Ripley's Belize it or not

It was hard to think of a good title for this blog entry. "Don't stop Belizin'" and "You're unbelizable" were the first that jumped out at me. What about "Belize in yourself"? Each equally horrible, it saddens me to know that all are being pedalled as t-shirts on the sandy streets of Caye Caulker this very minute.

Needless to say, we just returned from a trip to Belize and Guatemala. We had a bitchin' time and apart from a little sickness everything went smoothly.

The first few days we spent as much time in the sea as possible. Belize has the second largest reef in the world and we were able to see a good sampling of the flora and fauna represented.

We went to a place called "shark alley" where they have one of the highest concentrations of nurse sharks and rays in the world. They are everywhere and you can get close enough to gently touch them. They were pretty big too, maybe 4-6 ft. in diameter. Here's a list of some of the notable stuff we saw: Nurse sharks, rays, eagle rays, big octopus that was being attacked by a spotted eel, tons o' colorful fish, sea turtles, schools of tarpon, moray eels and huge hermit crabs.


After a bunch of cool dives we decided to do the famous blue hole. It's an ancient cave system that has filled with water. It's about 450ft. deep and one of the few places plainly visible from space. The dive takes you to about 130ft. where you can check out stalactites and if you're lucky the occasional bull or reef shark. Jacques C. was the first to dive it and after he called it one of the must dives in the whole world. Our experience there was surreal and scary. Our descent went well. At the bottom(130ftish) Candice was having problems seeing the group through her mask. She could just barely see us by our colored flippers. To add to that frustration, it gets dark down that deep. On top of that she contracted nitrogen narcosis. N.N. can be different for each person that gets it and their circumstances but for my girl she got really confused and disoriented. She was going a little crazy and starting to lose it. She thought she needed to ascend and started to frantically race to what she thought was the surface. Now to any logical/sane person the deep, dark cold side is the bottom and the light side is the top but not to Candice. I looked on in horror/shock as the love of my life started racing to the bottom. She got to 150 ft. before the dive master figured out what was going on and stopped her. It was really freaky and she didn't/doesn't remember most of it. It was just a healthy reminder that things can get a little freaky in the deep. Apart from that, it was like being on a different planet and we got some amazing footage of it that I'm too lazy to upload.




After the beachy portion of our trip we headed to the jungle for some more explorin.' On our way we both got totally sick, in fact, I'm still recovering. We popped some pills and toughed it out, what did you expect? We kayaked the mopan river and did some local jungle hikes. After that we went to Guatemala and checked out Tikal. It's the largest and most impressive Mayan ruins in the world. The next day we went to Actun Tunichil Muknal cave. It's this cave that you have to hike through the jungle for about an hour to get to. Once there, you have to swim, wade and climb through some beautiful formations to reach the part where the Mayas used to do human sacrifices. Yeah, you read correctly, I said human sacrifices. We pretty much felt like Indiana Jones sans booby traps.






Why have a whole tan when you can do it farmer style, representin' the roots. Layoff.

The bones of the victims are perfectly preserved by a layer of calcium. It's a little eerie and also really cool. They have perfectly preserved pots and vessels that are around 1,000 years old. It was incredible.

I took one for the team and lugged our 20lb diving camera through the cave so we could get some decent pics and vids.

We had such a good time and are so grateful for the experiences we had. Especially, for all the lobsters and pina coladas that freely gave their lives for our culinary pleasure.

Until our next adventure, adieu.