MEXICO Island Vibes JULY 2014

YUCATAN Peninsula, a pretty little playground:

Tulum, Playa del Carmen and Isla Mujeres.

Our gang of four glided seamlessly in a stream of sweat from Belize in to Mexico by means of a sweltering boat ride and a stuffy bus. We trekked a few blocks with the sun beating down, cursing the shuttle that wouldn’t drop us directly to our nearby hotel. When we eventually arrived we found ourselves standing in the courtyard staring longingly at the hot, green, murky pool. Whyyyyyy!?

With all of our tans at risk of melting off we checked in then headed directly to the beach to cool off.

We found a funky little cushioned beach bar and had sunset drinks. With ice cold beers in hand, nestled in the fluffy white powder sand and surrounded by the impossibly perfect aqua blue ocean we once again toasted our good fortune to be on this holiday together.

Amber and I enjoyed the rare opportunity to take pics together! We kept declaring we would get a really good one worth keeping… and while we didn’t necessarily get any brilliant photos we took plenty of half decent ones for the record book. Counting down to the 30^th, “let’s get a good pic for Mum”.

What else to do in one of the world’s most beautiful coastal regions but to enjoy the beach and climb the odd palm tree. We attempted several individual, couple, and group photos but alas, none of us are models and we missed the mark. Perfect postcard opportunity up for grabs but we let it slip through our fingers!

Despite technically now being on mainland Mexico Amber was still settled comfortably in island mode - taking a sunshine nap under a palm tree after eating fresh ceviche. This one knows how to relax.

With Amy’s stuffy old Spanish coming back to life and a few poorly placed words of my new Spanish we managed to get ourselves transported around more or less as we wanted. Ali slowly developed a special technique of speaking Spanish which involved adding “o” to the end of all English words. It’s a surprisingly entertaining technique that on one hand had us in fits of laughter at times but on the other hand it certainly had its limits.

On our grand tourist circuit we continued north without crossing paths with too much culture, history or local settlements. It’s a tourist trail for fly-by tourists and has been for a long time so we embraced it for what it was and enjoyed the holiday. One amazing natural thing we saw was El Gran Cenote.

A crispy cold, fresh, clear as glass, series of underwater caves near Tulum.

We swam around the caves for a long time with the water giving us goose bumps and soothing our sunburnt skin. We had a couple of snorkel masks and a pair of goggles and saw other groups scuba diving below us.

What a beautiful place! We stayed until we were shivering, wondering if we would ever warm up, then just moments later we were sweating the whole way home in the taxi wondering if we would ever cool down again.

We kept moving north to Playa del Carmen, a well renowned package-holiday destination for US tourists. As luck would have it (for Amber and I), Ali and Amy went ahead on an earlier bus and did the leg work to find hotels. To my delight I arrived in Playa del Carmen later that day to find Amy had scored us a cheap hotel room to share, while Amber and Ali went a little upscale to a different place with a glorious swimming pool. Splendid work team!

Our time in Playa was a little bit lazy and relaxing. Some of us spent time wallowing in the pool and searching for the ultimate taco stand while others took it in turns fighting off tummy bugs in bed for a couple of days.

When our awesome foursome was back in peak condition we jumped on the ferry to Isla Mujeres for the birthday portion of the trip! Well the whole trip was partly in tribute to the twins turning 30 but this is the island where it came together!

The girls trip continues! In hindsight this is the last civilised phase in our travel lives (for Amy and I) before we ended up being dirty surf rats back on the west coast. Amy - how very nice we once looked!

Amy and I kicked back with cold beers in hand enjoying the sunset while we let Amber and Ali take it in turns doing experimental hair dos on us.  

I was a little dubious at some of the odd things the girls were hanging out to try but with the end result… well it was actually pretty cool what they could do!

Clever young ladies… Amber, maybe grandma was right when she used to say you should be a hairdresser haha! Anyway, career discussion aside we continued to sail through our Caribbean days enjoying each other’s company and living the island life.

One incredible experience we all shared was diving with whale sharks one day! We jumped on and off the boat swimming behind the sharks until nobody could swim anymore and the giants meandered out of our reach in to the big deep blue.

Some of us had dived with whale sharks before at Ningaloo reef but this was still something really special and unique. We were so far out in the ocean with such big animals.

The last time we jumped off the boat we swam so hard with such focus that when we stopped to look around with an excited craze in our eyes, we realised the boat had gone. It had left us to drop other people at a different shark, and the other swimmers had fallen behind. Just us.

Wow, drifting way out in this huge ocean with a couple of cruising giants disappearing in to the distance. A tiny drop in the ocean.

BELIZE Unbelizeable JUNE 2014

A JOURNEY WITH FRIENDS FROM HOME!!!

I was so excited to be meeting up with all the girls! Amber for a few weeks, Ali for a couple of months, and Amy for at least five months, aaaarghhh we’re all so lucky!

So this is my triple A team for Belize. Three mine workers, reduced to bikinis, on extended vacations splashing around the Caribbean with me!!!

I was so looking forward to sharing travel experiences with close friends, a luxury that has only happened sporadically in the past, and this time it would be with three of my best mates! Diving! Sunshine! Island hopping!

The texts and emails were flying at a giddying pace leading up to the trip – accommodation, transport, border crossings, visas, flight dates… it made me realise how much my travel style had plummeted from it’s original ‘project planning’ with spreadsheets, research, advanced bookings etc… to the opposite extreme condition of no planning, no bookings, no organisation whatsoever.

Between the four of us we reached a happy medium with a few odd bookings here and there, but in the end even international and connecting flights were changed to allow for our haphazard evolving odyssey!

So to introduce the key players in the Caribbean chapter, this is how I found each of the girls: 

Amber, my twin sister, I eventually found on the ferry dock of Caye Caulker after I’d been eagerly skipping back and forward meeting other ferries during the day. She stumbled off the afternoon ferry carrying her little bag smiling and tired. She’d spent days catching flights, making connections (she even missed a flight while she was off with the fairies in the lounge waiting for it in the wrong time zone, oopsies) and eventually made it to the island more or less on time. Pretty good effort really!

Despite the one missed flight she’s the high end expert traveler who arrived with the smallest school bag of all. It weighed the least and contained just enough gear to survive every occasion from scuba diving to fine dining. She’s the traveler that gets curious looks when she checks in for her third connecting international flight without any checked baggage and a carry on bag that would rival most handbags. Round of applause. 

Ali, the expert packer, also arrived with a small bag although it somehow contained a lot. She also endured a grueling mutli-leg, mutli-country journey to arrive at the island ready for a nap. This magical bag she arrived with contained enough bikinis and clothing that in the months we spent together she never seemed to have the need to wear anything twice. Expert packer indeed. The amusing downside to this ultra-packing approach was that it required quite a strategic refined technique to repack each time we moved.

Finally Amy, the ultimate backpacker, I found sprawled out in bed, bag unpacked and kickin’ back in island mode already. She was clearly taking well to her newfound unemployment, the island suited her, she did not need time to unwind and acclimatise. She’d only packed a small bag with a few bikinis and not a lot else… I guess she was shedding her PPE (heavy mining work wear) for as little as possible.

Amy and I had a day to prepare before Ali and Amber arrived so we did our best to create a goodie-bag of essential items like chocolates, coffee, chips, a beach umbrella and unfortunately a couple of regular umbrellas for the evening rain. In a stroke of good (or bad) fortune the first time we actually used the beach umbrella was to fend off a violent downpour when we first arrived off the ferry.

The main purpose of our trip to Belize was to scuba dive. While it’s one of the more expensive destinations in Central America it’s also home to some of the most unique and beautiful dive sites. Amber and Ali signed up to do their PADI Open Water course and Amy and I scouted around to choose some fun dives, and to blow our budget by diving the infamous Blue Hole.

Amber and Ali claimed to be focused students and were taking the course very seriously… Until they realised their instructor wasn’t either focused or taking anything seriously, and so ensued a few days of taking pictures, talking to each other underwater and doing somersaults and succumbing to whatever other whims would overtake them.

At odd intervals their instructor might pause to briefly explain “what you should do”, followed by “but we won’t worry about that”. The poor girls were left confused, uninformed, misinformed and more than a little unsafe with faulty equipment, “don’t worry that’s normal”. Ah dear. We debriefed each evening wondering what craziness they were faced with each day.

Ali and Amber were busy with their course so Amy and I jumped on a boat for the Blue Hole. It bucketed so hard on our way out that it stung our skin and left us shivering cold! It took a little under a couple of hours from memory, bouncing through the open seas to the atolls and islands. We both pulled on our wetsuits for some protection and huddled together laughing and excited to be together, and to be diving the Blue Hole!

To book this day trip we put our budget before safety and went with the same dive company as Amber and Ali had for their course. It was around a $100+ saving to go with the dodgy brothers and we checked all our gear and the boat first, figuring we had each other as dive buddies to stay safe. It was such a great day, but also a big learning experience. In hindsight we both regretted going with this company, but learnt not to skimp on safety in the future. What a crazy but excellent day!

It turned out some of our gear was a little faulty, namely the pressure gauge had a torrent of bubbles flowing out of the connection and the face (along with a few other divers), and the inflator button on my BCD was sticking. At one point my BCD inflated uncontrollably while Amy helped pull me down, both kicking frantically while I purged my vest, eventually having to unclip the valve and manually inflate/deflate my BCD for the remainder of the dive.

(Google Image)

Anyway we survived and had a ball thereafter. The first dive was at the Blue Hole and wow was it surprising! It’s a deep dive so without using nitrogen the whole shebang from start to finish can only be around 20 minutes, and most of that is a slow ascent. The initial 5 minute descent to 40m had me grinning so hard my jaw hurt and Amy and I were signaling wide smiles to each other with our hands and with our eye’s bursting out of our goggles in shock.

(Google Image)

At around 30m depth the vast blue hole, otherwise a bland hole of nothingness and dark blue, widens out into a cave-like opening with enormous stalactites hanging down all around. We dove in to the sides engulfed in the relative darkness, out of reach from the last struggling rays of sunshine. We navigated around these huge hanging pillars keeping an eye on our gauges and each other when suddenly in our peripheral vision there were sharks… not one or two… and not small reefies… there were around six extra large helpings of nurse sharks checking out the bubbling diver snacks in their den. Eek! I was amazed! It made me tingle like a hundred reef sharks cannot. Amy and I stuck close as we slowly ascended monitoring our gauges and each other’s blind spots, what a trip!

In between island hopping and a picnic lunch we had two other magical dives at Half Moon Caye and Lighthouse Reef where we saw animals we’d never seen before. Not the least exciting of which was a strange dolphin-faced spotted eagle ray (haha, not the scientific name) flying through the water with its wings spread like it was soaring through the grand canyon. They really do fly through the water, tranquilo, slow motion, wearing a strange dolphin like face and an absurd grin you can see from the underside. How bizarre, and wow how it caught our attention. We starred and starred while it cruised nearby.

We had a quick walk around one of the islands between dives and saw some other neat animals but were more excited to get back in the water.

Half Moon Caye, just a touch, a touch of paradise.

A reasonable place for a picnic lunch, island style.

Amber and Ali survived their PADI course and were passed out, fully fledged certified divers! Now that’s what I call a productive start to a holiday. Besides diving we also spent some time eating from swing chairs, swinging in hammocks, drinking with our feet dangling in the ocean and roaming barefoot on the sandy streets… the usual gig.

One of our trip highlights was discovering the best breakfast place on Caye Caulker, Amor, which doubles as a trip lowlight for Amber and Ali who overdosed on the world’s strongest ice coffee. It sent them both in to shakes and relative depression, which led to an afternoon curled in bed wishing they hadn’t. I tried it out the following day, as a regular coffee drinker, to gauge the strength and wowser, it made my veins vibrate and my jaw ache uncomfortably. Heavy gear.

We spent some of our hours jumping in and out of the water at the channel with the girls laying in the sun tanning away all evidence of their long-sleeve-uniform work life. With every layer of glowing sun that draped over them they sank deeper in to holiday mode...

The girls spent some time trying the local cocktails, taking advantage of the bar on the channel. I couldn’t think of a better looking scene, two beautiful girls in bikinis, dripping wet from the ocean and glowing warm from the sun ordering blended ice drinks at a rustic outdoor wooden bar on an exotic island. Absolute magic.

A back-to-front tricycle… we found these things really funny at first but came to realise they are the norm all through Central America. Equally used to carry produce and/or people, I’m still not convinced it’s the most efficient engineering but I see it does the job.

After a little debate we decided it was time to move on north to the islands off Mexico. We took a variety of ferries, boats and, buses via San Pedro - Ambergris Islands, a border crossing at Chetumal – Mexico, and on to the glorious milky aqua waters of the Yucutan region.

We enjoyed a brief overnight stop on Ambergris Island where Amber enjoyed some resort style service - after trapesing alone through so many airports to fly across the world to meet me I figured I could carry her little school bag for ten minutes. Another noteable event on Ambergris was our best friend Zoe phoned us that night announcing her engagement!!! How exciting to get such happy news, absolutely awesome! Although once again left  wishing I wasn't so far apart from the ones I love. This newly engaged little lady especially.

Now on a whole different scale of excitement, let's take it down a notch so as not to belittle Zoe's engagement... I wish I could more definitively separate the next stupid thing I want to say but anyway, it's worth a mention... We ate a ridiculously huge and delicious pancakes-and-bacon breakfast before we departed the following morning. Scrump-diddly-umptious. Recommend this beachside cafe, Licks if you find yourself between ferries or on holiday there.

 

On a mission with my triple AAA team (Amber, Ali, Amy) and our beach umbrella. One last ferry terminal before we hit Mexico!

Hasta luego beautiful blue Belize xxx