Since Xie had gone to bed earlier than CM and Jess, she also woke up earlier. It was a beautiful day outside. There was a picnic table right outside the cabaña, and she sat there a while and looked at birds and wrote in the journal.
Then she went looking for coffee. She found a place open early – the Amor y Cafe. It seemed like a pretty cool place, with lots of regulars ordering delicious-looking food. Xie just got a coffee, then later a delicious banana smoothie. She sat and wrote in the journal, then spent some time reading the fish book again.
At that point, it had been a couple of hours since she got up, so she headed back to the cabaña, thinking CM and Jess would be up. They weren’t, so she spent some more time at the picnic table.
When everybody woke up, we got dressed and packed up for our snorkeling expedition and headed back to the Amor y Cafe. This time we got breakfast. They have delicious, fluffy, homemade bread from which they make grilled cheese sandwich, with or without various veggies. Xie got a grilled tomato and cheese, plus another smoothie, this time pineapple. The pineapple plus the yogurt was a little too tart. Jess got the same thing, except with a banana smoothie. CM got the sandwich with salami instead of tomato and a cup of coffee. The coffee was not very strong, which Xie had promised it would be based on her earlier experience. CM got a second cup.
During our breakfast, Fred Peterson came over to ask if he could join us. We had a large table, so of course we invited him. He explained that people had started smoking at the other end of the balcony, where he had been, and the smoke bothered him. We asked him about why he had come to Caye Caulker for six months of every year for the last seven years. He explained that he had found the place by accident. He was on his way to another vacation spot, when someone talked him into coming out to the island for a couple of days. He loved the place, and ended up just staying. He talked about the development of the island. When he had first started coming out, there was no electricity and no concrete construction on the island (now there were both — they generate their electricity with big diesel motors). He said that things had certainly changed for the downside, and that things were getting frustrating there. When Jess asked him if he had a new place in mind that he could go to next, he said that he certainly did (and it was clear that he wasn’t about to reveal the name or location of his new secret tropical paradise).
Fred was a Canadian, and he lived in the Okanogan Valley, in British Columbia. We talked about his two sons. One works for a fancy audio installation company that does large, complicated projects for Disney and the like. They use software to control the sounds, such that they can make the audio of a bee flying around the room to be very realistic. His other son went to school for business accounting, got very high marks and was very good at it. However, shortly after school he realized that accounting was not at all the career that he wanted, so now he works at a coffee shop and plays guitar a lot. Fred said that he encourages that son to get back into the game, but is mainly glad that he is happy. Fred kindly invited us to look him up if we were in his area.
We went over to Carlos’ shop after breakfast. He was there, and started right in with his low key everything’s a joke but you can’t let on to it being a joke style. He fitted us for gear. Xie brought her own mask and snorkel, so she only needed fins. CM was glad that his mask had a reasonable seal, despite his mustache.
We sat around for a while outside the shop. There was a woman from Texas who had recently finished her first army tour in Iraq. She had likes and dislikes about the army, but had re-enlisted. Her next tour was supposed to be in Germany.
CM noticed a tiny little puppy in a milk crate with a board on top to keep it there. We took turns petting it. It was so young that it tried to nurse on your fingers. Apparently it hadn’t weaned yet. Carlos came out of the office and told Jessica that she could take the puppy out of the crate. The story was that someone had dropped it off in the crate during the night about two weeks before, and Carlos found it in the morning. He said that they had to nurse it to health; it had lots of worms. He said that he wanted to call the puppy Western, because it looked bowlegged from behind. Jess fell in love with the puppy and named it Panucho (after the Yucatecan food, similar to a tostada). She and Carlos had playful arguments about the proper name for the puppy.
There was another couple, from Colorado, John and An-something. CM mistook them as being the Coloradan family that we had met the evening before at Carlos’ shop. The others on our tour were a brother and sister from Sweden (er, or something like that).
We headed down to the dock to get on the boat. It was a large motorboat with a big outboard motor that comfortably seated all of us. We were introduced to Carlos’ assistant, Dylan, who he called Bob Dylan, he explained, because Dylan didn’t like the name Matt Dillon.
Carlos passed out natural ginger candies – for combating sea sickness – to those who wanted them (more than half of us), and then he started the motor. It took Carlos eight or nine tries to start the motor, during which he acted nonchalant, like it was no problem. CM imagined us a mile out on the reef, unable to start the motor. However, there were no more starting problems for the rest of the day; it must have been because the motor was cold.
We zoomed right along in the boat for 20 minutes or so, and reached our first stop, a location where the local fishermen cleaned out the conch shells. This was a popular stop on most of the snorkeling tours, because the giant turtles and sting rays liked eating the scraps that the fishers threw out. We got in the water, and Xie quickly learned that there was a problem with her mask. It instantly started filling up with water. Fortunately, Carlos had brought some extra equipment, and had another mask for Xie to use that worked well. We swam around for a bit, watching the turtle and rays. There were two fish, called Remoras that would always stay right underneath the turtle, where ever it would go. CM figured out why that was when he saw the turtle eating a scrap of food. The two fish immediately came out from underneath the turtle and started biting and pulling the food away from its mouth. Perhaps there was some benefit to the turtle, or else it simply couldn’t avoid those fish hanging out underneath it, because they were always there. Similarly, just about all of the rays had a smaller fish swimming right underneath their tails.
Before leaving, Carlos paid the fishers a tip. He spoke Spanish with them, which was interesting.
We got back in the boat and motored out to Hol Chan, the location that Fred Peterson had recommended as being the best local area for fish diversity. We arrived at Hol Chan and hooked the boat up to a rope and float which were permanently attached to the bottom. Carlos lectured us about staying close to him, both because he would be able to point out the interesting fish and because he would keep us away from the areas with a current that could possibly pull us out. This was a great swim. We saw a bunch of fish, most of which we can’t remember, but including barracuda, different types of parrot fish, crabs (a male and female pair in their little cave-hole), as well as a bunch of different types of coral. Some of the fish swam in large schools, of maybe two hundred fish, and others were basically solitary.
Another stop was called “shark alley”. Here there were more boats from other snorkeling tours. We waited in the boat for fifteen minutes for another, much larger tour to swim away. Carlos made some comments under his breath about how their leader was having trouble keeping the group together. It really is too bad that he has to compete with other tour companies that are pushing the profit/cost ratio too far and are running much lousier tours.
Carlos threw some bait (probably chunks of fish) into the water, to attract the sharks. They were nurse sharks, which aren’t huge, but maybe up to four feet long. We got into the water and started swimming around. Carlos warned us not to put hands in front of the sharks. For the most part, the sharks didn’t seem to care about us people, or were perhaps even mildly curious about us (or more likely associated the snorkeling tours with getting bites of bait fish). At one point, Carlos got a grasp on one of the sharks, and turned it over, so it was belly up, while he was holding it. We took turns getting the chance to feel its skin, which was smoother than expected (most sharks have sandpapery skin, with tiny proto-teeth all over). The sharks were pretty. Carlos pointed out the shark which had bitten him a few weeks before.
After we got back into the boat, Carlos showed us the finger that had been bitten by a shark. It was pretty much healed by now, but you could tell from the scars that it had been torn up fairly well. He said that he was on a regular tour, and was doing the catching the shark trick. For some reason, the shark had bit his finger, and started sucking it. They are called nurse sharks, because they bite on to something and then suck like crazy, instead of shaking to tear away flesh, like other sharks. He said that after a minute, the shark just let go of his finger. The folks on that tour must have been pretty shaken up after that.
We stopped in San Pedro, a town on a neighboring island, for lunch. Carlos explained that food was relatively expensive here, and recommended a nearby restaurant as being on the reasonable side. He also pointed out the diving shop to Xie, that he had earlier recommended as being a place to buy a fish book. A little girl ran up the dock to see Carlos, as soon as we were landed. He asked her where her mother was, who came walking up a minute later. She talked about taking the girl to the dentist earlier, and was upset that she had a little gum disease.
The dive shop was closed for the lunch hour, so we went to eat. Apparently we were the only group that chose the restaurant that Carlos had recommended. The food was decent, but not really memorable. Pretty much the only spice in all of Belize seems to be Marie Sharps, a salsa of habeñero chiles with carrots and onions. We compared different bottles of Marie Sharps, which were labeled with different hotness levels.
After lunch, we rushed back to the dive shop, to get a chance to look at the books before we had to go back. They had the really excellent fish ID book and fish behavior book that Carlos had lent Xie overnight so that she could study up on the fish, but they were both pretty expensive ($95 Belize == $42 USD). We settled on a laminated page with fish on both sides. It didn’t have all of the fish that we had seen, but it was better than nothing.
We all got back to the boat at a reasonable time. The Colorado woman kept asking Dylan if we were good gringos, and wouldn’t let up until he replied that, yes, we were good gringos.
Our last stop was the “coral garden”. Carlos explained that we were on our own for this swim, because he was going to stay on the boat to cut up some fruit. A fruit plate was apparently requisite for any reputable snorkeling tour.
We swam out in the direction that Carlos had suggested. We didn’t really see new coral that we hadn’t seen before, but it was a good area, spectacular with coral growth. The types we saw: brain, lettuce leaf, fan, mustard hill and a few others that we didn’t learn the names of, like one with purple fingers.
After a while, we heard Carlos whistling and waving to us to get us to come back to the boat. CM and Xie were the last to get back. When we got back, there was a cooler top full of cut up fruit – bananas, pineapple, very yummy papaya and watermelon. Carlos kept encouraging everyone to eat more, saying several times, “I’ll tell you when you’re done.”
We boated back in, and everyone was pretty tired and wiped out. It was starting to become clear that Xie and CM had gotten sunburns on their backs, despite having applied SPF30 sun block several times during the day. We piled up the equipment while Dylan started washing it with a bleach solution. Jess and the others were playing with Panucho Western, the puppy, and Carlos tried his best into talking each person into taking it home with them.
Carlos downloaded the photos from his camera that he’d been shooting with his underwater digital camera all day, and we gathered around his laptop to look at them. He reiterated the names of most of the fish. Then he offered to burn a CD with the photos for an extra $30 Belize. We all settled up for the tour (none of us had paid yet), and bought a CD of photos.
We said our goodbyes to Carlos and headed back to our room. We took showers, which felt good to wash the salt off, but also made the sunburns more apparent. After washing off, it started to rain pretty heavily, so we were shy from going out to find smoothies and/or dinner. We listened to the rain get slower and faster for awhile, and napped or worked on the journal. Finally we decided to go out to the restaurant associated with our hotel, because it was so close.
CM ordered conch ceviche, while Xie got the fish special and Jess got the chicken special. The conch meat was a little chewy (not so much as octopus), and had a pleasant, sweet flavor. Xie and Jess had a rum punch drink that came with their meal. The punch was pretty tasty, with a mix of real fruit juice, not some overly sweet artificial crap. CM drank yummy draft Belikin beers.
At some point, Xie realized that she had left her mask and snorkel at Carlos’ shop. Even though the mask was broken, she wanted to retrieve her nice snorkel, and CM was interested in trying to fix the mask (the problem seemed to be with the water vents near the nose). We walked down to the shop, but unfortunately it was closed.
On the way back, we stopped at a little store to get some snacks for the bus ride. It was a crowded little store, and the best snacks they had were chips and cookies of various sorts. It was interesting to try and understand the Kriol conversations that a customer couple was having with the shop keeper. The were discussing the prices of various items and how much the folks owed the shop keeper (maybe they had a tab). Kriol is one of those languages that sounds very interesting and expressive, with a lot of ups and downs.
We were pretty wiped out by now, so we went back to go to sleep, so that we could get up early enough to get breakfast before catching the water taxi back to the mainland.
