I have just arrived in Singapore and am currently in between travel partners! Sarah has now gone to Melbourne and I am meeting Julia in Bangkok in a couple of days. It feels very odd not to have Sarah with me as we have spent every minute in each others company for the last 3 months!! We have had quite a relaxed time since Guatemala. We spent a week in Belize where we went straight to the Cayes - islands off the mainland surrounded by reef. Belize is so different from everywhere else in Central America as it is far more Caribbean. Everyone speaks English and Creole, as well as Spanish and it is far more Westernised. It is also far more expensive which is why we had cut our time there down to just a week. Our main aim was to dive the Blue Hole, which is the picture on the front page of my blog. It is a sunken cave surrounded by coral and you have to go down to 42 metres where you can go under the lip of the cave entrance and swim in and out of the huge stalactites that are down there. Normally you are only supposed to go to 30 metres when diving so it was pretty deep and at that depth you can get 'narked' - the nitrogen in your system makes you feel either paranoid or drunk - I thought the stalactites were wobbling as I was swimming past them! The dive was really amazing and on our way up we saw the silhouette of a shark in the distance. We were all getting excited and trying to swim towards where it was when we realised we were actually surrounded by about 20 reef & bull sharks. It was amazing. They came right up to us but weren't at all scary as they were far more interested in the fish around them. The rest of the day was spent doing 2 more dives and then drinking a lot of rum punch on our way back to the island while the dive masters all danced to reggae (it amazes me how excited they can get about Bob Marley even though it is literally playing everywhere all day every day). After that we couldn't afford to do anymore diving at that price but we did get to snorkel with nurse sharks, turtles and stingrays, and generally get into the Caribbean relaxed atmosphere. We left Belize on 24 August and spent a day in LA where we hit Melrose Avenue in a big way and can now barely lift our rucksacks again. Woops. Then on to Fiji where we stayed for a week. Again, Fiji is pretty expensive compared with everywhere else we have been so we decided not to do much touring around all the islands but instead stayed on one for the whole week. It was a brilliant place called Manta Ray Island - we were able to snorkel with Manta Rays there which were amazing. They are the really big rays that feed on plankton and the ones we saw were about 5 metres wide wing to wing. They are really beautiful creatures. The island was great fun and as we were there a week we were fairly long term residents and got to know all the local staff. The Fijian people are so friendly and love partying so we had a lot of fun with them. We didn't have as cultural an experience there as we probably should have (although we did do the compulsory local village tour) but we had a lot of fun just snorkelling on the reef and hanging out on the beach in our last week together and we loved Fiji. I am spending 2 days in Singapore before I meet Julia on Monday and embark on the next phase of the trip! I'm expecting quite a culture shock when I get to Bangkok after the last couple of weeks. xx