Belize

 

 We arrived in Belize 3 days after leaving Livingston Guatemala.  This is a pleasant little place, with half-way decent provisioning and great restaurants...who needs to provision if you can eat out??  

It's  little blurry, in this photo, because it is raining hard!  When it rains here, it really rains!  We got 20 plus gallons of drinking water added to our tanks.  We should have taken a photo, but what we do is wait for the decks to be thoroughly wet, scrub the foredeck, then damn it up behind the deck intake...and let the water run in.  Works very well and faster than our watermaker.



These fishermen are in Placencia Harbour, but we've seen them out in the Cays too.  They all sleep aboard for weeks at a time...God knows where?  What a life!! 

We anchor off this bar, called Yoli's, where we can get free internet from the hotel next door.  They don't have food, except a BBQ on Fridays.

 

There is no country check-in, in Placencia, so you have to go to the big ship dock area by water taxi.  This is the Mango Creek water taxi stop, and from here we go by land taxi to Big Creek for check in. We thought you might never have seen a menu quite like this one...we haven't either. Really, who orders seaweed and Ovaltine?

 

In Placencia they have what they call the "narrowest street in the world"...really a board walk.  Lots of little shops and restaurants.  Barefoot Bar is one of our favourites.

 



 

One of the houses or shops along the route.

 

 

Ralph liked the spelling here!

 Little guys on the front porch.  Wonder where Mama is?

 

This is actually a little out of order as we really did this river tour/hike after returning from Garbutt, which are the photos below these.  It's just too much work to reorganize it, so I'm just going with it like this...unless I let my OCD take over and correct it. 

I let Ralph talk me into yet another river tour/hike combo.  Don't even ask!!!  Just plain stupid, is all I can say.  We went with Homers' Odyssey (Stan and Lynn), fellow cruising buddies from Calgary, and their landlubber friends, Pat and Harry. 

 

This is where we started, called the Monkey River Tour, and the bugs started too.  Before that, we were going too fast for them to keep up.  There were some new ones, called "Doctor Flies" because of their liking to take blood...you get the picture!!

 

A resident croc.

 

 



Bats waiting for their night out. 

 

Our guide was actually very good, but I had a very difficult time paying attention and focusing on what he was saying because I was trying to keep myself safe from the bugs.  They loved me, even though I'd slathered deet on before the trip, and during.  I was a lot better off once Harry suggested I use this breadfruit tree leaf as a swatter!  What a brilliant man!!  Here, Brent, our guide, is showing us how the little hooks on the back of the leaves act like Velcro.





 

Once on land, the doctor flies left us alone...must be just along the river...or maybe just a change of shifts??  The mosquitoes took over...and did an even better job!  They drove us all nuts and we cut it a bit short as all were being "bugged to death"!  Here we are at a large stand of bamboo.





 

 

On the way back, we stopped to watch the manatees.  We didn't get many good looks, nor many good photos.  They're not big on jumping out of the water.



 

Sometimes just a nostril is all you see.

 

After a very long wait for weather, in Placencia, we finally escaped and headed north.  We had a great sail to Garbutt Cay.  When we went to anchor, and go into reverse to set it...we had no reverse.  We couldn't figure it out but the end result is that the tranny is on the fritz.



 

We hung out there, for several days, waiting for Cucumber Beach Marina to tell us they had room.  Eventually, after a real run around, we headed back to Placencia.  We had waited almost a week for them, but no real help. The junk and plastics on the beaches is just appalling! 

 

While there, we went ashore to the tiny mangrove island where we found this huge pile of conch...it's almost obscene when you see this and wonder how long it must take them to get that size.  I must google that.



 

Here are some more.

 

This is where the fisherman lives...talk about basic!

 

This was his collection of fish floats, hanging in the tree.  He also had several hard hats, not sure where from or what for.

 

So, here we are in Robert's Grove Marina awaiting the arrival of our new rebuilt tranny from Maine.  We'll be here a couple of weeks, to three, probably.

 



 And here is the culprit.  No fun for Ralph, getting this out.  150 lbs., all together, and of course not easy to get at.  Wish us luck!