Over and out..

Went for an 11am dive today. Finally my sinuses seem to have cleared so I had an excellent hassle-free time! The dive site was pretty cool too – the highlight being a big Hawksbill turtle feeding on some coral. He didn’t seem to give a rat’s arse about the humans around him so I was able to have a good look.

After the success of the first, we had lunch and came back for the 2pm dive. This one was pretty shallow so we were able to stay in over an hour. The topography was great – a long channel with big coral reefs on both sides, and lots of fish to gawk at.

Astute readers will note the similarity of this fish (on the left) to the jack knife shown below. This one (a spotted drum) was smaller, but had the same fluid shape that I liked about the jack knife.

Naturally we’ve booked in for all three dives tomorrow. Since the diving seems to be awesome, we’ll probably hang around and do the rescue diver course as this may be the last cheapish diving destination we’ll be in for a while!

PS. Matt would like to announce that he has put some videos on youtube, including a video tour around “our” island last week.

Roatan photos

Roatan diving photos

We’ve arrived on Roatan. As I mentioned earlier, it has 10x the population of Utila, so we were practically expecting a seething metropolis. It turns out that the backpacker area (the west end) is even smaller than Utila and a lot more spaced out (as in distances). We’re not really sure that we like it that much, although our judgement may be clouded by our 5AM start and I’m hoping that this place will be more appealing after a decent night’s sleep.

It looks like there is lots of good diving to be done once my cold is properly gone though.

The main reason for this post was to describe the crazy accommodation we stayed in for our last three days in Utila. Lonely planet describes it as “who needs LSD when you can go here?”. The surroundings are pretty crazy indeed. An expatriate LA art teacher has created a wonderful garden of bridges, ladders, caves, swings and mosaic paths, featuring about a gazillion marbles and other materials such as recycled wine bottles. There is even a “treetanic” bar in the trees (shaped like a boat) which on occasion serves strong tasty raspberry dacquiris. He’s also created a few themed bungalows. Ours was called “Shagrila” and no, that’s not a typo! Have a look at the website to get some idea, plus Matt has taken some great photos for our gallery.

Goodnight!

Went for two dives today. I’m very tired due to having to meet at the dive centre at 7am so please excuse the bullet point style of this entry! Every time I enter the water I discover new fish and this time was no exception. My favourites:

The jack knife: (a random photo I found on the web)

I only saw one of these, but could have watched him all day! He was only small, but has a big long swishy fin and tail, which undulate as he swims (ooh, how poetic) making him look like a rhythmic gymnast with two ribbons. Awesome!
 
 
 

Moray eel:

This green thing poking out of the hole is a big moray eel. He was just hanging out, opening and shutting his mouth, as moray eels like to do.
 
 
 

Queen trigger fish: (not our photo either)

We saw one of these ladies, absolutely beautiful as you can see from the photo! Apparently trigger fish here aren’t aggressive like they are in Thailand.. phew.
 
 
 
 
 

Tarpon:

Me staring at the silvery tarpon as the tarpon came up to eyeball me. It was bigger than it looks (over a metre long!)

Diving with the remnants of a cold is not fun though and my forehead is now really sore (must be some freaky sinus cavities up there or something).

Didn’t see any whale sharks this time and quite frankly I’m sick of trawling around looking for them now!

Spent lunchtime trying to take photos of hummingbirds at a restaurant down the road. They have a sugary bird feeder. As a bonus it attracts heaps of little fruit bats at night as well.

Yesterday I saw my first octopus. Unfortunately it wasn’t while diving, it was actually while walking to a dive shop. It was under a jetty in about 30cm of water. It didn’t look at all the way I had expected octopii to look. He had this awful stretchy looking webbing between all of his legs so he looked quite gooey. Not someone I would want to meet in a dark alley!

Off to Roatan tomorrow – another, bigger (10x population), island 20km away. Remember to go look at the photo gallery to see the large versions of these photos and lots more!! Matt’s done some beautiful HDR shots which are worth a look-see.

We spent the first couple of days lounging around, including a snorkeling trip out to see some whale sharks. Whale sharks are the biggest fish of the sea and can reach up 18m in length. Don’t worry Mum – they only eat krill and plankton, I’m way too big for their liking. Whale sharks are found by looking for a certain type of bird circling around above the ocean, and then a “boil” – a big group of fish all eating and jumping up from the water. It was cool just to see this boil. Even cooler to see a big white shark mouth just poking up from the waves. Normally whale sharks swim around horizontally catching food, but apparently the food here is so plentiful that no work is required, so they “stand” up and wait for the food to swim right on in!! Once the whale shark was spotted, all the previous rules about slipping into the water and not disturbing the shark seemed to be thrown out the window as 8 noisy snorkellers leapt in and raced over for a look. This is of course made the shark high tail it out of there. Rinse and repeat three times. The sharks we saw were reasonably small (approx 4m) but still very impressive.

The last three days have been spent sunning ourselves on our own private island! For only $115 US a night you can rent a beautiful white sand island, surrounded by disturbingly clear water and a great coral reef. The only communication is by radio to another island (5 minutes boat ride away), cooking is with gas, and there was even a generator if you felt the need for some electricity. The house was huge – including the sleepout there were six beds, four bathrooms, and heaps of mattresses. A lot of space for just the two of us! Grocery selection around these islands is pretty minimal so we ate a fair amount of pasta and tuna. Matt excelled himself using a combination of crappy blunt kitchen knives to hack into fresh coconuts (off the tree) to create a variety of rum beverages for our consumption. Entertainment consisted of watching pelicans dive for fish, snorkeling, waiting for bats to swoop through our bedroom (in the daylight strangely enough), playing a bastardized version of Monopoly (half the pieces were missing), drinking rum and taking many a photo of the sunset. Another highlight of our visit was the hermit crabs. There were HEAPS of them and they all seemed to want to come inside. If we didn’t shut the doors after sunset they’d just cruise on in uninvited. There were a lot of clanging sounds at night as they’d scuttle along the sliding door tracks, looking for a way to get in. The island is truly idyllic and I’m so lucky to have such an amazing person to share it with. ♥

Soppiness aside, we’re now back on Utila. Matt’s diving tomorrow and I’ll be tagging along as a snorkeller, due to having miraculously developed a cold. Random!

Little Cay photos

Utila diving photos

Another early start saw us catching a 9am boat from Livingston to Puerto Barrios, then a 1-hour mini-van ride down to the Guatemala/Honduras border.

After having our passports stamped, we boarded a Honduran chicken-bus (ancient US school bus, complete with legroom designed for 10-year old children) for a 90 minute ride to the town of Puerto Cortez.

Then it’s another mini-bus (this one with air-con miraculously!) for about another 90 minutes to San Pedro Sula, then straight onto a full-size bus (no air-con!) for a 4 hour ride over to La Ceiba, finally arriving very hot and sweaty around 5:30pm.

Generally it seems impossible to travel more than about 50km/hour anywhere within Central America, and often much slower.

This is yet another little shithole town with nothing much interesting to do, so we just grabbed dinner (Wendy’s – first fast-food we’ve seen since Mexico!) and retired to the blessed air-con and excellent shower in our hotel room. We’re strangely clean, too clean really, and not looking forward to the instant sweat the second we depart the hotel.

From here we’re planning to catch a ferry at 9am tomorrow morning out to the island of Utila, where we plan to do lots of diving and sitting around on beaches. Hopefully it’ll turn out to be a reasonably nice place, in which case we may end up stopping there for a while (as it supposedly has the best/cheapest diving in the region).

Livingston itself, like most towns in this part of the world, is a shithole. As it’s on the Caribbean coast, we were met on the dock by several black (Garifuna) guys wearing American basketball shirts, yelling stupid American-style greeting phrases then telling us how great their hotels were (we ignored them all)

Somehow we managed to choose to stay at the hotel (probably the wrong term) furthest away from town, so were totally hot and sweaty after walking down a dirt road for 15 minutes with all our gear to a small backpackers place where we rented a little wooden hut (complete with big holes in the floor and no bug-proofing but luckily we never saw any bugs). All very rustic and a bit scungy, complete with the “backpacker vibe” but very cheap (US$15).

We had originally planned to stop here a couple of days and do some tours, but after seeing the town we decided to only stay one night and bug out. The only thing we really wanted to visit while there was some waterfalls/pools which we just walked to in the afternoon. Unfortunately we didn’t realise that the walk was actually about 5km there, and probably about 10km back (which inspired many tantrums from you-know-who) but the pools were very nice and we were the only people there.

Today we went on a “tour” to a couple of places. Turned out the tour was actually just the transport and didn’t include any kind of information or the entrance fees. While the fees were pretty minor, the whole thing soured relations a bit and reminded us of our “walking ATM” status.

Despite that we had a great day. First stop was a gorge. We hopped in a dugout canoe and went 5 minutes upstream to a swimming hole. The water was ridiculously smooth so we took lots of rock-reflected-in-water photos. One of the guys with us amused himself by throwing ants in the water and watching the fish jump up to chomp them.

Next stop was Finca Paradiso (Paradise farm, I think). From the carpark, we walked for 5 minutes along a pretty track through the trees, until we came to a very picturesque waterfall and swimming hole. How very nice, you’re thinking. What makes this even better is that the waterfall is nearly scalding hot! There were lots of convenient places to sit in the cool water and have hot water pounding on ones back. Add to that the small fish nibbling bits of dead skin of ones feet, the sulphurous mud some people were smearing themselves with, and the natural steam room area under the waterfall and you have a total spa experience!

This afternoon we took a sweaty stroll into the village, and confirmed that (as the Lonely Planet infers) it is indeed a shit hole. The highlight was finding trails (motorways really) of leaf cutter ants across the driveway. I even found a leaf depot, where the leaf portions were picked up by the next set of ants.

Tomorrow we’re off up the river to Livingston (back to the Caribbean coast again).

This morning Matt and I got up at the ungodly hour of 3AM to join a sunrise tour to Tikal, another Mayan city ruin about an hour from here. Naturally the bus was half an hour late, so the tour started with a mad dash through a dark forest and a very fast climb up a pyramid! It was all worth it once we got to the top, planted our asses down and watched a beautiful sunrise. The soundtrack was interesting too – a lot of camera shutters and some very noisy howler monkeys. We could see the other Tikal temples in the distance, and toucans a few trees away.

As intriguing as it was, I think it’s fair to say we’re both Mayan ruin-ed out now and not really too fussed about seeing any more!

It was interesting to see what the unrestored buildings look like. Unless you know to look, you’d think they were just grassy tree-covered hills. Tikal’s setting is beautiful – walking through jungle tracks in the cool of the morning listening to the abundant birdlife was rather pleasant. We even saw a couple of crocodiles lurking around in a pond!

The rest of the tour was good – although by 11am we were pretty much exhausted and keen to be on the first bus home. After a crappy lunch and a siesta, it was time for a dip in the warm lake.

Los Angeles, USA

Despite everyone’s dire predictions, flying into LAX was actually surprisingly easy. Other than a bit of a wait to get through immigration, there were no customs searches or anything at all, and we were quickly able to proceed to the rental car company to pick up our transport for the first part of our trip, a shiny black Dodge Avenger. Like most American cars it seemed to have a fairly big engine (at least it made quite a bit of noise and sucked down the petrol) but was all spongy when it came to anything slightly more complicated… like turning corners.

We had chosen to stay in Venice Beach for a night before setting off for Vegas, largely because Venice is actually fairly close to the airport, and also supposedly we were less likely to be shot/stabbed/mugged/carjacked there than in downtown LA.

The actual beach was quite nice, and we managed to see some dolphins swimming past in the surf. Unfortunately the actual beach was mainly populated by fat Americans, some of which were covered up in blankets and were just sitting there in deck chairs, looking confused and grumpy as if someone had moved them while they were asleep, and now they just wanted to know where the tv had gone, and why this room was so big and had a blue ceiling.

Venice is a strange place, populated mainly by hippies. The boardwalk (actually a concrete path) was full of stalls selling the usual hippy crap, along with a few strange people holding signs like “I NEED WEED” or “MY NAME IS JESUS CHRIST AND I AM A TERRORIST”.

After a couple of hours of dodging Segways and hippies, we drove up to Santa Monica for dinner, then retired to our hostel.

Early the next morning we set off in our rental car (which thankfully hadn’t been stolen during the night) and drove up through Beverly Hills, Sunset Strip and Hollywood on the way out towards Vegas. None of this was terribly exciting, other than that there was a lot of traffic, and we failed to actually locate the Hollywood sign. (However I did see it from the plane as we arrived).

Actually negotiating LA traffic and finding our way around proved to be more problematic, and was eventually solved by stopping at a Radio Shack to purchase a memory card for my cellphone which enabled us to use it as a GPS navigator.

The drive to Vegas is pretty boring on the whole, but luckily only takes about 3 hours.

Las Vegas

We had chosen to stay at the Stratosphere hotel in Vegas, largely because it was cheap (or at least cheaper than most hotels in Vegas, which is still expensive compared to just about everywhere else). The main feature of this hotel is a large observation tower (similar to the sky-tower) which we didn’t go up at all.

We did however wander down the length of the Strip, which took most of a whole day. Along the way we stopped at the Sahara hotel and rode their roller coaster, which is launched from 0-100kph in approx 1.5 seconds via a giant magnetic rail gun into a quick set of barrel rolls and loops, then backwards through the whole thing. Short, expensive ($10 for about 20 seconds worth of ride), but fun.

Overall most of the hotels were pretty much the same stuff repeated over and over again, with different themes and gimmicks, different giant video displays, and different built-in shopping malls.

Highlights included the roof of the Caesars palace shopping mall (which is painted up like a blue sky with clouds – looked really cool), the Bellagio dancing fountains, and the restaurant where we ordered a yardglass (actually about a foot and a half) of margarita, but they screwed up and made two of them instead so gave us the other for free. By the time we got down as far as New York New York, we were both feeling too full of margarita to ride any more roller coasters, and caught the monorail home.

By the end of our first full day in Vegas we were pretty much over it, having lost approx $3 on the slot machines, walked about 10km, and generally seen most of the major casinos on the strip.

Hoover Dam

The following morning (after some shopping missions to various shops, such as giant electronics warehouse, Frys and some outlet malls) we headed off out to the Hoover Dam, which is normally only an hour or so away from Vegas, but because the main road actually drives over the top of the dam the last 10km approaching the dam takes about 2 hours while everyone drives at 1kph over the dam while taking pictures out the window and simultaneously honking their horn at the person in front of them who is doing the exact same thing.

The dam itself is quite impressively big, but the highlight was probably seeing what we think was a chipmunk up close in the car park.

A few more hours of driving brought us up through the hills to Flagstaff, Arizona. On the drive in we thought we were seeing things, but realized that there was actually snow on the ground in Flagstaff due to its altitude.

Grand Canyon

The next morning we departed Flagstaff and drove the final hour and a bit to the Grand Canyon. The canyon itself is really quite impressive… it’s a seriously large hole in the ground, with some cool layering visible. Unfortunately there were about 900,000 other people there looking at it too, and most of them were really fat.

Some interesting wildlife was spotted, with what we think were Condors flying around overhead, probably looking for fat Americans to shit on (at least that’s what I would do if I was a Condor)

After a few hours spent walking along the rim of the canyon, we headed off again back west to Lake Havasu city. There doesn’t really seem to be a whole lot at Lake Havasu city other than a lake, and about a million or so American shitheads with large power boats and/or jet-skis. Could have had something to do with the fact that it was Spring Break at the time though. Unfortunately at this point the usual travelers stomach bug caught up with me, and I spent an unpleasant few hours in the hotel room but was thankfully fine the next morning when we continued onward to San Diego.

San Diego

San Diego was actually reasonably nice. We were staying in a hostel in the old part of the city which was quite relaxed and easy to get around. We ended up staying 2 nights here as we hunted down some shops to buy some last minute items (like sandals for Claire) that we thought might be hard to find once we left the USA.

Tijuana, Mexico

After 2 nights in San Diego, we took the tram south towards the border, then walked through a large set of pedestrian bridges and gates towards Mexico.

Getting from the USA to Mexico on foot is very easy. So easy in fact, that we departed the USA and entered Mexico without realizing it, or talking to a single official person. This was somewhat of a problem, as we had been expecting to hand back our little green departure cards upon leaving the USA, so we had to walk for miles back to the US immigration office on the mexico side of the border, jumped the line of about 900 mexicans waiting to get visas, and managed to find some officials. Unfortunately this didn’t really achieve anything either, as they told us that even though we were leaving the USA, we weren’t REALLY leaving the USA, and that they didn’t really want our departure cards back until we flew back to the UK. This was a bit of a pain in the ass as it meant that our entire trip was now limited to the 90 days originally granted when we first arrived in LA (as we had to return to LA to fly back home), and if we didn’t come back by June 16, we’d officially be over-stayers (even if we hadn’t actually been in the USA during that time). It’s stupid, but I guess it’s all to stop people from quickly ducking down to Mexico to get themselves another 90 days. Fortunately 90 days gives us about 2 weeks beyond the original planned length of our trip, and by the way we had been spending money so far, we’d be broke by then anyway.

Tijuana itself wasn’t anything special. We walked down the main Av Revolucion, which was mainly a bunch of shitty tourist shops and guys with poor donkeys spraypainted up to look like zebras.

The one good thing about Tijuana was the hotel we stayed at, which seemed to be about the poshest hotel available in town (but was still reasonably priced, compared to Vegas).

One afternoon in Tijuana was plenty though, and we caught a flight the next morning onwards to Guadalajara.

Guadalajara, Mexico

At first impressions, Guadalajara was kinda similar to Tijuana – grey concrete buildings, dirty, generally all a bit run down. After a bit of walking around we realized there was a bit more to it, with some fairly nice central plazas, churches and fountains. Unfortunately it was also seriously hot, and after half a day of wandering around the central city looking at various landmarks, we had pretty much had enough and retired to the air-conditioned haven of our hotel room.

Tequila, Mexico

About 1.5 hours bus ride from Guadalajara is the town of Tequila, where the majority of tequila (the drink) is still brewed. It’s a fairly small town, and is mainly set up for Mexican tourists. There were definitely times when we felt people were looking at us a bit funny as there were very few white Gringos in this town, but on the whole people were very friendly.

We toured two tequila distilleries while here. One was a small outfit who gave us a guided tour through their whole operation, from the harvesting of the Blue Agave plants, the cooking and shredding process, then the distillation. The tour involved walking up on some catwalks alongside 50,000 litre tanks of bubbling tequila, then plenty of tasting at the end. It was interesting to learn that what we (and probably most people in NZ) think of as Tequila isn’t really tequila at all. It’s tequila mixed with all sorts of stuff like water, colour, flavouring, etc… apparently all the stuff which is responsible for the hangovers.

True tequilas are made from 100% Agave juice, and they even use the natural bacteria extracted during the process to produce fermentation. The taste of this is more like a cognac than what most people think of as tequila.

I wish we could have purchased some bottles here, as it was stupidly cheap but we just couldn’t carry it (around US$20 for Anejo (aged) tequila, which often runs hundreds of NZ$ per bottle back home).

We also visited the Jose Cuervo distillery, which was more expensive to tour, and much less comprehensive. They also made everyone wear hair-nets and wouldn’t let us go anywhere near any of the actually processing equipment (unlike the smaller brewery, which basically walked us right through the middle of it all). Same deal though, just all built for tourists with a big video presentation and other rubbish.

After 2 nights here, we headed back on a bus to Guadalajara, then changed busses and headed out towards the Pacific coast to the small town of Manzanillo.

Manzanillo, Mexico

Manzanillo is a relatively unexciting port town on the south-west Pacific coast of Mexico. We were hoping this would have nicer beaches than it turned out to have, and was again largely set up for Mexican families (who all drive down from Guadalajara for the weekend). We weren’t too impressed, so only stayed one night and bugged out the next morning for an even smaller town another hour or two up the coast called Barra De Navidad.

Barra de Navidad / Melaque, Mexico

Barra de Navidad and Melaque are two small towns separated by about 3km of beach. We chose to stay at the northern (smaller, and cheaper) town of Melaque. This was pretty much a town-street town, with a bunch of small hotels right on the beachfront.

Overall this was a fairly nice place, with a good beach with big waves. It felt a lot more laid-back, but was largely populated by retired Americans and Snow-bird Canadians (apparently Canadians who fly south for the winter). This meant that the two streets were clogged with giant pickup trucks which all the Americans apparently needed so they could drive from their hotel/condos the two blocks down the street to get a coffee.

After two nights here we had pretty much seen and done everything there was to do (which was mainly sit on the beach, drink, and watch pelicans diving for fish at sunset) so headed up the coast a bit further for Puerto Vallarta.

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

After staying in Melaque, arriving in Puerto Vallarta was a bit of a shock. Suddenly everything was massively touristy again, with people trying to sell us their crap left right and centre. We quickly discovered this was because Puerto Vallarta is one of the main ports on Mexico’s Pacific coast for cruise ships. Every day 2 or 3 would arrive and dump thousands of fat American tourists into this tiny little town, then they’d all bugger off to screw up another town the next day.

Fortunately we had a lovely little hotel here which was all built around a central courtyard which would have been quite boring if they hadn’t jammed it with hundreds of plants.

Puerto Vallarta was also our first diving expedition since Thailand the previous year. We boarded a boat with an American couple and headed out to the Islands of Los Arcos, which were supposedly very good.

However, we should probably had realized something was afoot when they fitted us with full-length 7mm wetsuits. The water on this coast was COLD! At 15m or so down, it was only about 11 degrees. Combined with visibility of about 3m, this was overall a rather unpleasant experience. We saw perhaps 3 or 4 fish, and they didn’t look happy either.

Strangely, the Americans who were with us raved about how awesome it was, and were quick to sign up for another trip as soon as we returned. We politely made our goodbyes and sodded off, thinking that we had obviously been spoiled after diving in Thailand, where the waters were crystal clear and bathtub warm – not to mention it cost half as much as diving in Mexico!

After a couple of nights here we’d had enough of Americans again, and caught a flight east to Mexico City.

Mexico City

Mexico City was one of those places we were a little apprehensive about at first. We had been warned over and over about how dangerous it is, and how you should never get in a cab, etc, etc.

On the whole, we just didn’t have any such issues at all. We used authorized taxis to get from the airport, and the hotel arranged transport back. Even walking around at night it didn’t feel that unsafe… possibly because Mexico City has the most visible police presence I’ve ever seen. Almost every street corner has a cop on it, and in most cases the cop is wearing a bullet proof vest and is holding some sort of fully-automatic machine gun.

Again we didn’t really find a whole lot to like in this big city. Unfortunately our hotel didn’t have air-con, and was right next door to a pub which played either loud hip-hop or loud rock music until 2am every night.

While the city itself wasn’t anything special, we took a daytrip up to the ancient Maya city of Teothiuacan which was about an hour away on a bus.

Teothiuacan, Mexico

This ruined city was fairly impressive. We weren’t really prepared for just how big this place was. Not only does it contain the third largest pyramid in the world, it has streets which are several miles long, and thousands of structures. At its peak, over 100,000 people lived here.

Today most of it is just ruins of stone buildings. The bigger ones are still mostly intact, but the majority are just fragments of walls, or raised stone platforms where wooden houses once stood. The big draws here are the two pyramids which used to have temples on the tops. The sheer scale of these is mind-boggling, considering they were built by hand, without even the wheel to assist them.

Unlike the Egyptian pyramids though, they’re not built from giant stone blocks, but rather are actually a huge pile of dirt which has then been covered with rocks and a cement-like substance.

Even so, given how exhausted we were after climbing to the top I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have to be the guy who had to carry rocks the size of car tyres to the top of this thing. Then again the Maya were into human sacrifice, so that probably helped to motivate the workers.

The downside of this place is that all this beautiful stonework is filled with little Mexican men trying to hock their trinkets and bracelets at you every 10 feet. Some of them were really pushy, following us for several minutes yelling “Almost Free!” “Just one dollar!” or “Buy one for your mother in-law?” We don’t know for certain that Mexicans even know what a mother in-law actually is, but for some reason they are all convinced that she needs jewellery and souvenirs.

After a very hot day spent at the ruins, we flagged down a bus and managed to make our way back to Mexico City for one more night.

This was also our attempt to locate some contact lenses which Claire had sent to Mexico City via Poste Restante. Unfortunately it seemed the Lonely Planet guidebook was a little wrong when they said this system works well, and the people at the post office (who spoke zero English) couldn’t help us find the package at all, so we ended up having to purchase some emergency contacts from a local shop. Not the same type, but will do until we get back to the UK.

While trying to get this sorted we again ran into our old nemesis… the French. We don’t know why, but early on the morning just before we were due to head to the airport, we arrived at the post office to find a huge group of French tourists lined up at the only open teller window. They were all buying huge sheets of stamps for no apparent reason. We don’t quite know why, but we now understand why the rest of the world hates the French so much. No matter where we run into them, they’re almost always infuriating.

Cozumel, Mexico

A couple of hours flight from Mexico City took us to the island of Cozumel, on the Caribbean coast of Mexico about 100km south of Cancun.

Unfortunately this is another major cruise ship port, and was even worse that Puerto Vallarta. This town was so set up to take money off rich fat Americans it was just a joke. There was a chain called Diamonds International that literally had a store on every single block in town. There were at least 5 of them on the same street, all selling the same thing. We’ve noticed the same thing in several towns now where the cruise ships dock (all the same chain)… maybe there is some strange behaviour that cruise ship passengers exhibit where they can walk past the first 3 or 4 stores before deciding that maybe they DO want to buy an overpriced necklace.

This place was quite depressing, with the number of Mexicans who spoke in American accents, and watching huge groups of fat Americans walk off the boats while being herded like sheep onto a bus for a quick tour around the islands (no doubt past a few Diamonds International stores) then back onto their ships so the next 3 cruise liners could dock the next day.

The diving here was supposedly world-class, however it was also seriously expensive so we opted instead to do a snorkel trip around one of the local reefs. Unfortunately our boat broke down halfway there, so after a couple of hours floating around in circles, they dropped us back at a wharf and sent us back to town. They wanted us to try again the following day, but we had heard from some other people that the diving wasn’t that great anyway, so we had them credit us towards something different over on the mainland – Cenote diving.

That afternoon we packed up and took the 45 minute ferry back to the mainland to the beach town of Playa del Carmen.

This place was much nicer than Cozumel, largely because the cruise ships don’t call here directly. That said, it was still amazingly touristy, but the shops were all crappy souvenir shops selling bad t-shirts instead of diamonds. The beach was also lovely, and the whole town had obviously been designed properly from the start, with pedestrian-only roads and good beach access. (unlike Cozumel which has only rocks, and the waterfront is solid hotels which means you can sometimes need to walk for blocks before you can find a way through to the water, assuming you don’t get hit crossing the road on the way)

Cenote Diving, Mexico

The next morning we were off on our diving trip to the Chac-Mool cenote. A cenote is a limestone cave that has filled up with fresh water as the water-tables have risen since the end of the last ice-age. They usually have a large opening, and many underwater stalagtites and stalagmites.

Diving in a cenote was a truly amazing experience. The water is crystal clear and cool, and really felt like you were floating in space. Apart from the bubbles the divers created, there was no way to tell they weren’t just floating in the air.

Technically diving in a cenote is ‘cavern diving’, which is different from ‘cave diving’ in that you can always see natural daylight, so in theory it’s impossible to get lost (so you don’t need any special training or equipment). In practice, sometimes that natural daylight was very small and a long way away, which was quite scary at times, but also exhilarating.

The strange thing is that there is also a halocline. This is where the fresh water is actually sitting on top of a layer of salt-water. As you pass through in to the salt-water, visibility goes very strange. The best way to describe it would be to imagine that someone had just smeared grease or Vaseline all over the outside of your mask. Very odd, and we were quite glad to rise back above into the nice clear fresh water.

Tulum, Mexico

After a couple of days spent in Playa del Carmen we headed south about 45 minutes to a very small town called Tulum.

Tulum is mainly famous for the local Mayan ruins which are perched in a cliff, overlooking the Caribbean ocean. The setting is lovely, with the grey ruins against the turquoise blue of the water. Unfortunately it seemed that lots of the fat American tourists had read about this too, and had come here. 90,000 fat Americans all clustered in tour groups plus stinking heat made this reasonably unpleasant, and the ruins themselves were pretty dull after the huge ones out near Mexico City.

We took an interesting side-trip from Tulum back up the coast about 15 minutes to an even smaller town called Akumal, which had some excellent snorkeling. Despite the waves being a little on the large side, the highlight of this was coming across a turtle who we followed for about 10 minutes as he cruised around the area looking for food.

The second day was mostly spent sitting on a lovely beach near Tulum, where we both got sunburned despite sitting in the shade almost the whole day.

Belize

After two nights in Tulum we had finally had enough of Mexico and headed south to the border of Belize. An uneventful bus ride and border crossing had us landed in the small town of Corozal, on the Belize side of the border.

This was a seriously crappy little town, with basically nothing there but a bus-stop and a wharf where we planned to catch a boat out to Ambergris Caye.

While wandering towards the wharf we picked up a ‘friend’, being a strange black man on a bike (named Mike) who lacked quite a few teeth and wanted to be our friend. He also wanted us to buy some weed off him, and it took quite a while to convince him that we really didn’t want any. After showing us to a local restaurant (which only served Tamales and ‘Beans and Rice’ – the main dish eaten in Belize), he eventually sodded off after being tipped a couple of dollars for being our ‘guide’.

Thankfully we only had to wait an hour or two in Corozal before the boat departed for Ambergris Caye, an island out of the coast. This was a very noisy 2-hour ride in a large speedboat (with three 250hp outboard motors on the back) to the town of San Pedro on Ambergris Caye.

San Pedro, Belize

While not a cruise ship port, San Pedro was again full of Americans. This time they were all driving golf carts through the 3 tiny streets of this small island beach town. Unfortunately wherever there are lots of Americans, everything is quite expensive. Hotel costs here were back up to around US$60 per night for a fairly basic room, although it had aircon.

The town itself was nothing to write home about, with several over-priced restaurants and bars. We did purchase a bottle of a local drink called Pantiripper, which consists of coconut rum mixed with pineapple juice.

The only real reason for coming to San Pedro is that it’s one of the closest places to go diving in the Great Blue Hole.

Great Blue Hole diving, Belize

The great blue hole of Belize is apparently one of the best dive sites in the world. Originally made famous by Jacques Cousteau, it’s a 1000 foot wide hole, 500 feet deep, set in the middle of the Lighthouse Reef.

Located 60 miles from San Pedro (about 3 hours on the boat), this was once (back during the last ice-age) a hollow cave (which explains why it’s filled with stalactites and such) which then collapsed in when sea levels rose.

Today it’s a giant hole in the ocean which is visible from space, filled with sharks.

This was a deep dive to 40m, the deepest we had gone so far and right at the limit of where you can dive to without special equipment, training, or a decompression chamber. Three minutes to get down to 40m, then just 8 minutes spent at the bottom, with a 20 minute decompression stop at 20 feet on the way back up.

Overall not a huge amount of marine life down that deep (saw a couple of large sharks swimming slowly past far below us), but swimming amongst massive stalagtites was incredible. They say it takes 100 years for a stalagtite to grow an inch, and some of these are 40-60 feet long, and a metre or so thick in places. In the crystal clear Caribbean water, it was almost like swimming through a rock garden.

The trip included two other dives to shallower reefs which were also great, with a huge variety of cool coloured corals and heaps of fish including a couple of beautiful spotted eagle rays.

Definitely worth the trip out here just for the diving alone, although seriously expensive.

After a couple of nights in San Pedro we had pretty much seen everything we wanted to see, and caught another boat back to the mainland to the town of Belize City.

We didn’t really see much of this place, as we simply walked the 4 or 5 blocks from the wharf to the bus station, and jumped on a bus to San Ignacio.

San Ignacio, Belize

Bus travel in central America so far has been a bit mixed. Mexico has a fantastic bus system with lovely buses with big soft seats (roughly equivalent to older business class airline seats), aircon, toilets, movies… the works. While you pay a bit more for it (US$20-30 for some 4-6 hour trips), it’s not an unpleasant way to travel.

Belize buses on the other hand are all old US school buses that are run down to the point that nobody in the USA wants them anymore. A trip of just over 100km takes around 3 hours as the bus stops at just about every street corner along the way to pick up or drop off locals. On the bright side, the entire trip cost US$4.

San Ignacio is yet another shitty little town way out on the western side of Belize (although given the country is only about 200km wide, ‘way out’ doesn’t mean much). Yet again the town isn’t the reason we’re here, but rather some of the surrounding attractions.

Today was spent floating down a river on an old inner-tube, through a huge big cave then through some nice jungle. It was a very pleasant float at first, then we got overtaken by a hundred or so American tourists on a day-trip here as a cruise ship had docked at Belize City. (Are you getting the hint yet that American tourists, especially those on cruise ships aren’t really our favourite friends?)

Overall it was a lovely trip, although we got a bit ripped off as it cost US$65 and was supposed to last all day but we were home by 2pm. (including an hours drive each way)

On the whole, Belize hasn’t really done it for us. While it’s nice that everyone speaks English, lots of them do it with an American accent and often it all just feels a bit fake. Especially as everyone is lovely and friendly, but they’re also all trying to sell you something. They keep telling us we’re in paradise, but other than some lovely islands and bits of jungle, I’m not really seeing it.

Tomorrow we’re heading for the border of Guatemala to catch a bus to Flores, then on to the Mayan ruins at Tikal the day after. We’ll be back in the land of struggling with our Spanglish, but with a bit of luck things will be cheaper.