Belize Day #7

We woke up later than usual, somewhere around 8am and I was feeling the pain. Jes was starving as usual and had to go for breakfast immediately. I was having no part of it, so she went out on her own and was kind enough to bring me back a breakfast burrito and sweet coffee from our favorite joint. 

We scrambled our packs together as we were getting shooed out of our room at 10am sharp, no messing around with checkout times here I guess. We wanted to catch the 11:00 flight to Dangriga but it turned out it was booked. We settled for the 1pm departure.

We left our big packs at the hotel and went for a walk to find lunch before our flight. I wanted either A/C or an ocean breeze to help my hangover and our favorite spot had neither of the above. We found a spot on the beach just up from our hotel and had a pair of pina coladas, a bacon cheese burger and fries for me and veggie wrap and coleslaw for Jes. 

Our golf cart taxi showed up on time and 5 minutes later we were at the airstrip. I was delighted to find Sunday afteroon NBA action on TV in the waiting room. A hotly-contested battle between East contenders Chicago and Orlando. 
In stark contrast to the airport standard we're used to in Canada, bags were taken and thrown straight on the plane, carry-ons not bothered to be searched and I'm not sure we even gave them our names! It was nice to not have all the extra travel time going through security. 
We had about a 1 hour layover in Belize City and then were off to Dangriga. On arrival, in our minds we'd just hop the next boat out to Glover's Reef for a relaxing few days on the atoll. It was already 3:00 and there was no chance of getting out there that night and as we found out, this little side trip was turning out to be cost-prohibitive. The options for getting out to the hotel we're pretty limited, the one seeming to be the best was a US$400 one-way water taxi that wouldn't even be able to get us there that night as it was too close to nightfall. Not a good mix with boating over a reef. We needed a new plan and I was in no mental or physical state to be participating in such high-brain-demand activities.

After much deliberation, we finally agreed...we're going to scout out some whale sharks! I approached the desk and asked when the next flight to Placencia left. She told me "7 minutes". Perfect! We booked it instantly, but there was a problem. There was a sudden an unexpected rumble from the nether regions of my bowels. I rushed to the men's room of the tiny airport and proceeded to diarrhea for the next 15 mins, during which time our plane landed, Jes grabbed my gear, got on the plane and the airstrip staff banged on the bathroom door for a solid 5 minutes. I apologized profusely for the delay and ran out to the plane, feeling each and every glare of contempt from through the airplane windows, including Jes's. How dare I delay these people's vacay by 8 minutes for my own selfish diarrhea! 

 We landed in Placencia and, after trying to be persuaded by some Hollywood chick into renting out her cabana a couple miles out of town, found a cabbie to take us to a hotel in town for cheap. After no deliberation, we settled on the Sea Spray which, despite its lack of A/C, was right on the beach and very central. We went immediately for a walk to talk to the dive shoppies. We found a stereotypical 60s hippie at a dive shop down the sidewalk from us. He informed us that he "could just take us out to look for whale sharks" but that they would be hard to find as they don't congregate at Gladden Split until the caviar banquet produced by the spawning zoo plankton on or around the full moon. The full moon wasn't scheduled until our departure day, a week to the day later, so we decide to make a new plan and try our luck with the whale sharks a couple days before the full moon.

We spent the evening dining seaside at the dock at the end of the sidewalk. I was sold enough by the pineapple-slice-topping to order the teryiaki chicken burger while Jes settled for a Thai veggie dish. We crushed delicious fruit smoothies with the meals as we schemed a new plan for our trip. We eventually reasoned that whale sharks weren't happening for at least a few days, so into the interior we'd go to explore some caves. A bit of a waste of a travel day, but them's the breaks of travelling by the seat of your pants.   We sourced out some info on the bus schedule and crashed early ahead of an early departure to Belmopan, near the Jaguar Paw cave tubing and A.T.M. archaeological site.