Belize - Day 2

Our first full day in Belize! We were awake at 5:30 am, thanks to the local aviary going on in the tree outside our window. Oh well, was a good chance to head up to the roof deck and take a few photos of the sunrise.


To give you the "lay of the land", the caye is about 1 mile wide (east to west) by about 4 miles long (north to south). There are 5 north/south streets on the caye, with numerous side streets connecting them. The north/south streets are conveniently named

• "Beach": pretty self-explanatory, except you need to know that it is on the ocean side, rather than the lagoon side of the island.
  
• "Front": the main street. One street west from "Beach".
  
• "Middle": again, self-explanatory
• "Back": would be self-explanatory except for the fact that there is also...
• "Back Back": street furthest west on the lagoon side

We are on "Back" street. From the roof deck we can see both the ocean and the lagoon, and it is about a 10-minute walk (at a slow pace) to either.

After the sun was up we unpacked everything and got settled in. I was slightly dismayed at the shortage of hangers and I could have used a basket or a drawer for underwear & socks. Otherwise, lots of closet space and ample shelves for everything. By 8 am we were showered and headed up the street to Marin's for breakfast.

One thing we are learning quickly here on Caye Caulker is that they take their motto "Go Slow" very seriously. We ordered our breakfast (various combinations of eggs, toast and beans) about 8:10 am. It came out about 8:55 am. Until 8:30 am, we were the only two people in the restaurant. Dinner last night was a similar story. Oh well, what else have we to do?

My breakfast - beans, "jacks" (which are the puffy things) and cheese. Very good! Even better, our entire meal with two coffees was about $8 US with tip.

View of the kids on their way to school while we ate breakfast. The tortilla stand is to the left, just out of the camera view.

After breakfast we headed up to the rental office to talk about some of the tours we are interested in doing. The property manager, Kim, a fellow Canuck, lives here on the island year-round and gave us some great recommendations of who to use for diving and snorkeling. He will also arrange a full-day in Belize City where we will go to the Belize Zoo, cave tubing and zip lining. After getting our list of preferred tour vendors, we picked up our rental vehicles and were on our way!

Zipping around the island on these bikes is really quite fun and convenient! We can get the entire way around the caye in less than 30 minutes and it's easy to navigate. Plus, it's good exercise and green, and it's how the locals do it!

Beach street

The yard of our house (looking down from our front deck)

Alta Vista. The upper two floors are our rental suite. The ground floor is where the owners stay. That's their golf cart. If you look at the very top, you can see the railing for the roof deck.

Our next mission was to get some basic groceries so that we can at least eat breakfast in our house most days. The fun of shopping on Caye Caulker is that you have to go to different stores for different things: the bakery for bread, the butcher for meat, the greengrocer stand for produce, and the grocery store for staples. There is also a woman who runs a stand where she makes fresh tortillas every morning. We watched her from our breakfast restaurant but she was closed by the time we went back later in the morning. We'll have to hit her up tomorrow!

By the time we finished our shopping and brought our purchases home in the baskets of our bikes, it was time for lunch. We hopped back on the bikes and headed up toward "The Split" - named when Hurricane Hattie came through in the 60's and created a small waterway across the island where there wasn't one before. This area is where most of the tourist hotels are, along with an abundance of restaurants and shops.

The Split. Seriously, is this not the most beautiful thing you've seen?

For lunch, we opted for jerked chicken that a couple was cooking & selling on the beach. It was delicious!

We also tried to find the mysterious "Chocolate", an 83-year old gentleman who is famous in Belize for his manatee conservation work. I've been emailing back and forth with his wife for the past month trying to arrange a tour to the sanctuary he helped to establish. It seems, however, that 83-year old Belezian men are not exactly on a set schedule. Annie, Chocolate's wife, suggested that his tour schedule would depend on "the weather and his mood", but not necessarily in that order. We were instructed in the emails to stop in to his gift shop and let him know we wanted a tour. Annie thought that, due to the length of our stay, the odds were in our favor that we would get a tour at some point. We finally found Chocolate's gift shop (nothing has an address here, just the name of the street it is on which, based on what I told you above, could mean anywhere in a 4 mile strip, or even on one of the side streets in the general vicinity) but it was closed. No hours were posted so we'll try again later.

As it seems that everything closes up for "siesta" in the early afternoon, we headed back to the house to hang out. We were going to read and relax but both ended up sleeping for about an hour, which was nice based on our early morning. After our nap, we headed back out to check in with the tour companies we want to use. We were able to book a snorkel trip for tomorrow morning, and also talked to the dive shop about working a dive around the mysterious schedule of Chocolate. In keeping with the "no problem" attitude we've encountered here, the dive master was understanding of this issue and said we could book with as little as 12-hours notice - wow!

Before dinner, we headed back up to Chocolate's shop to try again. Ah - the shop is open! It's empty, but it's open? We wander around inside for a bit and don't see anyone, then we wander around outside for a bit and spot him (we've seen pictures of him on the web) - yay! We introduce ourselves and he chats us up about his goal of passing the true meaning of ocean conservation on to the "young people" of the world. We tell him that we're dying to do a tour with him and he is agreeable to take us. He just doesn't know yet when that will be. He suggests that we check back every day until he knows. Ok, fine. He's famous and old so we'll cut him some slack. We promise to return tomorrow and ask "what time is best to come". "Oh, I'm always here" he tells us. Based on our experience, we know that this is not true but, again, we'll humor him.

For dinner we were hoping to try an Italian place that is rated best restaurant on the caye by Trip Advisor (one of our favorite sites). We rode by it on our bikes earlier today but when we returned on foot this evening we couldn't find it. Again, addresses or even some basic landmark directions would be helpful. Instead, we ended up at Pizza Caulker - which ended up to be a happy accident. For about $25 US we shared a 12-inch pizza (they use Belizean hot sauce in the pizza sauce!) and 4 drinks (two local beer for Andrew and 2 rum punch for me). Yum-o!

Rum punch!

Andrew and the local beer - Belikin

Now, we're back at the house for the evening. I'm blogging and Andrew is playing on the other computer (yes, we brought two - after 10 years of marriage we've learned that sharing a laptop is not possible). Tomorrow we'll make a tortilla run first thing in the morning and then make our own breakfast burritos at home before heading off for a 1/2 day snorkel trip. Stay tuned!