distance. For those of us going on to Caye Caulker this wasn’t such a good omen, as we still had another 30-minute boat journey south, right into the eye of the storm. As if on cue the sun dropped beneath the horizon in mere minutes, as it does when you’re only 18 degrees north of the equator, and as we left port in the dark the first rains kicked in, forcing the crew to jump into the passenger cabin and batten down the hatches, while thunder clapped overhead. The boat windows were tinted a deep yellow, which was quite pleasant on the way over in the afternoon sunshine, but in the dark it meant that we were effectively cooped up in a small, claustrophobic cabin that jumped around as it smacked into the storm waves, and every few minutes the cabin would light up with hellish lightning flashes that left their spidery imprints on the backs of our eyes. It was so easy to imagine that we were crossing the Styx into hell that I instantly banished all thoughts of the afterlife to the back of my mind and went into the happy place that I built while sailing the south Pacific when we hit a storm in the roaring forties. Frankly, it was a relief to step out onto the dock at Caye Caulker and into torrential rain that instantly soaked me to the skin and turned my backpack into the subject of its own Olympic weightlifting category.

So we stood there, dripping wet, in the dark, on the end of a pier, on an island in a country we’d never visited before, with no accommodation booked, and no idea what to do. I was beginning to regret promising a Caribbean paradise to Peta as we stumbled onto the beach and into the path of a group of drunk American tourists.

‘You look like you’re dressed for Seattle,’ said a slightly worse-for-wear man, wearing a T-shirt, shorts and a grin. ‘Where you from?’

‘London, England,’ we said, adding the country because there are apparently 20 cities called London in America, and the accent isn’t always enough for two and two to get it together in the beer-addled brain of a holidaying college boy.

‘Woah, then you should be used to this,’ he said, laughing a little too hard at his own joke. ‘Doesn’t matter though, this is paradise, even if it’s raining. It’s better than Ambergris, Ambergris is all stuck up, you’ll be good here, loads of bars, go for it, it’s fuckin’ paradise, man! You go for it, London. Fuck yeah!’

And he stumbled off into the dark with his friends while we staggered up to the main road to try to find a hotel, weighed down by sodden packs and twelve hours of being on the move.

Adrian to the Rescue

There aren’t any vehicles of note on Caye Caulker, but there are lots of golf buggies that are used for everything from taxis to tours, and within a few minutes of arriving at the main drag, we flagged one down.

‘Hello, how you doing?’ said a booming voice that oozed friendliness and warmth. ‘Welcome to paradise. I must apologise for the weather, but sometimes it rains in paradise too. Now where are you good folks going?’

So we climbed into his golf buggy and told him we were looking for a hotel, and we showed him the shortlist we’d made from the places listed in the guidebook.

‘Let me just pick up a box from the dock,’ said the taxi man, ‘and I’ll ring a few of those for you, to see if they have spaces.’ And after skidding down to the dock where a singing Rasta wandered past the buggy, proclaiming that Jah was good, the taxi man, who introduced himself as Adrian, started working his way through the list. One by one we found out that they were fully booked, or only had rooms for US$200 a night, a lot more than we’d been expecting to pay. He finally reached the last one on the list, which was just round the corner, so he spun away into the night and pulled up outside De Real Macaw Guesthouse, which appeared to be near to the shore in the northern part of the island (though in the darkness and pelting rain it was hard to see anything at all).

‘We can manage three nights,’ said the smiling lady in the hotel, and showed us three rooms that fit our budget perfectly; we picked the best room with a veranda overlooking what we were assured was the beach, gave Adrian US$5 for his help, and followed the lady’s directions to the Rainbow Grill and Bar, where we drank Belikin Beer and ate fish fillets that were simply and properly cooked, rather than being smothered in tomatoes, cheese and chipotle and cremated in the Mexican manner.

‘God, this tastes good,’ said Peta as the nutrients flooded into our systems.

‘It tastes like paradise,’ I said, clinking her bottle with mine.

And the next day, as the sun rose in clear skies and shone on the beach outside our veranda, we realised that the drunk American was right, Adrian was right, and yes, we were right. Caye Caulker is indeed a little bit of paradise, and it was worth all the hellish storms to get here...

Caye Caulker

Written: 23 November 2013

The unofficial motto of Caye Caulker, one of the many small, sandy islands off the north coast of Belize, is ‘Go Slow’, and it’s obvious from the moment you step off the ferry that this little corner of the Caribbean Sea dances to its own relaxed rhythm. The traffic here is all about golf buggies, bicycles and pedestrians, rather than cars, lorries and buses, and there are no traffic jams to speak of; the Rastas that look after the handful of trinket stalls along the northern beach are so laid back that their sales pitches are hard to tell from genuine greetings; and even the nightlife winds down at a civilised hour, so the nights are refreshingly quiet under the starry skies of the tropical moon. Caye Caulker is, without a doubt, a little slice of paradise, managing to retain a charm that its busier and more popular neighbour, Ambergris Caye, is in danger of losing with its busier roads and larger hotels.

People come to Caye Caulker to kick back, and after the long journey from Mexico, that’s exactly what we did. The torrential rain that we’d dragged ourselves through on arrival soon subsided, and although most days we still saw the odd sharp downpour, the sun came out in style, drying out our mouldy clothes and blowing a fresh, dry breeze through our hair. While Mexico seems to be full of claustrophobic buildings with rising damp, black mould and worryingly dank smells, Caye Caulker’s buildings are light and airy, and even though it rains here with the same biblical determination as the rest of the region, the architecture is built to cope. The roofs over the wooden verandas don’t leak, in stark contrast to the leaky restaurant in Tulum; the sea breezes soon blow away any mustiness from the well-ventilated rooms, unlike the heavy dampness of the hemmed-in hotels of Playa del Carmen; and, more importantly, the insides of the buildings are lit up by the sunny smiles of the locals, which prevents the rot setting in.

In short, in Caye Caulker it’s a pleasure to be in the tropics, which is something I never felt in steamy Mexico.

Paradise Found

Caye Caulker is a tiny sand island, perched on top of a reef. This kind of island is called a caye (pronounced ‘key’), and most cayes are fairly small; Caye Caulker is one of the smallest, at only five miles long and a mile wide. The island is split in two by a water channel called the Split, which the islanders dug out after the storm surge from the 1961 Hurricane Hattie cut across the island and created a small breach. The Split is now a wide channel that cuts across the island from east to west: north of the Split the island is almost uninhabited and is smothered in mangroves and forest, though parcels of land are currently up for sale in the windows of the local estate agents, so you can expect the northern half to change rapidly in the coming years; meanwhile the southern half is home to the island’s main settlement, which consists of three parallel roads – known as Front Street, Middle Street and Back Street, though they do have more formal names that nobody seems to use – each of them lined with relaxed restaurants, small shops, diving and snorkelling operations, and locals cycling gently along the streets, saying hello to each other in lilting Caribbean accents as they gently weave left and right to avoid the dips in the road where the puddles form after the rains. The language here is English, but even if you didn’t understand a word – which is quite often the case, as the English spoken here is as much Creole as it is Commonwealth – you’d still know that the vibe was relaxed; it’s all in the intonation.

We happily settled in to a routine of leisurely breakfasts, relaxing days and long evenings. Not much happens in Caye Caulker, which is the point; for excitement there are diving trips to the reefs off the island and nearby Ambergris Caye, as well as the famous Great Blue Hole of Belize, further out in the Caribbean. But on Caulker itself the busiest spot is the bar at the Split, where travellers congregate to sunbathe and drink Belikin beer and cocktails on a boardwalk by the water, while Jay-Z pumps out of the speakers (back in the 1980s and 1990s, the international languages of travel were Bob Marley and football, but now hip-hop seems to have taken on the soundtrack duties, while football continues its reign as the world’s cultural Esperanto). As lunchtime approaches, locals set up oil-drum barbecues along the northern beach, where they cook chicken, lobster, fish and conch, sending mouthwatering smells down the road to pull in the unwary; and as the afternoon siesta drifts into the early evening, people head out into the town, such as it is, to check out the restaurants. As if in answer to our prayers, some of them even display the catch of the day outside – wiggling lobsters and clear-eyed snapper, all of them ready to jump straight onto the barbecue – and you simply pick the size of fish or crustacean that you fancy, and sit back with a Belizean beer while the smell of your dinner wafts enticingly on the sea breeze.

Even the beer in Belize is delightfully simple. The main brewer is Belikin, and their main brews are standard Belikin beer at 4.8%, and Belikin stout at 6.5%; these two use the same bottle, so you can only tell your poison by holding the bottle up to the light and looking at the colour of the contents. They also do a light beer called Lighthouse and a maltier premium beer, but for me, the light and dark, as they’re known, tick all the boxes: light for thirst, and dark for the kick. I love stout in hot countries – I got a taste for it in Ghana – and Belize has got it sorted.

And don’t forget the cake lady, who sells delightful homemade cakes from her hand-pulled cart every afternoon along the seafront; or the fruit stalls with perfect bananas and succulent pineapples; or the fresh fruit juice stalls, or the bakery in Middle Street, or the amazing ‘fry jacks’, light profiterole-like fried dough pockets that are a marriage made in breakfast heaven when combined with pureed beans and habanero sauce, or with jam and butter for a sweeter kick. After the stodgy and fibre-deficient food of the Yucatán, Belizean fare is pure paradise.

Paradise Lost

There is, though, a slight crack in the façade, and every now and then real life spills through. Pretty much every day, we saw someone somewhere lose it. One night we had a Rasta lying on the beach outside our window, smashed out of his brains on weed and local rum, calling out bizarre non-sequitur obscenities into the night before passing out in a haze of red, rolling eyes; another night one of the Chinese men from the local supermarket made a phone call in the middle of the street in which he completely lost it and shouted piercingly scary Chinese threats into the handset for a good ten minutes, while his business partner tried to coax him away from the red mist and back to sanity; another night one of the other shopkeepers had a stand-up row with a sloppily dressed local whom he’d kicked out of the shop, following it up with, ‘Come back here now you coward and let’s sort out this man to man, you fucking scum, you don’t come round here no more, I sort you out good and proper’; and then there was the black guy shouting, ‘I’m not racialist or anything, but it’s like you’re a monkey and I’m a gorilla.’ It’s like lying under a picture-perfect palm tree and hearing the faint creaks and rustles from the fronds above that indicate a coconut might fall down at any minute, breaking the tension and possibly someone’s face, too.

And peppered around this background noise of locals losing their cool with each other, there are noisy gaggles of Australian girls peddling the late-night streets with their astonishingly piercing shrieks; there are monged-out twenty-somethings from Oregon at the food stalls who make you realise that no, South Park isn’t a satirical show, it’s a documentary; and there are plenty of slightly lost travellers wandering around, like the young English guy who cornered us in the ATM and grilled us in a panicky voice about the best approach to changing money at the Guatemalan border (‘I don’t know, can’t you see I’m using the bloody cash machine?’ was my gruff response, as the ATM booth is neither the time nor the place to corner other people, unless you’re a thief). Caye Caulker is a classic stop on the Gringo Trail, the classic travellers’ route that stretches from Mexico to Panama, and at times you can feel you’re stuck in gap year hell; still, the next step along the road for Caulker is a full-blown tourist industry, and the Gringo Trail is a minor fate compared to that...

But despite these cracks around the edges, the charms of the Caribbean win out every time, and Caye Caulker is, for now, a little bit of paradise. One hopes that for this part of the world, everything continues to go slow, including the inevitable change into a more popular and less charming destination. Enjoy it while you can, because this won’t be a quiet corner for long.

Diving in Ambergris Caye

Written: 25 November 2013

The diving off the northern cayes of the Belize is world class, so it didn’t take much persuasion for us to book a two-dive trip to the reefs off Ambergris Caye, just to the north of Caye Caulker. Our dive operator chose two of the classic locations off the southeast corner of Ambergris – Esmeralda Canyons and Cypress Canyons – and after waiting for a tropical downpour to clear away, we set off on the 30-minute dash to the reefs off Ambergris.

The local blurb speaks highly of the sites (of course). Esmeralda is ‘one of the top dive sites’ and ‘abounds with tropical fish’; at Cypress, meanwhile, ‘schools of yellowtail, grey, black and red snapper swim among these beautiful coral formations’. In the end, though, we were both pretty underwhelmed by the poor state of the coral and the small amount of wildlife. The problem is that we’ve only just come away from diving in Cozumel, which is in a totally different league to Ambergris; where Cozumel’s reefs absolutely teem with life, literally everywhere you look, the reefs in Ambergris look a bit tired and battered, and although there are fish and lobster and the odd ray (which we didn’t see, but another group did), they are far fewer in number than in Cozumel, and we couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed.

It didn’t help that we were sharing the boat with a fairly irritating bunch of divers, who ranged from a total novice on his very first post-qualification dive who seemed to know everything there was to know about diving already, to a bragging Frenchman who proved that diving can be a bit of a twat magnet sometimes (it turned out he lived in Tulum; that made sense). The on-board conversation was an endless one-upmanship of who’d dived the most amazing international dive sites and which one was better than the rest, and Peta and I just exchanged glances and let them get on with it; I’m too grizzled a traveller to get involved in that kind of conversation, so we just looked out to sea while the novice banged on about how amazing the diving was (though he’d never dived anywhere else, so couldn’t compare), and the Frenchman puffed up in self-admiration as he talked authoritatively about cenote dives, Polynesia, the Great Barrier Reef, and all the other sites that, yes, I’ve also dived. The irony is that he’d been in the same group as us on the Ambergris reef, and he’d been the one smashing the reef with his fins in his queue-barging attempts to photograph the coral up close; perhaps that’s why the reef round here looks so pre-loved.

There were some good moments, though. On the first dive in Esmeralda, we saw a huge, green moray eel near the start at 21m down, and throughout the rest of the dive we were visited by nurse sharks, who are friendly and harmless but distinctly shark-shaped, so every few minutes I’d glance down and think ‘Shark!’ before realising that, actually, the world wasn’t about to end after all. Peta particularly enjoyed swimming with sharks, as the sights that the guide was pointing out weren’t that inspiring; as she said after the dive, if she wanted to see a lobster she could go to any aquarium, but swimming with sharks? That’s not something you do every day.

In the second dive in Cypress Canyons, we got to swim single file through an 8m-long and fairly claustrophobic tunnel through the reef which would have freaked me out if I hadn’t already quashed that phobia back in the cenotes. But the overall feeling was of a dive site that pales in comparison with Cozumel, and a dive boat full of slightly annoying people who were a little too keen to tell the world about themselves, without first checking whether they had anything interesting to say.

But this isn’t the only dive we’re planning to do in Belize, so hopefully things will get better...

Travelling by Internet

Written: 28 November 2013

I’m going to sound like a bit of an old-timer here, but wow, the Internet has really changed travelling compared to 18 years ago. I didn’t notice the effect so much when I visited West Africa in 2002, because that’s a pretty poor part of the world and the Internet was still a bit of a novelty then, but here in the touristy parts of Central America there’s wi-fi absolutely everywhere, and the effect on the travelling community is huge.

Of course, this isn’t the first big change that travelling has been through. The first wave of what we now call backpackers came along in the 1960s and 1970s, when people started dropping out of society and hitting the hippy trail from Europe through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal and India, and on to Southeast Asia. This led to an explosion of travel guidebooks, in particular the now ubiquitous Lonely Planet, and with the advent of cheaper air travel, people taking ‘gap years’ were everywhere by the 1980s, to the point where going travelling became a pretty standard thing for young people to do. And now the landscape is changing again, as the old paper-based guidebooks give way to the Internet as the go-to source for travelling information.

Peta and I straddle the first two eras of travel. Ask Peta about travelling through the Greek islands in the early 1980s, or riding a motorcycle through iron-curtain-era Yugoslavia, and it’s a pretty different story to modern travelling. The Greek islands didn’t have phones, and if the weather blew up, the ports would close, so you had to time your departures carefully if you wanted to make a connection on land. You just turned up on the islands and asked around for places to stay; there were no guidebooks, you just asked people where to go.

When I travelled in the mid-1990s, the guidebook was well established, but the Internet was in its infancy: only geeks had email addresses, and only cutting-edge technology companies had websites. I took an Internet-savvy computer with me on my travels, and nobody knew what it was for; I used to explain it away as a portable fax machine, as that’s what people could understand (and, indeed, that’s how I would send my writing to my family, as that was the only technology they’d have access to). Like all other travellers, I’d turn up somewhere and use the guidebook to find suitable accommodation, or if that was full, I’d just start asking around. Other travellers were mines of information, and we’d swap hotel details and ferry timetables like they were a tradable currency. And as for reading books... well, they really were valuable commodities, particularly in non-English-speaking countries.

But these days everything travel-related is online, and everyone seems to be connected, all of the time. TripAdvisor has become the go-to website for finding accommodation, Facebook is how we all communicate with people back home, and every other person seems to be a bloody travel blogger. Instead of getting off the bus and idly wandering to the nearest OK-sounding hotel in the guidebook, travellers now go online in advance, search through hundreds of options, read through other travellers’ ratings (often from just a few days ago), and if they like what they see they can even click on the ‘Book’ button and pay for their stay in advance. It’s a complete change-around from just ten years ago, when you could only access your email in Internet cafés and wi-fi was still pretty rare outside of the West.

Information Overload

For me, this is all a bit of a culture shock. Back when I learned to travel, I’d spend ages poring over the guidebooks, and soaking up every bit of information I could lay my hands on, from hand-copied maps to route suggestions, and I played with my itinerary for hours, wondering where I should go. I trained myself to soak up information like a sponge, mull it over and make a decision, and this worked really well when information was relatively scant. But in the Internet era, the sheer volume of data literally makes me panic and I get information overload. I can’t cope; my brain insists on reading everything, and when faced with having to make a decision, it simply freaks out and freezes. It’s most inconvenient, and I find I can only look at TripAdvisor for a few minutes before the red mist descends and I have to go and lie down.

Luckily Peta is much more adept at filtering out the reams of crud that you find on the Internet, so we’re playing to our strengths. I’m good at planning interesting routes through countries, sorting out the finances, and documenting where we’ve been; and Peta is good at finding places to stay and eat. It’s a classic male-female split, and it seems to be working.

And there is one huge advantage of being connected on the road that even I have to admit is a life-saver. On my previous travels, I’d have to carry my memories with me, and the prospect of having my bag stolen was a constant worry. Most travellers back then would have some kind of paper notebook in which they’d jot down their thoughts, and any photos we took would be on film. I remember travelling through India in 1998 with about 20 exposed films tucked away in my pack, worrying constantly whether they’d get waterlogged on the bus roof, or baked in the hot sun, or infested with ants, all before I’d had a chance to develop them. I’d also back up my writing to a chunky flash memory card, which was about half the size of a packet of ten cigarettes, and I’d hide it in my money belt, so if someone stole my computer, at least they wouldn’t get my writing. I’d email my jottings home when I could find a connection, but that wasn’t that often, and I could never email the photos home.

Luckily I made it through both my big trips in the 1990s and 2000s without having anything stolen, and by the time we went to India again in 2007, everyone had started going digital, and I remember being surprised about the number of laptops I saw in the guest houses. These days there are iPhones and laptops everywhere you look, and wi-fi is an essential aspect of the modern travel circuit, so at the end of most days I’m able to back up my writing and photos to my website. Although it would be a major pain to have my MacBook stolen, as I wouldn’t be able to write any more until I found a replacement, at least I shouldn’t lose any memories (and I’m still backing up to a USB stick which I keep in my money belt, just to be doubly sure – old habits die hard).

So although I might find it hard to cope with the information overload of modern online travel, there is at least a silver lining. Though part of me can’t help wondering if the less popular travel destinations of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua will bring back the good old days, when less was – for me at least – more.

The Great Blue Hole

Written: 29 November 2013

‘Oooh, are you planning to dive the Blue Hole?’ people ask when you tell them you’re going diving in Belize.

‘What, that massive hole full of deep, dark water and sharks?’ I reply. ‘Are you kidding? No thanks. I’m much happier diving on nice shallow reefs.’

And that’s that. Except things don’t always turn out the way you planned, so yeah, we ended up extending our stay in Caye Caulker just to dive Belize’s Great Blue Hole, even though that was the last thing we thought would happen when we arrived in paradise. Ah well, all good plans are made to be broken...

The Lure of Lighthouse Reef

The problem is that Belize is supposed to be one of the most amazing diving destinations in the world, but we were really disappointed by our trip to the reefs off Ambergris Caye. It just felt a bit drab compared to the astonishing colour and sea life off Cozumel in Mexico, so we thought we’d book a trip to one of the more distant reefs off Belize, ideally somewhere like Turneffe Island, which has a good reputation, or even Lighthouse Reef, which surrounds the Blue Hole.

The thing is that everyone comes to Belize to dive the Blue Hole, so that’s where the focus is. We put our names down for a trip to Turneffe, but when the time came there weren’t enough people to justify a boat; on the other hand, that day’s Blue Hole trip was fully booked. ‘What else do you have?’ we asked, and they said we could go out to the local reefs again if we wanted, which we didn’t, but that the Blue Hole trip was the only other one that they knew would have enough customers to guarantee. And so we thought about it over dinner and figured that, hey, the Blue Hole trip consists of three dives, only one of which is the Blue Hole, and as the other two dives – Half Moon Wall and the Aquarium, both in Lighthouse Reef – are supposed to be absolutely world class and literally some of the best reef dives on the planet, then perhaps we should do the trip anyway. After all, we could always skip the Blue Hole dive itself, if we didn’t fancy deep, dark, shark-infested waters.

So we booked onto the Blue Hole trip for a couple of days later, and settled back to read more about this intriguing dive. And as we read more, and more, and more, it became apparent that, hell, you’ve got to try it. It might not always be enjoyable and it might not be something you ever want to repeat, but if I could get over my various phobias to conquer cenote diving and come away with some really amazing memories, then surely conquering the daddy of all deep water dives would be worth doing.

After all, the Blue Hole is pretty unique in the dive world. It’s a deep dive to the margins of safe no-decompression diving, and it’s important to go into it with the right mindset. This isn’t paradise diving through a tropical aquarium, it’s a descent into the watery bowels of the earth. The Great Blue Hole is a collapsed cave in the middle of the turquoise waters of Lighthouse Reef, forming a perfect 300m-wide circle of dark blue water that’s 124m deep and looks for all the world like a menacing black pupil in the middle of a turquoise iris of reef. Its image is the tourist brochure cover for Belize, and it’s a national icon; it’s OK to go diving in Belize and skip the Blue Hole, but to go to the Blue Hole and not dive it? That would be a little strange.

It’s also on every diver’s list of dives you must do before you die, which is ironic because people do indeed die here (another reason why we didn’t really fancy doing it). A lot of the Blue Hole’s appeal to divers is that it’s at the limits of safe recreational diving, and at its full depth it’s a dive for experienced divers only, specifically those with the Advanced Open Water qualification; Open Water divers like me and Peta can go down to 30m, while advanced divers can go a bit further to 40m, which is as deep as you’re supposed to go without specialist equipment. Because it’s at the limits of safe diving, the hole has a bit of a reputation, though people who do have accidents here tend to be cave divers going way deeper than recreational divers, or people having heart attacks or suffering from equipment failure, neither of which are issues with the Blue Hole as such. That said, there’s definitely a feeling of trepidation for people heading out to the Blue Hole, and it is a deep dive, so the element of danger attracts people from all over the world who are keen to take on the challenge.

So you have to take it slow, and with respect. You can come a cropper here if your equipment is faulty; when you reach 40m, there’s still another 84m of water between you and the bottom of the Blue Hole, so if your buoyancy jacket fails to inflate properly, you can end up plummeting down to the bottom, where you will inevitably die. If you choose a dodgy operator who sends groups to the Blue Hole that are too large, then if two people get into difficulties, the guide can help one, but the other might get into trouble unnoticed. And if your buddy and you aren’t communicating, then you might not notice that your buddy has succumbed to nitrogen narcosis, which can affect divers at 40m, and which in extreme cases can send you completely do-lally, to the extent where you might think it’s a good idea to remove your regulator and try breathing the sea water. If your buddy is keeping an eye on you, then they can head this off by getting you to concentrate on something, like your gauges, which can help focus your mind through the narcosis.

In other words, you don’t muck about in the Great Blue Hole. It’s safe if you’re a safe diver, and dangerous if you’re not.

Geology of the Great Blue Hole

For a lot of people, the dive in the Great Blue Hole is the least interesting of the three dives you do on Lighthouse Reef; in fact, it’s often a major disappointment. It’s dark, it’s blue, there’s practically no life, and because you get through your air much more quickly at depth, it’s a short dive, at around 20 to 25 minutes. But knowing a bit about how the Blue Hole formed makes it all the more impressive, because it isn’t just a hole in the sea, it’s a geological monster.

Like the cenotes in Mexico, the Blue Hole is a karst-eroded sinkhole; in other words, it started out life millions of years ago as a huge chamber in an underground cave system that was eroded from the limestone by acidic water seeping into the ground (‘karst’ being the name given to this kind of geological formation). An earthquake caused the cave ceiling to collapse, and at the same time it tilted the ground through an angle of 12°, so the sides of what is now the Blue Hole don’t go straight up and down, they form overhangs. Stalactites continued to form after the earthquake, so some stalactites are at an angle of 12° while others are straight up and down, and some even change halfway, with the top part at an angle and the bottom vertical.

Some time after the cave collapsed, the Great Ice Age ended and sea levels slowly rose, flooding the Blue Hole in stages. As a result the sides of the Blue Hole were eroded at different levels at different times, carving shelves and ledges into the sides of the sinkhole. The deeper dive takes you down the overhanging sides of the cave to the top of a cave entrance that’s smothered in huge stalactites and stalagmites, and then it’s back up again into the light; the shallower dive, which we did, reaches the stalactites at the top of the cave entrance. In both cases the dive is straight up and down, but if you tell yourself that you’re in a gargantuan cavern from a prehistoric cave system that was smashed by a massive earthquake and flooded by meltwater from the ice age... well, the scale of it all is slightly more impressive than your average cenote.

Inclement Weather

As seems to be a theme with our trip so far, the weather had other ideas. We booked onto the dive for the day after next, giving us a day to rest after our trip to the Ambergris reef, and we turned in early the night before, as the boat leaves Caye Caulker at 6am to get to Lighthouse Reef before the other boats. All fired up for the dive in the morning, we lay there unable to believe our ears as the winds started blowing, and then gusting, and then howling through the phone lines, before a huge tropical storm hit and lashed the island with horizontal rain and screaming winds. The rain stopped sometime in the night but the winds kept on blowing, and it was with a heavy heart that we fell out of bed at 5am, packed up for the dive and plodded down to the dive shop, where we knew they’d simply turn us around and say sorry, no, this is just too dangerous to go out in. And that’s exactly what they did, so we went back to bed, helpless in the face of the tail end of this particularly persistent hurricane season.

By this time we’d got ourselves pretty excited about the prospect of diving the Blue Hole, so after a few hours’ sleep and a leisurely breakfast, we decided it would be worth extending our stay by a day to go on the next Blue Hole trip, which was scheduled for two days later. The winds died down and the sun eventually poked through the clouds, and we spent the day walking to the southern tip of the caye and back, along churned-up paths that went past the hotels in the southern part of the town, before skirting the edge of the airstrip and passing a number of lonely-looking houses that had seen better days. It felt a bit spooky down the southern end of Caye Caulker, I have to say; the theme from Deliverance kept going through my mind as we stumbled across houses that looked abandoned, unloved and, in quite a few cases, unfinished. The paradise dream doesn’t always turn out as you planned, and anyone considering building a luxury holiday home on a remote Caribbean island would do well to visit southern Caye Caulker on the day after a tropical storm. Paradise, it ain’t.

So that night, for the second time, we went down to the dive shop to set up our equipment, and the weather seemed to be cooperating this time. Imagine how we felt, then, as the winds picked up during the night, howling a gale all the way through to the morning, when the alarm went off at 5am and I knew, for a fact, that they were going to cancel again and we weren’t going to be able to dive the Blue Hole after all. ‘What a let-down,’ I thought as we bent our way through the winds to discover that... bloody hell, they were planning to go. Really, in this wind?

‘It should clear up later,’ they said, and a bit dazed after a night of lying there and assuming that we’d simply have another day to kill, we found ourselves bouncing through the surf, on the way to Lighthouse Reef.

Diving the Great Blue Hole

The journey out there was hell. The boat smashed through the swell, soaking those of us who sat at the back in an attempt to stave off seasickness, and by the time we pulled into Lighthouse Reef, some two hours later, I was shivering. Shivering? In the tropics? None of us on the boat could quite believe it, but yes, we were all absolutely freezing as the driving winds chilled us to the bone.

Despite the early hour, it was a blessed relief to get into the water, which was warm and tropical and Caribbean, even though the skies were cloudy and the water wasn’t the pretty azure blue you see in the brochures. But the Blue Hole was obviously a lot bluer than its surroundings, and from the boat we could see the perfectly round edge of the reef that surrounds the hole, so we still knew we were somewhere special.

I wasn’t expecting it, but when I jumped off the dive boat in the middle of what I thought was the Blue Hole, the water was quite shallow. Inside the 300m-wide circle of coral the sides gently slope towards the middle of the circle, like a huge funnel, and then suddenly, wham! At about 15m down the sandy slope suddenly ends and drops vertically down into a huge blue hole of nothingness. Unfortunately for us the storm had whipped up the surrounding seas and there was a fair amount of silt floating around in the water, so the visibility wasn’t as clear as it normally is, but the immensity of the deep blue chasm under our feet was impressive. As I floated off the edge of the lip and out into nothingness, it felt a bit like the first time I bungee jumped, but instead of the world rushing past me in a calamity of falling, I just hovered there, slowly drifting down the outer wall, which I kept in front of me to avoid getting disorientated.

The outer wall is, frankly, a bit spooky. After the coral reef at the top, it’s relatively dead, though not completely; I felt I was slowly sinking down into the oesophagus of some immense sea creature, with its ridges and bumps and slightly furry algae growths swaying in the gentle current. After the battering of the boat trip, the dark blue was incredibly quiet and tranquil, eerie even, as we descended to 24m before checking that everyone was OK. We then dropped to 30m and swam around a huge stalactite hanging off the sloping sides of the cave, before gently floating into the deep blue away from the sides.

Unfortunately there weren’t any sharks when we did our dive; they tend to go deeper when the weather isn’t so pleasant, and with the visibility being fairly mediocre, it was hard to look deeper into the hole to see if they were there. Nobody got any nitrogen narcosis either, which was disappointing for some of the deeper divers, who’d really fancied knowing what all the fuss was about; in the end it was a fairly uneventful dive, but for me, with my ingrained fear of deep, dark water, it was an exercise in slightly wide-eyed wonder at the fact that I was doing it at all. Amazingly I didn’t guzzle my air, unlike one of the other divers, who ran so low on air that he had to buddy-breathe the dive master’s air on his safety stop; I coped fine, and for me, that was the truly immense thing about the Blue Hole.

Though I have to say that diving into a pitch black cenote with rock above your head, a failing torch and a grumpy Italian dive master... well, that’s a hell of a lot scarier than a deep hole in the middle of the sea. I’m just impressed that I can compare the two dives from my own experience; I never thought that I’d be able to do that.

Diving in Lighthouse Reef

The weather didn’t only make the journey to the Blue Hole hell, not to mention scaring away the sharks and silting up the visibility, but it also screwed up the diving at Half Moon Wall and the Aquarium, the other two sites that we were due to dive. The original plan had the second dive straight after the Blue Hole, after which we would tie up at Half Moon Caye Natural Monument for lunch, and then head out for the third dive before returning home. Instead, the team decided to wait a bit for the second dive to see if the visibility would improve, so we dropped anchor at Half Moon Caye after the first dive, and waited to see how things panned out.

Even though the wind was blowing a gale and all the palm trees on this small caye were bent double in the wind, it was a charming stop, not least because the small forest provided shelter and – ahh, that’s better! – some respite from the constant gale. Half Moon Caye is also home to a bird sanctuary and a lookout post from where you can see flocks of red-footed boobies nesting in the tops of the ziricote trees; these birds spend most of their lives at sea and only come to land to breed, so this is a rare opportunity to see the birds up close. However, to an ornithological philistine like me, the frigate birds are much more impressive, with their huge, puffy red gular pouches that they inflate to impressive sizes during courtship. Even if you’re not a bird lover, the lookout is a great vantage point, though as it can only hold eight people at a time, you can’t spend all day there, even if it is wonderfully sheltered up there in the canopy.

But eventually we had to get back to the boat for the second and third dives, which were now going to be at Long Caye Wall and the Lion’s Den, on the leeward side of the reef where the atoll had protected the coral from the main swell. The second dive was good, and compared to the rather sad reefs off Ambergris Caye there was plenty of life and lots of coral. It still didn’t quite compare to Cozumel, but it isn’t really fair to compare them directly, as the sun shone on calm seas in Cozumel, while we had dark skies and ocean swells at Lighthouse Reef. This was followed by lunch on the boat just outside the Half Moon reef, where the winds spun us round in circles as we ate tepid chicken curry and drank sugary pop. I hate eating on pitching boats, and by the third dive I was struggling to see the funny side. I also found that, after a couple of reef dives of 45 minutes and 50 minutes, I was getting a little bored; yes, more coral, and yes, more fish, and yes, look, there’s a lobster, and yes, OK, a drummer fish. But I’m getting cold, my eyes are starting to sting from the salt, I’m getting tired, it’s pretty dark down here, and we’ve got a bloody long boat ride back again after this, which is going to suck. I wasn’t miserable, but I was having to try hard to stay interested, which says it all, really.

On the way back to Caye Caulker, I just spent every available moment staring at the horizon while the other divers merrily talked about where they’d travelled, where they’d dived, what they were going to do next, and plenty of other small talk that I couldn’t even focus on. And the journey back, which was longer and bumpier as this time we were heading into the wind, even managed to drain the younger and more vigorous members of the team, who were all looking totally worn out by the time we docked.

So, that was the Great Blue Hole. I wasn’t expecting it, because most people don’t seem to feel this way, but for me the dive in the Blue Hole was by far and away the highlight of the whole day. It was 25 minutes of floating around in the deep blue of space, not seeing any life, not seeing any sharks, just seeing the odd stalactite and precious little else... but for some reason that’s the memory that will stay with me, rather than the freezing winds, the dreadful swell, the mediocre visibility and the slightly underwhelming reef diving. Funny, that.

The West

San Ignacio

Written: 3 December 2013

It took a while for us to warm to the charms of San Ignacio, because first impressions last. We got there in the end, but it was a bit of a long road... literally.

It didn’t help that we tackled the long journey from Caye Caulker to San Ignacio the day after our dive trip the Blue Hole, which had completely wiped us out (though in a good way). It started with the water taxi from Caye Caulker to Belize City, which bumped along through the swell, adding sore patches to our sore patches, and the taxi across town to the bus station was pretty rickety and the suspension in the tired old cab had seen far better days, but the most painful part of the whole trip was the music in the bus from Belize City to San Ignacio.

It’s a funny thing about developing countries, but their stereos only seem to have one volume setting, and that setting is at least two notches higher than the speakers can cope with. Whether you’re in Indonesia or India, Burkina Faso or Belize, the driver is in charge of the music, and he wants you to sit there and listen, so he turns it up to full volume and takes no prisoners, whether it’s Southeast Asian pop music, a Hindi film soundtrack or, in the case of the bus out west from Belize City, country and western music of the most dreadful kind.

It didn’t help that someone else on the bus had brought along their own boom box and was determined to entertain the packed bus with their own mega-mix of Belizean beats, which led to a face-off between the driver and the DJ passenger, with each of them upping the volume until the bus driver comprehensively won with his ear-bursting rendition of Waylon Jennings’s ‘Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up to be Cowboys’. Despite this initial win by the driver, the passenger was biding his time, because when things calmed down a bit with some gentler Dolly Parton, he wacked up his ragga beats and took on the driver without flinching, until the latter discovered that his speakers could indeed take just a little more, and turning up Charley Pride’s ‘Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger’, he sent the pretender packing with vibrations that rocked the bus even more than the potholes on the Western Highway.

After an hour of aural tennis, Peta had a serious headache and I’d had enough of banal lyrics about cheatin’ women and gamblin’ men, and when Billy Ray Cyrus’s ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ started up, that pretty much summed up how I felt. Luckily we soon reached Belmopan, the capital of Belize, where most of the passengers got off (including the defeated DJ) and the music switched to insanely loud 1980s power ballads, which was perhaps not the improvement I’d hoped for. As Jennifer Rush screamed about ‘The Power of Love’ and we bumped our way in the direction of the Guatemalan border, the heavens opened, spitting rain through a broken window and directly into my face, so at least you couldn’t see my tears.

Black and Blue

After our stressful arrival in the torrential darkness of Caye Caulker, we didn’t fancy splashing around in the rain trying to find a hotel again, so we booked a hotel in advance in San Ignacio. This turned out to be a very good idea, and soon enough the rain had stopped and I was perched on the balcony of the Casa Blanca Hotel, watching the world go by below from the safety of a bottle of Belikin Stout. It was really rather peaceful after two and a half hours of the soundtrack from hell.

So the sudden loud shouts from up the street were a bit of a shock, wrenching me out of my reverie as a lanky black man ran down the street, shouting angry words in Creole and throwing his long arms up in the air in the universal language of fired-up testosterone. He stood on the road opposite the hotel, looking up the hill and shouting, until he calmed down a bit and started loitering with intent instead. He was tetchy, jumping from foot to foot, and clearly wound up; the man at the table selling trinkets by the side of the road suddenly looked extremely busy with his bracelets and necklaces, as the angry black man paced around like a panther patrolling his territorial boundaries.

After about five minutes of this, I heard a muffled shouting from up the hill, and the black man yelled, ‘ You want some? You come on, then,’ in a deep bass voice. There were higher-pitched shouts from up the hill, and again he threw his hands up to the sky. Looking behind him, he saw something in a dark side alley and ducked in for a second or two, before coming out shouting.

‘Come on then!’ he yelled, turning up the hill. ‘Let’s go. Right now!’

‘Yeah, you want some, nigger?’ came a Chinese voice from up the road, and three pumped-up Chinese men started running down towards the black man, one of them in the front shouting and pointing. The black man had his right hand tucked behind his back, and as he headed up the street, I could see he’d grabbed a short bit of wood from the alley.

They met in the middle of the street, the Chinese man putting up both fists and trying a side kick, and the black man dodging and biding his time before feinting with his left hand and springing the surprise from his right, smacking the Chinese man on his forearm. A mother and daughter stood frozen on the pavement and cars ground to a halt as the pair traded kicks and punches. And then the black man brought his right hand down and smacked the Chinese man hard on the side of the head, sending him spinning between two parked cars and down onto the pavement on the other side of the road.

‘You want some of this too?’ he yelled at one of the other Chinese men, who put up his hands and turned to run. The third Chinese man stood still by his downed friend, unsure what to do as the black man jumped back onto the first Chinese man and smashed him a couple more times in the face before running off down the road, stopping to yell incomprehensible threats at the now totally shell-shocked Chinese. The first Chinese man got up and put a hand to his face, which was gushing blood from a mashed-up nose, and he and his friends stood there, totally confused as the black man shrugged his shoulders aggressively, turned casually away from the scene, lobbed the bit of wood back into the side street and sauntered off as if nothing had happened, while the Chinese men limped back up the street, looking at each other in confusion.

Welcome to San Ignacio. I guess the blacks and Chinese don’t get on here, either.

Ruins and Caves

We’d shacked up at San Ignacio in order to visit Actun Tunichil Muknal cave and the Mayan ruins at Caracol, both a couple of hours’ drive out of town, but San Ignacio itself has its own set of ruins that are well worth the 30-minute walk out of town. Known as Cahal Pech – Mayan for ‘Place of Ticks’, which was the name given to the site by the archaeologists who excavated it in the 1950s – it’s one of the oldest recognisably Mayan sites in the Belize River valley, dating from around 1200 BC (though it was abandoned in about 900 AD). It was home to an elite Mayan family, and its location on top of a hill above present-day San Ignacio is palatial indeed; most of the buildings date from the end of the occupation, between 600 and 800 AD, but because they’re in a crumbling state with gnarly trees growing out of the stonework, it feels a lot more ancient.

But the best thing about the site is that it’s relatively quiet. Sure, small buses of tour groups spill through during the day, but it’s off the main tourist trail, and it’s easy to shake off the groups of slow-moving Russians and Americans as they follow their tour guides round the site, and if you wait for a few minutes, you’ll soon have the site to yourself again. You can pretty much clamber anywhere you like, and the view of the forest canopy from the top of the biggest pyramid, some 25m up, is atmospheric (though you can’t quite see out of the forest to the surrounding hills, which is a shame, as the views are lovely on the walk up to the visitor centre).

San Ignacio also has some great street food in the form of small stalls along Burns Avenue, where you can pick up some local favourites for a pittance. We munched on panades, which are crispy fried corn pancakes stuffed with a spicy chicken filling and served with grated onion and cheese, three of which will cost you a whopping one Belizean dollar, or about 10p each; we ate tostadas, which are deep-fried tortillas piled high with cheese, onions, beans, sour cream and salsa for a massive 75 Belizean cents each (or 25p); and fried tacos, which are rolled up soft tacos, stuffed with meat and deep fried before being smothered in onions, sour cream and salsa, also 75 Belizean cents each (or 25p). Lunch for two for a couple of quid, including a large Coke and a place to sit on the side of the road... that’s got to be worth a go.

San Ignacio is also home to a large market, which we caught the tail end of on the Saturday we arrived, though it was closing up at the time; and it’s also near to the confluence of the Macal River and the Mopan River, which is where the Belize River starts. We also fell in love with the restaurants, in particular a Mayan restaurant called Ko-Ox Han-Nah (‘Let’s Go Eat’ in Mayan), which served consistently excellent food at good prices. Finally, after the disappointing food of Mexico, and the slightly monotonous fish-based restaurant fare of Caye Caulker, we’ve found some food that’s worth writing about. Well done San Ignacio, you came good in the end.

Actun Tunichil Muknal Cave

Written: 2 December 2013

Really, how could I resist? The chance to explore a remote flooded cave system, stuffed with ancient Mayan artefacts and the skeletons of sacrificed women and children, deep in the rainforest... isn’t that what everyone dreams of? Of being Indiana Jones for day?

Frankly, no, it isn’t. I hate caves, I get claustrophobia, I don’t like dark water, and I can live without bats flying round my head and cold water dripping onto my face from ancient stalactites, however pretty they are. I have nightmares about caves; Indiana Jones, I am not (although I do have the hat).

But, as with the Blue Hole, it seemed churlish to come all this way without visiting Actun Tunichil Muknal cave, especially as none other than National Geographic in its book ‘Sacred Places of a Lifetime’ rates it at number one in its list of Top Ten Sacred Caves. And hey, if I can scuba dive in a completely flooded cave and survive, surely I could try a bit of spelunking and survive. I mean, it’s only claustrophobia...

Into the Forest

You have to take a tour if you want to visit Actun Tunichil Muknal (which is Mayan for ‘Cave of the Crystal Sepulchre’). This is not only because it’s a delicate archaeological site that would be trampled into oblivion by unfettered tourism, but also because it’s a hell of a trek to get to the archaeology in the first place. When you sign up for a tour there are some simple rules: first, no cameras are allowed anywhere in the nature reserve that contains the cave, ever since a tourist dropped his camera on a 1000-year-old skull and smashed a hole in it; second, you need to bring a set of clothes that you don’t mind getting completely wet (though not beach gear, as that wouldn’t be respectful enough for this sacred site); and third, you need to bring a pair of socks, so you can walk around the archaeology without stomping it into pieces with your shoes, or leaving oils from your feet that will mess with the natural flow of water over the delicate surfaces.

These rules tend to put off your typical ten-sites-in-a-day, air-conditioned coach tourists, putting this attraction in the ‘adventurous’ category. And adventurous it is, too. After an hour’s drive from San Ignacio, half of which is along incredibly juddering dirt roads, you reach the entrance to Tapir Mountain Nature Reserve, where the park warden sticks his head in the van and tells you not to touch anything, not to use cameras, and to listen to everything that the guide says you must do. And he smiles a happy smile, wishes you a good day, and off you go into the small car park next to the park office.

This is where the fun starts. Grabbing nothing except a caving helmet with attached head torch and a bottle of water, you slip into your set of wet clothes and set off through the jungle on a 45-minute trek (though not after your guide has warned you to keep an eye out for snakes). The first river that you have to wade across, Roaring Creek, is cold and waist deep, and at maybe 20m across it’s a bit of a shock to the system at 8.30am. The second river – Roaring Creek again – is even faster-flowing and even colder, though by the third one – yes, you guessed it, it’s Roaring Creek for a third time – things are still a bit numb, so it isn’t quite as uncomfortable. At the small shelter near the entrance to the cave you leave your water bottle stashed away in the eaves, and then it’s off to the hourglass-shaped cave entrance, which is dark, flooded and distinctly uninviting when you’re already shivering from the river crossings. The ancient Mayans believed that Actun Tunichil Muknal was the entrance to the underworld, and the locals still call it Xibalba (pronounced ‘Shi-bal-ba’), after the name for the Mayan underworld. It’s not hard to see why.

Our guide, Orlando, was a charming Mayan with kind eyes and a patient soul, and it was his smile that got me swimming across the first pool of dark water and onto a rock where we all crouched down, peering nervously into the shadows beyond. From that point on it was single file, passing messages down the line like ‘watch your knees on that rock there’ or ‘don’t smack your head on this’. We walked through a fast-flowing river, heading upstream through small tunnels and into large chambers with bats flying around our heads, before ducking under stalactites and rock flows that glittered in our torch light; and all the time we walked through waist-deep water, trying to feel our way through the rocky riverbed without twisting an ankle or bashing a knee on anything sharp.

Every few minutes, Orlando would wait for the group to bunch up and would show us something interesting; he pointed out sparkling rock formations, he showed us black deposits of manganese and white deposits of calcium, and he even demonstrated how one of the rock flows looked like a wedding dress seen from behind on a particularly shapely bride. And then he got us all to stand waist-deep in the flowing river before making us turn off all our torches. Yes, absolutely every one of them; it suddenly became completely pitch black, deep inside a cave in the bowels of the earth, while he told us we were in the Stelae Chamber, and how the Mayans had carved two of the rocks here into special shapes. One was in the shape of the obsidian blade that they used for bloodletting, and the other in the shape of a maize cob, or if you’re feeling fanciful, a sting ray’s spine, which they also used for bloodletting; apparently the Mayans would use blades and spines to cut the tongue, or the foreskin of the penis, or even cutting off a fingertip, and they’d offer the resulting blood to the gods.

And then Orlando turned on his torch and shone it on a rock that, yes, did indeed look like a sting ray’s spine, and the shadows it cast on the dark water and cavern walls danced all around me, pointing at me and saying, ‘Ha! Dark water! You’re standing in dark water! It looks just like blood!’ I suddenly felt as if my spine was indeed made of sting ray, and I had to think happy thoughts until he let us all turn our lights back on and we headed further into the cave, distracting me from my first panic attack of the trip.

There were some tight squeezes, too, where we had to turn our bodies side on, sink chin-deep into the water one at a time, and twist through the small tunnels to get through to the other side, with water churning around our necks. When you’re in a line, there’s not much you can do except swallow hard and go for it; this is how you conquer phobias, by confronting them, and that’s exactly what I had to do. I thought of nothing and didn’t dwell on thoughts of miles of rock above my head, or the closeness of one’s breath when you’re passing through a tiny gap that you have to turn to pass through, or the possibility of jamming one’s helmet into the tiny gap above the water line that’s surely smaller than your head, getting stuck and never being able to move again... but eventually we reached the half-mile point where the rest of the three-mile river system disappears off into the mountains. There are no more archaeological artefacts upstream from here, and instead the good stuff is in the prehistoric chambers above the river. And so the climbing begins.

Crystal Skeletons

There are no guide ropes, no ladders, no man-made hand-holds or steps in Actun Tunichil Muknal; there’s nothing modern at all save for some red tape on the ground that shows where the artefacts are, so climbing the almost vertical wall of slippery rock into the upper caves is no mean feat. You’re wet, you’re slippery, you’re cold and you’re tired, but you have to put your right foot here, your left hand there, swing your left foot round here, twist your body through 90 degrees, and pull yourself up with your hands to get onto the small ledge at the top. It’s amazing that more people don’t slip and injure themselves seriously; one rather suspects that it’s only a matter of time before the cave claims its first modern victims, but for now it’s all about the ancient victims in the caves above, and they’re definitely worth the risk.

At the top of the climb you have to take off your shoes and put on your socks, and from this point on the air is still and smells dank and musty, a heady mix when you combine it with the overpowering smell of tourist’s armpit. It’s the same claustrophobia you get on a packed day on the London Underground as your guide points out the first artefacts, broken pots that are half buried in the cave’s sandy floor, left untouched since the Mayans smashed them on the ground sometime towards the end of the classical period, between 700 and 900 AD. He also casually mentions that this is the spot where a fellow guide was trapped for ten hours when a flash flood hit the river below and it rose to block the exit. ‘Oh, and he had guests with him,’ he adds with a wink, and suddenly it’s all a bit too real.

And then it’s a squeeze through a small opening in the rock, before wham! The cave opens up into a huge cavern, littered with broken pottery and old fireplaces, while large flowstone formations crown the roof high above your head. There’s a sequence of five chambers, each more impressive than the one before, and it isn’t long before you’re staring at your first skeleton, with the skull sticking out of the cave floor, the femurs to one side, and the rib cage visible in a jumble of backbone. The upper caves used to flood and the water moved the bones from their original resting place, where the Mayans sacrificed their offering to the rain god, Chac, smashing the poor soul on the side of the head before ripping open the rib cage, pulling out the heart and sticking it on the fire. They believed that the smoke from the burning heart would please the rain god and the droughts that eventually brought about the fall of the Mayan civilisation would recede, but all that’s left are the bones of the sacrificed and the stories of the guides, told deep underground just inches away from the sacrificial skeletons.

There are 14 skeletons in all in the cave, ranging from a one-year-old to adults (though you only get to see a handful of them). Some of the skulls have flattened foreheads, which the Mayans used to think was beautiful; they would bind a plank of wood to a child’s head and leave it there until the forehead was flattened, and they would also force the child to look at its nose for weeks on end, eventually making the child cross-eyed. Finally, they would stick jade teeth into their mouths, leading to a flat-headed, cross-eyed, jade-mouthed look that doesn’t sound as appealing to modern ears as it presumably did to the ancient Mayans. One poor child even had his arms bound before being killed; he’s the one with a tourist-inflicted hole in his head, which only adds insult to injury.

But the queen of all the skeletons is the Crystal Maiden, a 20-year-old woman who lies on her back at the end of the cave system. She’s been there so long that her bones have calcified, giving her a crystalline and slightly puffed-up appearance; it’s hard to tell where the cave floor ends and she begins, as she glares at you from her 1000-year resting place. This, you remember, is the Mayan underworld, and staring into the sockets of the Crystal Maiden, it’s hard to suppress the subterranean shiver that shoots down your sting-ray spine.

Into the Light

Of course, you now have to go back out the way you came in, and climbing down the slippery rocks is even harder than climbing up. Luckily you’re going with the river flow this time, so the river sections aren’t so bad, and it isn’t long before the daylight blinks in your eyes and you have to swim back across to the cave entrance. Oh, and you then have to do the 45-minute trek again, wading across Roaring Creek three more times before collapsing into a juddering bus that shakes all the cave water out of your ears before dumping you back in San Ignacio for a well-earned bottle of stout.

It’s a proper caving adventure and isn’t for the faint-hearted, but it’s worth it to stare into the depths of the Mayan underworld. If that doesn’t make you appreciate the sunshine, I don’t know what will.

Caracol

Written: 4 December 2013

The journey to Caracol, Belize’s most impressive Mayan ruins, used to be one of the most intrepid four-wheel-drive journeys you could take in this part of the world. Tucked away in the thick rainforest near the Guatemalan border in a remote corner of western Belize, the ruins were discovered by chance in 1937 by a wandering horseman called Rosa Mai, who was out looking for mahogany and cedar; the remains of this once bustling metropolis had lain undisturbed in the rainforest for 1000 years, ever since the Mayans had abandoned the city following an extended drought. Although the British and Americans surveyed the site and took a few choice finds for their own museums, the site – which was by this point buried beneath a millennium of rainforest growth – was only excavated properly from the early 1980s on. For those who managed the journey in those early days, it was a proper wilderness trek, and it’s no picnic even today.

It’s compounded by the fact that the 52-mile drive from San Ignacio passes though some pretty lawless country, and there have been attacks in past years on tourist trips by bandits popping over from Guatemala. There is now a British Army base in the area that provides a daily escort to and from the ruins, departing from their base in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve at 9.30am and returning at 2pm, and since the British presence the attacks have stopped, but this is still not an area to be sniffed at. So even though the road is better than it was – it’s still for four-wheel-drives only, but you can drive it in two to three hours rather than two to three days – Caracol remains a remote ruin that is visited by relatively few tourists.

After the energetic Indiana Jones saga of the Actun Tunichil Muknal cave, we figured that visiting Mayan ruins in a remote rainforest would be comparatively relaxing, so we booked a trip with the same company in San Ignacio and set off with our tour guide for the day – an affable and knowledgeable local called Diego – and three other tourists, plus the driver, in a 15-seater four-wheel-drive bus. The skies were pure blue, the seats were comfortable, and as we strapped in I had a good feeling about the world. I love ruins, and these sounded pretty amazing.

End of Transmission

The drive to Caracol passes through the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve, and I have to say I fell in love with the place. As you drive south from San Ignacio and into the reserve, the landscape is all tropical rainforest, like most of the rest of the country, but after you pass through the reserve entrance, the vegetation suddenly changes, and within a couple of minutes the dark canopy of Belize’s secondary rainforest is gone and the pine forest starts. This sudden change isn’t due to altitude – though the reserve is at a refreshingly higher altitude than the sweatier plains below – but to a change in soil composition. The ground in the Mountain Pine Ridge area is a deep red from the large amount of iron oxide in the soil, and this increased acidity means that traditional rainforest can’t grow, and instead only a handful of plant species can survive, including two species of pine and a small number of scrub plants, such as fire grass.

This mix means that fire plays an important part in the lifecycle round these parts, and every year bush fires ravage the area when the sap in the dry pine cones catches fire and all the scrub burns back to charred earth, only to start growing again. The pine trees, meanwhile, survive the onslaught with their tall fire-resistant trunks, so you end up with these two tiers of vegetation – tall pine and low scrub – living far apart and yet in harmony with each other.

As we drove, it struck me that I was falling for the lonesome pines of the Mountain Pine Ridge because this part of the world looks just like the Australian outback (surely no coincidence, seeing as the outback also lives according to a bushfire cycle). The red soil, blue sky and green scrubland is such a beautiful colour combination, and the silhouettes of the pine trees against the sunlight are stunning. I’ve spent many happy days walking through this kind of landscape, and with the bad road and the remoteness of the whole area, it brought back a lot of good memories. The drive was a delight.

We soon arrived at the army base, where we turned off to visit Río Frio Cave, a large cavern that the Mayans used for shelter (though they didn’t use it for anything ceremonial, as it’s open at two ends and they only used completely enclosed caves for ceremonies, as they needed the darkness to represent the underworld). It was a nice enough detour, but I couldn’t help noticing that we turned away from the army base at 9.20am, just as the convoy was preparing to leave, so by the time we got back to the base, the convoy was gone.

It didn’t really matter, as joining the convoy is optional, so we signed in with the officers at the checkpoint and set off on the worst section of the road, crunching our way through a really churned up section that took a few attempts to clear. This was obviously going to be a bumpy ride – Diego told us the roads had only just reopened after some of the heaviest October rains in years – so we held on tight as the pine forest petered out and changed back into tropical rainforest.

It was perhaps 45 minutes from the army base that things started to go wrong. For the last few miles to Caracol the road is sealed – a bit of a surprise after so many miles of gear-grinding madness – and as we rolled along at a good speed, with Caracol in our sights, we reached a small hill and inexplicably started to slow down. The driver, who on some of the gnarlier parts of the churned-up road had earned quite a few cheers, started over-revving the engine in a slightly unnerving way, and despite his enthusiastic punching of the accelerator pedal, we slowly and surely ground to a halt. Thick rubbery smoke started pouring out from the front wheel arches, and the driver shrugged, pulled on the handbrake and jumped out, followed closely by Diego. They looked under the front of the bus, muttered to each other and glanced up at us, just as the acrid stench of Serious Mechanical Failure seeped into the air-conditioned cabin.

‘Um, the transmission has run out of oil,’ said the driver, poking his head into the bus in a cloud of smoke. ‘It looks like we broke a pipe back there, and all the oil has run out.’

‘Ah,’ we sighed, and jumped out of the bus to take in our surroundings while Diego and the driver wandered down the road to confer in private. We were in the middle of nowhere, somewhere between the army base and Caracol, and the bus was completely dead.

‘So here’s the plan,’ said Diego, returning alone from his conference with the driver. ‘We saw some workmen a few miles back, so the driver has gone to talk to them to ask whether we can use their pickup truck to get us to Caracol. And then we can call for another bus to come and pick us up.’

So we sat down and waited on the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, in bandit country, without an army escort, and without any idea how long we’d be there. And it was at that point that Peta looked down and spotted something metallic in the undergrowth.

‘What’s that?’ I asked as she picked it up.

‘It looks like a bullet casing,’ she said. ‘Look there’s another. And another. Wow, there are loads of them. Loads of bullets. Everywhere.’

Which really helped the minutes slip by as we waited to see who would get to us first, the workmen or the bandits.

The Ruins

Amazingly, half an hour later a flatbed truck puttered into view, and thanking our lucky stars we grabbed all our stuff and jumped into the back. That last 20 minutes along the road was a hoot; having the wind blowing through your hair is so much more enjoyable than the savage air conditioning that drivers in hot countries insist on turning up to full, and it felt surprisingly apt to be turning up to such a remote site in the back of a flatbed truck.

And what a site! Caracol is such an atmospheric place, and in parts it’s hard to tell where the ruins stop and the rainforest begins. This was once one of the biggest and most powerful of all the Mayan cities, and the parts that you can see as a visitor are just a small fraction of the whole site, which at its peak was home to about 150,000 people, more than twice the current population of Belize City.

Not only that, but Caracol is home to what is still Belize’s tallest building, even though it’s over 1400 years old and is buried in the depths of the jungle. At an imposing 43m high – considerably higher than the 25m height of the main pyramid at Chichén Itzá – the Caana (‘sky palace’) is a three-tiered pyramid that dominates the main plaza, and the views from the summit, over the rainforest canopy to the distant hills in the south of Belize, are absolutely thrilling. They alone are worth the long, arduous journey from civilisation.

And all the while there are practically no people here; we only saw a couple of other tourists in the entire day, and it was a privilege to be able to climb over the ruins while howler monkeys screeched and keel-billed toucans flew through the treetops. One day the Belizeans will upgrade the entire road to bitumen, and then Caracol will become Belize’s Chichén Itzá; for now, though, it’s the preserve of the lucky few who make the effort to grind through the mud and climb to the top of Belize’s first, and only, skyscraper.

There are, of course, plenty of other buildings and plazas at Caracol, as well as plenty of stelae, the tall stone monuments on which the Mayans carved pictures of rulers, conquered enemies and bloodletting ceremonies, along with the glyphs that give us so much information about their long-lost empire. There are ball courts, tombs, living quarters and altars, as well as countless piles of rubble that are still smothered in 1000 years of rainforest. Excavations still go on each year; Caracol has plenty more secrets hidden away under the strangler figs and moss carpets, and it’s hard not to feel like an explorer as you wander under the canopy, in the shadow of the Mayan empire.

Back Home

On the tour Diego had turned out to be a genuinely likeable and knowledgeable guide, though even his enthusiasm started to flag when we came back to the visitor centre, well after the army convoy had returned to base, to find that our replacement bus hadn’t yet arrived. We were stranded until it did, so we sat and listened to the noises of the jungle as the sun slowly moved across the sky, until finally, at 4pm, a tiny Toyota RAV4 pulled into the car park.

‘That can’t be it,’ we thought, ‘there aren’t enough seats,’ but sure enough this was the only vehicle they’d managed to rustle up, so we had to bunch up with three on the backseat, two on the passenger seat, and Diego standing on the back bumper, hanging off by the tips of his fingers.

We dropped Diego off at the still-stricken bus, which by this point had been joined by a land cruiser and a tow rope, and then we started the long, slow haul back through the mud. This was a much slower and scrappier affair in the small Toyota than it had been in the rather meatier bus, but there was one massive bonus to all this delay: as we passed through the pine forest once again, after a quick rest stop at the Rio On Pools, the sun dropped below the trees and lit up the sky in a stunning sunset, the black silhouettes of the pines outlined against an airbrushed sky of blues, yellows and reds, while a crescent moon with clear earthshine appeared next to a bright Jupiter and a beautifully clear Orion’s Belt that sparkled like jade teeth in the smile of a Mayan princess.

Yes, we were absolutely exhausted when we got back, but I’m so glad the bus broke down. It turned an adventure into an event, and it was – as they say round here without even rolling their eyes – un-Belizeable.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 5 December 2013

Belize was just what we needed after the damp squib of Mexico. There’s no language barrier, they have beautiful Caribbean islands, there’s some excellent food, and they’ve got some very impressive sights. We were also lucky with the weather in the end; yes, it was a bit blowy in the islands at times and as a result the Great Blue Hole wasn’t as great as it might have been, but overall we loved it.

It isn’t all perfect in paradise, of course. Belize is not a particularly cheap place to travel, and there is still an undercurrent of angry drunkenness that flares up every now and then. Belize City, in particular, is a bit of a sleazy dump, though it’s a fun city to take a cab ride through, as it’s a sleazy dump with character. But cities in this part of the world are often pretty grim, and settling back on a tropical island with a cold beer or two is what it’s all about, especially when the local brew is so drinkable.

And the sights? They’re world class, but still have a feeling of being fairly undiscovered. There are amazing Mayan ruins that are so remote that the journey is as exciting as the destination, and caves with 1000-year-old skeletons where you really feel like Indiana Jones as you crawl through the caverns. And that’s on top of the relaxed paradise islands where time goes slowly, just as it should do.

So thank you Belize, you’ve recharged our batteries after a bit of a false start, and we’re now ready to tackle Guatemala. We couldn’t have done it without you.

Further Reading

This story is continued in another of my books, Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala (also available for free from www.moxon.net/ebooks). If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from the same source, covering 25 countries and six continents:

- The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

- Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

- A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

- In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

- Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

- A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

- Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

- Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

- Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

- A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

- The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

- Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

- Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

- Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

- The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

- The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

- A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

- Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

- Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

- God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

- Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

- Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

- The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

- Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

- Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

Playa del Carmen to Caye Caulker

Caye Caulker

Diving in Ambergris Caye

Travelling by Internet

The Great Blue Hole

San Ignacio

Actun Tunichil Muknal Cave

Caracol

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading

Table of Contents

Preface

Playa del Carmen to Caye Caulker

Caye Caulker

Diving in Ambergris Caye

Travelling by Internet

The Great Blue Hole

San Ignacio

Actun Tunichil Muknal Cave

Caracol

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading