Out Of Mexico And In To Belize

A dreadlocked guy lazes in a hammock and raises his hand as we alight from the ferry. “Welcome to paradise” he beams. The delicious smell of barbecued seafood drifts across the sandy track, a smiling girl clocks our backpacks and suggests we taste the local rum before we walk any further. We turn right, heading to where our next bed is. The breeze is deliciously warm, the sun incredibly hot.

And everything is different, just a short journey has brought us to a different culture which feels so different that we could call it a different world, let alone a different culture. No longer is there any significant Spanish influence, but instead we are in a disputed territory with a British Commonwealth past; no longer is Spanish the mother tongue, but instead we hear a lilting mix of English and Creole. Infectious laughter seems to decorate every sentence.

Out of Mexico and into Belize – but not mainland Belize, we’re on a beautiful island which is unmistakably Caribbean, where men sport waist length dreadlocks, where the sound of reggae is everywhere, where it’s possible to sip beer or rum punch whilst sitting on a wooden jetty, slide down the wooden chute into the warm sea when the sun gets too hot, then return to our drink. An island where there are no cars, just golf buggies and bicycles. Where the sunshine is kissed by the warm Caribbean trade winds, where the island motto of “go slow” is everybody’s maxim for daily life.

Go slow. This is an island where beach bars have tables out in the water, where palm trees bend in the lusciously warm breeze, where pelicans and frigate birds glide overhead, where people smile first and speak second. But they always, always speak. Laid back beach bars call you in, barbecue smoke drifts across the island, and all the time the turquoise background of the beautiful Caribbean provides its consistent colour. An island where the food is sensational, where fresh lobster is delicious and, wey hey, inexpensive.

An island where giant rays glide past us as we wallow in the warm sea, where seahorses thrive, where the world’s healthiest coral reef sits a few hundred yards offshore. 

Go slow? We feel like we never want to hurry again. Ever.

This is the island of Caye Caulker, backpacker destination, laid back haven, the Caribbean personified. An island where there’s never any need to put on shoes or change out of beachwear, unless you want to. An island where the locals want you to love it, because they love it themselves. Where they want you to…..well….go slow.

Caye Caulker (pronounced “key corker”) is an island split in half since the 1961 Hurricane Hattie created a small divide which has since become a wider channel with 100ft deep water. Our base here on the southern half of the island is close to The Split, as it is known, where a ramshackle ferry looking like a homemade raft carries people back and forth between the two halves across the bobbing turquoise waters.

Just getting here is an adventure. From our last base in Valladolid it is a 6-hour bus ride to the coastal town of Chetumal where we spend a single night before boarding the strange looking ferry which would resemble one of those cruise liner feeder pods if it wasn’t for its four large Yamaha outboard motors. The cramped little capsule of a craft bounces and slams its boneshaking way across the waves first to San Pedro on the island of Ambergris Caye (Belize border control, customs point) almost two hours away and then on to Caye Caulker. Don’t catch this ferry if you have a back problem, it’s not an easy ride!

Once here though, being on Caye Caulker is as easy a ride as you could ever get, every inch the calm, friendly laid back corner which those of us who haven’t yet visited the West Indies picture that place to be. Caribbean first, Central America second.

On the southern tip of the island is a small airstrip suitable only for light aircraft, but is the starting point for another incredible experience to match the flights over San Francisco and the Grand Canyon earlier on this trip. Lying some 70 miles from Caye Caulker is the breathtaking natural phenomenon known as The Great Blue Hole.

Flying out over the extensive coral reefs is spectacular enough, but as we approach, and circle, this incredible sight, it’s almost hard to believe what we are seeing. The Blue Hole is effectively another, giant, sinkhole, formed when the sea level was lower, over 150,000 years ago as the ground fell away to form a cenote. As the seas rose, so this deep hole in the ocean flooded, to create what we see today.

Charted and explored by Jacques Cousteau in the early 1970s, the depth of this amazing phenomenon is thought to be around 410 feet, deep enough to be devoid of life down in its darker depths. Surrounded by coral reef atolls, the Hole itself is almost perfectly circular, 984 feet across, the glorious circle almost as spectacular as the deep blue colour. Cousteau cited it as one of the top five places on Earth for scuba diving. For us, flying over it is rewarding enough – another fabulous experience in our amazing year of fabulous experiences.

After such an amazing trip, surely a wildlife-spotting-cum-snorkelling trip can’t thrill us, but our guide and skipper Valerio has other ideas as he hits the speedboat throttle and takes us out towards the coral reef. First we hunt a sighting of manatees, aka the sea cow, relatively common round these parts – we catch a brief glimpse, but only of one, and only once.

Swimming off the reef though, amongst schools of nurse sharks and various types of stingray is fantastic. The sharks (safe, don’t panic) swim so close to us, the rays happily brush against us as they swim by, happy to let their strange “wings” feel out our human form. As Michaela dives off to take some superb underwater shots, I have a eureka moment and after all these years of trying and failing, I suddenly master the art of snorkelling, joy of joys!

Sure enough, Valerio’s promises are good, and we see large quantities of brilliantly colourful fish, intriguing banks of healthy coral, and a moray eel, before we head back round to the leeward side of the island, away from the reef and into calmer waters. Into, in fact, the territory of the seahorse. We see a few – they are of course very tiny and very heavily camouflaged- but seeing them in their natural environment is a first for us, and is yet another thrill.

Our last sighting is a shoal of tarpon, large fish agile enough to leap out of the water and claim a fish from our fingers – tourist trap stuff but hey it’s fun.

Caye Caulker is a certain kind of paradise. Beautiful, peaceful, happy, so deeply the Caribbean vibe, and visually stunning – yet at the same time we can see that it wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. There are no real beaches here, but the beautiful sea is so calm and colourful that swimming in its warmth is rewarding even without any troublesome sand. Yes the beach bars play their reggae and dance music, but with a couple of exceptions it’s at an acceptable decibel level – and this isn’t a late night party island, the beach bars close at sunset and all is quiet by 7pm, replaced by cool guys with guitars in the bars strung along the sandy roads.

Don’t expect the lap of luxury on Caye Caulker, this is a proper place, not a 5-star hiding place – though there is plenty of perfectly acceptable accommodation. The southern half, south of the Split, is where to stay to be part of it all – unless isolated self-contained sites are your thing (apparently there’s a few on the other half – for us, stay in one of those and you won’t feel the joy of Caye Caulker).

When we first stepped off the ferry on to this island, we were delighted to see that the seaweed invasion, so awful back in Puerto Morelos, was nowhere near as bad here – but each day has brought a little more and the invasion has undoubtedly begun. Still not as bad, but it’s on its way.

“It’s de wind”, Valerio explains in his alluring Creole English, “when dose east winds blow, den in come de weed. Dat norf wind it take away de weed. Norf wind come October time”. He does, though, subscribe to the widely held theory that Brazil is responsible, through allowing fertilisers to run off into the ocean. “It tru it be globe-al warmin”, he says, “but al-zo tru dat Brazil don’t care”.

If Caye Caulker is even the smallest indication of what Belize and its people are like, then we want to come back. Moreover, Caye Caulker is, after Puerto Viejo in Costa Rica, our second little taste of the Caribbean lifestyle, people, and food. 

We both know we want some more.