I have been in actual paradise this week. Caye Caulker is a tiny tropical island off the coast of Belize, which was split in two after Hurricane Hattie. There are no cars or real roads- only golf buggies and sand tracks... There is reggae and and a rum bar on every corner, and I have been told off by locals for walking too fast.
I left planning getting there until the last minute, and the island's hostels were pretty booked up, so I ended up staying in a cat sanctuary for my first two nights... Yes, really. "Pause" is run by a tiny woman called Maddy and is home to 4 dogs and 87 cats- Maddy knows every single one of their names. My room was essentially a tree house, and yes it did smell like cats... but I was so happy to be on such a beautiful island surrounded by perfect caribbean waters, that I really didn't care. And after speaking to Maddy about what she does I am especially glad to have stayed there and given money to a good cause: Belize has some messed-up ideas about pest control that involve dumping stray cats into the sea in order to keep the population down. Maddy rescues them and takes them in- running the house all by herself and using visitors' rent money to fund it all.
When I woke up on Tuesday morning and stepped out of my treehouse onto sand, I felt ridiculously excited. The island is so small that most houses back onto the water, and Maddy's place has its own little boardwalk and boat. I sat there eating my breakfast while watching pelicans dive for theirs.
I spent the first day catching up with my mind and some emails after the last week of mayhem, before going out for dinner with the other people staying at the shelter. (I realise that makes us sound like homeless tramps/alcoholics and/or victims of domestic violence...) For the most part, our group consisted of an amerian couple; a swiss couple-effortlessly cool even after ridiculous journeys, not even a hair out of place while I sweated and turned into one giant afro; Suzi- an amazing woman from California who has been travelling around the world for 6 and a half years! (I cannot imagine living out of a backpack for so long. What a hero). A couple of days later an Australian vet and a girl from Essex arrived. We spent a few evenings sitting on top of the boat, watching the sunset and drinking far too much rum. Just like pirates.
On Wednesday I went on a snorkling day trip. Everyone who had done so seemed to follow a pattern of accidentally doing it hungover and getting mild sunstroke in the process- I am ashamed to say that I followed suit. As the boat sailed off in the morning and I felt the relief of the sea breeze, I thought everything was going to be ok... but the rockiness of the boat starting to change my mind. Just as a charming old Canadian man had just asked me whereabouts in England I was from, I had to run to the side of the boat and projectile vomit quite spectacularly into the Caribbean sea. The lovely people on my boat thought I was just sea-sick and offered me limes, water and sympathy, so I chose not to enlighten them.
The snorkling was amazing though- once I got in the water I felt one thousand times better. The guide warned us that the first stop was mostly for getting a feel of the snorkling and having a swim around, so we wouldn{t see much apart from fish, but as soon as I jumped in and went underwater a massive ray of some kind swam straight past me. At later stops we swam with nerf sharks, sting rays, turtles and eels... one of the crew- for reasons unknown referred to as ´The Caveman¨, grabbed a shark' which were harmless but almost as long as me- and hugged it so that we could stroke it´s belly. Poor thing. Later we had lunch and rum on the boat and saw the barrier reef- which is the second longest and most living in the world. I was in my element that day.
In the evenings, we often ate at a local family´s house (which they opened up to as many people as could fit on their porch). The fish was freshly caught and super cheap compared to the other touristy restaurants on the island. Saying that though, for such a tiny, idyllic place it wasn´t at all ruined by tourists- probably because most were backpackers and there for the marine life. I´ll definitly go back to Caye Caulker for a holiday some time.
I did have a slightly ridiculously last day there yesterday (Friday)... as part of the selection process for one of the MA courses I´ve applied for, I received an email with a set of tasks to do, including ¨use all available news sources from your current location to pick out some news stories and suggest features...´ it seemed simple enough, until I was told that the only news on the island was gossip, but I could look out for a man named NAche on Friday evenings who sometimes sold papers on the beach. I didn´t find Nache, which meant that he had probably gone fishing instead. I did however, meet a very helpful man in the corner shop whose brother had gone to Belize City for the day and could bring me a newspaper back by 8pm. Of course when 8pm came and I started wandering through bars asking for a Chinese man about a newspaper delivery, most people I came across assumed I was using some weird code for drugs and I eventually gave up. Pretty funny evening.
Today I got the boat to Belize City before catching the bus all the way to Flores in Guatemala. Belize City was a dive- I walked around for a while but didn´t feel too comfortable. It was also baking hot... which turned out to be nothing compared to the journey I was about to take on the sauna-come-bus for 6 hours.
Stopping at the Guatemala border, the passengers moved like zombies in the heat, getting more and more irritated with salesmen and men offering to exchange money at an horrendous rate. There was a fee to leave Belize and supposedly another fee at customs upon entering Guatemala... I said I didn´t have any cash and the guard let me off- this made me feel pretty jammy until I realised that the customs ´fee´was actually a total scam anyway- it´s not compulary to pay it, but most tourists don´t realise that and the customs officers go home pretty happy.
Flores is beautiful, but an unbearably humid 40 degrees celcius. A lot of people do jungle treks from here which sound fantastic but sweaty like hell. I am being eaten alive by mosquitoes and my hair has reached new levels of voluptiousity. I don´t even know if that´s a real word but it should be. My hostel has a good vibe though- and for once I can actually enjoy the cold showers!
Hoping to do a sunrise tour of Tikal on Monday... apparently there are jaguars in the jungle and everything! And you know, famous Mayan pyramid stuff... But also monkeys! And probably a whole new population of mosquitoes preparing for their tasty english banquet.
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