A couple of friends from the expedition, Nick and Sarah, are also doing this so we decided to travel together. On Wednesday we caught a bus from Tulum down to a small fishing village called Majuhual. GVI (who ran the expedition I was on) are in the process of setting up another expedition here. It seemed like a nice, if somewhat strange, place. Most of the people we met were drunk, and it was only 6:30pm. The waiter at the restaurant we ate at was plain crazy!
We had been hoping to take a dive trip out to Banco Chinchorro, which is an atoll around 20km offshore from here, but unfortunately this wasn't possible. Basically, cruise ships come in once or twice a week, and the village functions around business from the cruise ship passengers. When the cruise ships aren't in everything closes up and people go back to Cancun. A cruise ship was leaving that evening, so the local dive operation wasn't prepared to go out the next day with just the 3 of us. So we just stayed the night (I slept in my hammock!) and caught a bus the next morning to Belize City.
From Belize City we caught a water taxi for the one hour trip out to Caye Caulker, a small and very chilled out island. It is a very caribbean place - lots of reggae music, blue skies, blue seas and a very slow pace of life.
We found a nice hotel up at one end of the island to stay at. It has its own little jetty which turned out to be an excellent place to relax with a beer and watch the sun go down. It was also very close to an excellent little bar called the Lazy Lizard that looks across a narrow channel called "the split" that divides the island into two. To see some of the photos, click here.
