This morning after breakfast I walked out to the garden and saw all of the iguanas having their breakfast.... Nice fresh fruit chopped up by the hotel staff!! We started talking to one of the guys who works here, who explained to us all about the wildlife they have at the hotel! He then got us some food for the turtles, so we fed the turtles in the pond which was brilliant! If that was the only thing I did today I would have been happy!! But lucky for me, I had more things planned!!
Kim, Barry (a you beaut couple from Perth) and myself were picked up at 8am and taken out to our tubing location!! The cover photo is of a postcard I got showing tubing, as we couldn't take anything that wasn't waterproof!! So a depiction in a postcard is better than nothing?!?!
When we pulled into the car park, we notice that all these buses were coming in.... Wouldn't you know it, cruise ship day!! The thousands of tourists keep piling off the 8 buses that turned up!! Holy crap, this is going to be a human tubing soup!!
We started off by grabbing our tubes!! I did feel like Michelin Man carrying the tube!! We then had to walk for just over 30min to get to our launch place!! We walked through the jungle, where our guide started ripping branches off trees, leaves off bushes, cracking open seeds and mushrooms off logs to provide us with bush snacks along the way!! Lots if it was really good as well!!
We also saw lots of wildlife, including birds, fish, frogs, ants, bats and these raccoon looking things!
We then came to a path where all the tourists were going down, and instead of going down the path that the thousand other tourists were going down, our guide took us along another path that took us higher than everyone else!! Brilliant, we were going to have some quiet time! We got to our launch place and we all managed to jump in our tubes without falling out... Good start!!! Then we slowly started drifting into our first cave!! It was stunning!!! At this stage we were allowed to just float around and look at things as slowly as we wanted!! We had the occasional other tourist float by, but it was nice just to take it all in!! The only thing that freaked me out was when the guide said that we should be careful when touching the walls as there were spiders on them!! I stayed all the way down the middle of the river!! Anytime our guide took us close to the wall I was telling him to not let me touch the wall!! I think he thought it was hilarious!! But I was seriously freaking!!
Anyway, we floated out of the first cave and that's when the human tubing soup began! Now these groups were all tethered together, it was like a chain gang of tubes. And you could hear them coming from a mile away!! The guide would be up front giving a running commentary on absolutely everything in the cave system, and I'm surprised that you couldn't hear them back in Australia they were that loud! And boy were they paddling madly, just like human steamboats!! They were going so fast, that the people on the tubes couldn't even focus on the sites before they had gone past them!! Much like formula1 one blink and you missed it!! Thank god our guide was so laid back and cruisy, where he just pulled us to the side (away from the spider walls of course) and let them fly by!! We did have to join together by this stage, more because we would have no hope in hell of finding our guide in the caos if we lost him!! He just gently paddled us through the second cave and all the way through the jungle that we had walked earlier to where we started!! It was so cool!!
We walked 2 min back to the bus, where we got changed and had a delicious belizean lunch, of chicken, rice, beans and potato salad! And a cold beer of course!
We then made it back to the hotel, where I decided to hit the town! I ended up catching a taxi in by myself, as I just wanted to have a look around take some photos!! I ended up seeing Joyce (our tour grandma) in town so we walked round the town! To be honest there's not much to see in town, I think we covered the 2 streets in about 15min, but we sat and had a drink and watched the world go by. We then had some dinner with Barry and Kim and headed back to our hotel after that!!
I can honestly say that I have loved Belize...maybe even more than Mexico!! Big call I know!! The people here are just so lovely and the country has so much to offer!!! I feel very blessed to have been able to experience this beautiful country!! It also helps when they speak English!!!