Saturday 06.08, almost two weeks ago, myself, Ludde, Enrique and some of his Venezuelan friends went for a full day tour on the biggest rum brewery in Venezuela. On the drive out I sat in the front seat, listening to spanish pop and daydreaming, mainly about Belize and diving in the great blue hole. The idea got stuck in my head, and stayed there. After a great day with rum-tasting, paintball and tours around the destilleries I finally got the chance to check out how much a Central - Amerika adventoure would cost. Hours of comparing flight fares later, I booked my one way ticket to Belize city. Ludde, for economical reasons, decided to stay with our original plan, going to Colombia. Hopefully, we´ll meet up somewhere down the road back in South America!
My flight-itinerary was a 34 hour travel with stops in Bogota, a sleepover in Panama City, San Salvador and then Belize city. All flights were more or less on time, and they were all equipped with a personal entertainment center, touch screen TV and comfy seats. So no complaints there. Even the sleepover in Panama turned out great, were I met other travellers spending the night in the comfortable cushioned chairs in the waiting - areas. At arrival in Belize City I teamed up with a Canadian couple, Megan, who had been living in Belize for a couple of months, and Tyler. After being offered a number of illigal substances our first 15min in Belize city, we hopped on the first boat out of the noisy, shady capito and went out to the tiny settlement out in the coral-reef surrounded islands. Caye Culker. True to my mission I looked up a couple of different dive-shops and questioned them on what I needed to know before booking a tour out to "the great blue hole". I quickly signed up for a trip leaving two days later.

Caye Culker is an amazing, chilled out place, with a more carebbian feel than Central American. No cars are allowed on the island and everybody gets around on bikes, Golf carts or on foot. It has a great diversity of resturants and street food, that mainly revolves around the easily accesible food found in the ocean: Lobsters, crab, barracuda and snappers. Some years back, a hurricane raided the once twice as big island and split it in half. In this spot, were there now is a 30m wide strait, there was set up a bar, The Lizard Lounge, and the surrounding beach is just called the split. This is arguably the main attraction on the island. The water holds about 31 degrees, and the delicious Belizian beer costs about 2usd at the Lizard. It is probably also the best place to establish new aquintances, or however that horrible word is spelled. Spent most of the waiting time for the dive hanging out at the split with Megan and Tyler, having beers in the water and jumping of the pier. Good times.
When dive-day finally came lurking I was as excited as a 6-year-old on christmas. All nine divers met up at 0530 in the morning for a shared breakfast and coffe. I hadn´t really thought to much about the details about the dive, wich actually requires an advanced PADI-licence, before I suddenly was surrounded by only dive-masters and proffesional marine biologists. Luckily, the dive shop cared more about the 180usd I would be leaving with them than anything else. The boat-ride out to The Great Blue Hole is of the rough sorts. Driving for 2 hours, crashing into big waves in a small speedboat. But all sour backs and sick stomachs were forgotten when we all of a sudden were drifting in the middle of this crazy reef formation. Dive-time.
The dive is basically a slow descent down to 40 meters, where you swim around in this collapsed cave for 8 min before you start the just as slow ascent. What I hadn´t prepared for was the sharks. I´ve dove with sharks before, but not this close or that many. Once we entered the hole 50-60 reef sharks, all about 2.5 m, kept cirkeling underneath and in between the divers. Several times, they were actually close enough to touch. This combination of drifitng around on 40m depth in a collapsed cave, with schools of sharks almost sniffing your toes was definately one of the highlights of the trips so far. On our way up we got an unexpected visitor. A massive great hammerhead showed up from nowhere, joined in to check out the divers before he glided away into the darkness. Our dive-master told us that in his 11 years of diving the great blue hole, he has seen hammerheads once. Luck. One of my fellow divers, Matthew, has promised to send me his underwater photos from the dives when he gets back to England in a couple of days. Hopefully they´ll do a better job at explaining the crazyness of this place than my words could ever do.
The two other dives on the trip was in the coral reefs surrounding the Blue Hole. Having done some reef-diving before, I really didn´t expect that much. That turned out to be a false assesment, cause the combination of crystal - clear water and healthy colorfull reef was absolutely spectacular. Swimming through coral-formations with huge barracudas, tarpons, turtles, sting- and eagle - rays, lion fish and also here a Great Hammerhead Shark in 30-40 m visibility was just fantastic.
Back on the island I celebrated the grand succes with a fresh lobster and barracuda steak dinner with Megan and Tyler. A massive meal that probably would have costed me about a house and a car back in Norway, but here it was about 50Kr. And Belize is supposed to one of the most expensive countries in Central Amerika.
The following two days were mostly spent in The Split with everybody from the dives, including a british parlament - representative, just haveing beers and chilling out. My plan at the moment was to start heading for Guatemala as soon as possible, making my way down to Colombia. A Texan family put a couple of bullets in that plan when they told me about the Yucatan region of Mexico and the grand cenotes, huge cave systems with water as clear as air, and where there still in August is whale - shark season. I had to go. One of the other divers, who is working in another region of Mexico, decided to take a couple of days more of work to join me in Mexico for Cave - exploring and whale sharks. So after saying goodbye to Megan, Tyler and all the others in Caye Culker, on saturday I headed of to Mexico with Karen. Pictures and entries from Mexico are just around the corner!