When we woke up, Jes informed me that, for the second time in the last few nights, she had dreamed that we saw whale sharks. I had a similar dream the night before, so we took these as good omens for the day to come. This was sadly, painfully off target however...
We ate breakfast around the corner from the Splash dive shop at the only open restaurant we could find at that hour. I use the term "restaurant" loosely as it was basically some nerd's computer repair shop that happened to have a small kitchen in it. After charging us BZ$27 for a couple eggs, a slice of ham and a burnt bagel, we left without tipping to live out our previous nights' dreams.
We got to the dive shop right on time at 8:15am and I immediately found it curious that we were the only divers there. Still, there seemed to be a fair amount of hustle and bustle going on in the shop, so the thought was fleeting. The dive shop steward, a mid-20s Belizean, sat us down and started with "First off, I don't know how to apologize...". Turns out a paying member of the day's dive party had an afternoon flight to catch, and to facilitate him catching this flight, they bumped the departure time ahead by one hour. They were able to give notice to every other member of the group, except the ones who didn't write down their hotel name on their form: Jes and I. Because we had just come right off the boat and took the first place offered to us, we didn't catch the name of the hotel before we waltzed out to sign up for our whale shark trip. So, I suppose we have to take some of the blame for this, but to our credit, we described the location to him with supreme accuracy and also, they never gave any inkling that a time change was even a remote possibility and we should get back to the dive shop later with the hotel name. Bottom line, the boat was gone, and we weren't on it, a crushing way to start our day and even more crushing to finish our trip with no whale sharks.
After the initial pain of the depressing reality weakened, we started scheming. We had alotted the next day (Sunday) as a travel day back to Cancun, with our homebound flight scheduled to depart at 12:30pm Mexico time on Monday. We thought maybe we could push the return flight back a couple days and not only try the whale shark tour again, but also increase our chances at seeing them, as we had learned by this time that the best chance to see them was a day or two AFTER the full moon.
We finally were able to get in touch with WestJet after a lost morning of buying phone cards and messing around with pay phones. The only option was to postpone our return until Wednesday and pay them a gazillion dollars for the difference in the cost of flights, plus a change fee of course.
We nixed that idea and explore another last ditch alternative. We scouted around for some info on flight and bus schedules, as well as allowable border crossing times, and we were able piece together a travel plan that would get us to Cancun in time to catch our flight AND allow us to take the whale shark trip on the Sunday. We did have to consult the dive shop to get a guarantee that we could be back in time to board the 4:25 flight to Belize City, the very last flight out of Placencia. They gave us their word and told us that we would leave an hour early again. "Not a problem, thanks for telling us this time", I sneered, still hot from getting shafted earlier.
So we had a plan. A far-less-than-ideal plan, an impossibly-improbable-to-go-off-without-a-hitch plan, but a plan nonetheless. We would do the whale shark trip, be zipped back to land in time to catch the last flight of the day out of Placencia, catch the last bus of the day out of Belize City, cab across the border into Mexico and catch the latest possible bus out of Chetumal back to Playa where we'd have a leisurely breakfast, catch a few last warm rays of sun and catch the bus to the airport. That's a lot of catching!
We could have taken the easy route and gone whale-sharkless, but they, along with the blue hole, were one of the defining attractions of our trip to Belize. We were not about to give up that easy.
This left us with an unanticipated afternoon of freedom. We decided to use it to let off some steam from our stressful morning by kicking back with our books on the beach. We spent the better part of the afternoon drinking, eating, and drinking some more, beach-side at the Kozy Korner. We also got in some last minute trinket-shopping and had some soft-serve ice cream on the main drag, enticed by the unending free samples.
In the early evening we returned to the dive shop to confirm our departure and inquire about the success or failure of the outing that day. Maybe I was wearing my hat differently or something...I hadn't seen a lot of gangly white dudes who didn't fit through the dive shop door without ducking, but no joke, the guy looked at me a bit puzzled, as though he'd never seen me before. I was ready to rip into him when he clued in and confirmed that we were good to go in the morning. We'd leave our big packs in the shop and they'd arrange everything to get us to the airstrip to catch that flight.
Second order of business was to hear about the million whale sharks they saw that day, that we missed because of their nonchalance. He informed us that they didn't have any luck that day and didn't see a single whale shark. Relief washed over me in an awesome wave. Maybe things were going to turn out for the best after all.
We left with renewed confidence to go find some supper.
We settled on a small joint called J.Dee's on the main road that had a live reggae organ performer scheduled. We had delicious meals of barracuda and pork chops, maybe the best of the whole trip, and the musician was quite good. We left in a much better mood than that with which we started the day (the booze helped), and went back to the hotel to await more visions of whale sharks dancing in our heads.
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