Belize

After spending a month and a half in the chilly mountains of Mexico and Guatemala, Dan and I were itching to get to the white sandy beaches and crystal clear Caribbean waters one thinks of when there is talk of Central America. We hoped to find just that in Belize!
We crossed by boat into Punta Gorda where we didn't find a whole lot going on. We travelled North to beachside Hopkins where we spent a few lovely days relaxing in the sun, swimming, and checking out the very talented Garifuna kids play traditional drums and attempted to shake our booties even half as fast as them (Dan came pretty close) and trying one of the delicious local dishes, hudut, a coconut soup with fish and spices served with mashed plantain.. so good!
We brought in the New Year on the beach of Hopkins Bay Resort listening to live music and watching the sky light up with fireworks. It felt oddly familiar, returning from the beach to a dorm room with the same New Zealand fellow I had somehow snagged 3 years previous in a much too similar setting in Phuket, Thailand.
From Hopkins we took the bus to Belize City and caught the ferry to Caye Caulker where the motto is "go slow," just what we were after! At this point we were pretty good at the Belizean chilled out beach ways and spent a few more days relaxing, but just had to slip in a day of diving to the world renowned Blue Hole.
The boat ride out to the Blue Hole was great in itself! We had dolphins playing in our wake and pilot whales jumping right next to the boat!
The Blue Hole itself was exactly that- a huge, very blue hole that seemed bottomless. We quickly descended to about 130ft to see the stalegtites then back up. There wasn't a lot of life, just some Caribbean reef sharks and a few in our group were lucky enough to see a hammerhead! We did a second dive at the more colorful Half Moon Wall where we saw spotted drummer fish, lion fish, an octopus, barracuda, grouper, cleaner shrimp, trigger fish and a big sting ray! We had lunch on Half Moon Caye and checked out the booby observatory where we could see many of the birds nesting over their unborn eggs. There was also a snorkel group feeding a shark and a sting ray right off the beach! Our last dive was at a site called Lion's Den named after the abundance of lion fish that had taken over. Here we also saw a puffer fish and eagle ray amung some other cool stuff!
We had one more relaxing day on Caye Caulker before heading back to Belize City and bee-lining it to the airport to catch our flight to Nicaragua!