unbelizeable

First, a confession: like the tacky, unrepentant American tourist that I am, I bought a t-shirt at the airport that says "unbelizeable" on it. Usually puns bug the crap out of me, but that one cracks me up. At least I didn't get the one that says "You better Belize it" on it.

As I may have mentioned, we stayed on a tiny island named Caye (pronounced like "key") Caulker (apparently the name derives from the caulking they used to use to seal boats...man, do the British suck at naming stuff). It is very touristy insofar as tourism is essentially the only industry (other than a little fishing, what else can you do on an island a couple miles long, less than a mile wide, and in the middle of a gorgeous ocean?). It is very untouristy, however, insofar as virtually all of the places to stay, eat, etc. are all unpretentious, rough-around-the-edges, casual little mom-and-pop places. No chains, no huge hotels, no golf courses or swimming pools or other resort-y trappings. Very mellow and cool.

Our initial intention was to take a taxi from the Belize airport to the dock where the water taxi (i.e. boat) departs for Caye Caulker and Ambergris Island, a larger, more built-up island centered around the decently-sized town of San Pedro. (Fun trivia fact: remember "La Isla Bonita" by Madonna? "Last night I dreamt of San Pedro"? That song is about Ambergris Island.) However, we discovered once we got on the ground (actually, DWE saw it from the plane, but we confirmed it once we were on the ground) that the road from the airport was washed out, so it might have taken us hours to get to the water taxi dock. So instead we decided to fly to Caye Caulker. It's a ten minute or so flight on a teeny little winged deathtrap run by a teeny little domestic airline named Mayan Air (random thing that cracked me up: there is another either domestic or Central American airline flying out of Belize called "Taca Air", but every time I looked at the sign I thought it said "Taco Air").

Anyway, there are lots of pictures to show you, and lots of stories to tell, but I'll start in this entry with the pictures I took from the plane.

Some other, undeveloped islands. The dark parts of the water are where there is seaweed growing. The water is very shallow.

More islands and stuff out my window.

DWE, being cute but not very comforting as I worry about our tiny plane crashing and killing us.

This is Caye Caulker. The island was split in half by a hurricane (or at least that's how the story goes...apparently that might not be true) and the half to the left is the one where all the stuff is (obviously). The airstrip is on the very far left end of the island (just out of the frame) and it takes maybe twenty minutes to walk from there to the Split (as they call the place where the two parts are, well, split).

Look how tiny the plane is! We were in the second-to-last row.