Friday 20 August 2010

I think they're speaking English...

From Flores we headed North to Belize. Here I found myself getting a 2 day visa whilst everyone else got a 30 day visa and I'd asked for 7 days. As part of this scam I then had to travel to the capital city, Belmopan, (basically a bus station and many administration buildings) to buy a “visa-extension” for US$25, resulting in my beer and ice-cream budget for the duration of Belize being $0. Of course this didn't extend to rum mixed with coconut water from green coconuts we found on the beach. We headed first to Dangriga, a Garifuna settlement towards the south of the country. We found a very friendly hostel and a small town with sandy streets full of barefoot friendly people speaking English in a way we couldn't understand. Fortunately they were also well versed in “English for foreigners”. Food in Belize consisted of fish, fish or fish flavoured chicken. Fine for me, but not so good for my fish-hating friends.

We headed out to Tobacco Caye, a tiny coral island 100m by 40m in the Caribbean in the Belize barrier reef. The entire island is white (slightly coarse) sand, coconut trees, conch shells and brightly painted wooden huts. We snorkeled straight off the beach and I was very excited to see three levels of life and three levels of shoaling fish – right below the surface, in the reef and weed below and the space in between. I also saw eagle rays hunting for crabs under a boat tied at the dock, swimming off with the crabs legs dangling out from either side of their mouths, and a sting ray, although I kept my distance a little more from this one. My friends were apparently not as excited by fish as I was and quickly became bored of the underwater wonderland, instead preferring Cuba Libres to an interactive nature programme. We swung the night away on hammocks on our balcony watching the electric storms over the Caribbean and listening to the waves break on the barrier reef.

We also visited Placencia and again marvelled at the brightly coloured buildings rising out of the white sand (incidentally the white sand here really was quite rough underfoot too) before returning to our cockroach, ant and frog-infested room. The next day I either had a nasty heat-rash or had caught legionnaires disease. Leaving Belize we headed for Honduras in a boat that definitely looked too small to be a legal means of crossing a border, with a whole load of boxes that looked too dodgy to be legally crossing a border... Arriving in Honduras a man met the boat and ran away with everyone's passports. Apparently this is to ensure our attendance at immigration, however it may have worked better if he'd told us where the immigration office was...


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