Laughing Caye

From San Ignacio we moved to Placencia which is at the end of a peninsula South of Belize City. The town is not very big but is home to some very big homes. Mostly owned by North Americans, plus the road in was just paved earlier this year so access has been improved significantly. This is all good news for the real estate investors in this area, not to mention that there is a new international airport being built less than 30 minutes away. All this spell big changes for this little town, hopefully it does not lose its’ charm in the process.

This is Main St. in Placencia.

We met some of the other guests at the hotel, Darryl from Kelowna, Dennis from London Ont., and Dave from Maryland USA and I ended up drinking with them until midnight, I am sure we would have kept going but we ran out of booze, just as well as we all decided to go snorkelling the next day. This would involve getting up around 7am so that we could get a boat arranged and still manage to get a full day on the water, assuming of course that the “cold front” everyone was talking about did not ruin the plans. As you probably predicted, some of us did not get going that early so Brenda and I had breakfast and waited for the others to emerge from their rooms. During this time we went down to the pier in front of the hotel to enjoy an absolutely picture perfect morning and we actually seen an Eagle Ray swim past and a couple of rather large fish, wow, the day was starting off pretty good. Once the others got going we managed to arrange a boat to take us to the reef and spent the day snorkelling, on the way to the reef we seen a bunch of dolphins which is a real treat, getting better all the time. Once at the reef we did two guided snorkel swims, as the reef is protected and inside a national park the guides make sure that nothing gets disturbed by the tourists. The first swim was great, the water was very clear and we could see numerous fish species, lobster, crabs, and of course coral formations. After a prepared lunch of BBQ chicken, scalloped potatoes and coleslaw,(no I did not cook the BBQ chicken this was part of the package) we went for our second tour. During the second we seen much the same things just more of them, but when we got back to shore the weather had changed drastically and the “cold front” had arrived. On the 22km boat ride back to town we were bucking 3 to 4 foot waves. Our skipper did a great job and we only caught air with the boat about half a dozen times, when we finally made it to shore we commented that that would never happen in Canada. Not the big waves part, the part where none of us were wearing life jackets, they were tucked safely into the hull of the boat under a trap door. So to sum up the day we watched an awesome sunrise, seen a sting ray, seen some dolphins, went snorkelling and seen a whole bunch of sea life, had a great lunch on a little island in the Caribbean Sea, then rode mother nature’s roller coaster without a life jacket, a rather full day if I say so myself.