When we landed in Belize, the plane immediately did a 360 and started heading back towards the same direction from which we came.  “That was a short trip to Belize” I thought…

It turns out they have just the one landing strip so the plane had to turn around for us to deplane.  When we came to a stop, the workers wheeled two manual stairs to the front and back of the plane. We happened to be sitting towards the back and ended up deplaning sooner than most of the people on the flight.  Passport control was  a breeze.  We filled out our cards on the way in on the plane and the woman behind the gate took those and our passports and stamped them without saying a word to us.  The immigration guy wanted to know where we were staying and that was it.

We payed $25 (American) for a cab ride from the airport to the water taxi to get us to Caye Caulker.  The water taxi was $14.75 (American) round trip and an hour later, we arrived…very much overdressed in jeans and T-shirts.  There are no cars on the island, only golf carts and bikes.  A guy offered to take us to our guesthouse for $5, but we declined, wanting to save some money.  We found our lodging and checked in.  Later, we found a restaurant and had jerk & bbq chicken and soon found out that this place is extremely gorgeous and extremely not cheap.

Even though the Belize dollar is worth exactly half of the American dollar…so $10 American gets you $20 Belize…the prices are such that it doesn’t work much in your favor. A bucket of 6 Belikins is $30 (BZ) at the Lazy Lizard (The place to see and be seen on the island), but there are cheaper options.  You can get 6 of those same Belikins for $16.25 (BZ) at a small shop towards the north end of the island.  We found a bar that seemed pretty lively and it turns out Tuesdays are live music nights.  The band was great, we had a few beers and met some fellow travelers who didn’t think we were from Texas because we ‘didn’t have the accent’.

We stayed at Sophie’s Guest house and we loved it.  It was our first hostel/guest house so we don’t have much to compare it to but…we had our own private room with two huge fans (if you know us, you know how much we like our fans)…it was right on the water and the sunset was right outside of our room.  We sat and watched it from the hammocks they provided every night.  There are only five rooms here total and we share a bathroom/shower stall.  It sounds weird but we haven’t had any issues.  There was hot water and electricity and free wifi with the room.  We would have stayed there longer if we weren’t on a budget.

We went snorkeling Thursday and we had our own boat with our own guide….there was no one else with us.   Neither of us had been snorkeling before and it took a minute to get use to it, but once we did we loved it.  It was like being inside of a huge aquarium.  We saw all sorts of coral and fish and then we moved on to swim with sharks and stingrays.  We had the GoPro with us and I can’t wait to see what Mandy puts together with the footage.  That was $60 American for both of us for a couple of hours.  We could have made that last longer, but we were getting tired and Mandy started to get seasick, so the guide took us around to the other side of the island and dropped us off right on the dock in front of our guesthouse just in time to watch the last sunset.