Caye Caulker, Belize

Some of you reading this blog might be aware that if I had been born a girl, my girl name would have been Belize. You might say that would be even weirder than Balen...I´m not sure, it´s a toss up. Easier to pronouce certainly. But at any rate, I was excited that we started the Central America leg of our trip by visiting my would-be namesake. Here are some things you might want to know about Belize:

- EVERYBODY speaks english. It´s sort of bizarre, but true. And very well too. We would try to speak spanish and the locals would respond in english. It was good for us to get information, but bad for our spanish skills (especially now that we are in guatemala where no one speaks english except people trying to get you to overpay for tours).

- It´s the most expensive country in central america, probably because everyone speaks english and the Belizean government has decided to fix the belizean dollar at 2:1 exchange rate with the american dollar.

- It´s beautiful.

- It has the second biggest barrier reef in the world, and that´s where we spent most of our time, on 2 little atolls called Ambergris Caye and Caye Caulker.

We spent most of our time on Caulker. It is a charming little town with three roads going north-south, and maybe 10 going east-west. My kind of place, geographically, though I did manage to get us sort of lost looking for the only ATM on the island. We ate some great food, including awesome banana bread made fresh daily, and really good fruit smoothies. We even found a sports bar to watch the Duke-Butler game with the rest of the gringos. Everyone in the bar was cheering for Butler (obviously), and I was sure they were going to pull it out in the end but sadly, we all know they did not.

We went on a great sailboat-snorkeling trip to the reef, where we got to see sharks, green moray eels, manta rays (We got to touch the rays, they were very slimy), barracuda, and tons of reef fish and beatiful coral. One manta ray actually swam between my legs, which was a very odd sensation, let me tell you. If you are ever on Caye Caulker, we recommend Blackhawk Sailing Tours whoeheartedly. Our guides, Charlie and Steve, were awesome. On the way out in the morning, we stopped the boat briefly so Charlie could dive for conch shells, and then Steve used them to make conch ceviche for our snacks. It was delicious. It was a great trip, but of course we both got pretty sweet sunburns on the back of our bodies so we decided that we had had enough beach time, and the next day we departed for Flores, Guatemala.