Hello Steemit friends. Hope you are all having a nice weekend.

As you can read in my personal description I like photo- and videography. As till this moment I only used photo’s in my post. Today I want to try and show you some parts I captured with my Gopro when I was snorkeling in the waters near Caye Caulker in Belize.

I visited Belize last summer. Me and my girlfriend were in Livingston (Guatemala) after a boat trip over the Rio Dulce. From Livingston we took a boat to Punta Gorda, Belize, and from there we hopped on a chicken bus to a little town called Hopkins which is somewhere in the middle of Belize. We stayed here for a few days and then hitchhiked with some locals in a massive pickup truck further north. The guys took us over the dirt road at high speed to Belize City (the busses can’t go here), so we arrived in Belize City way earlier than we expected =). From Belize City we took a ferry to Caye Caulker.

Caye Caulker street view

Animal life on Caye Caulker

FYI we always like to travel on a budget, so Belize was a bit more expensive than we were used to. We checked out some dive schools but they were way too expensive in my opinion. Mainly because I am certified but my girlfriend not (yet) and we were asking around at different diving shops to dive together. None of them were willing to let my girlfriend to some kind of discovery dive with us. We never had any trouble with this in Asia, but in the shops in Caye they just wanted to sell full courses. A bit sad.

Luckily there is always snorkeling! And I can tell you it is just as good as diving because you almost get to see the same things (as in sea life). We did a whole day trip which consist of 6 snorkeling spots and 2 viewing spots to spot some manatees. It was mating season and the manatees come to the reef to mate. Usually they swim up and down between the reef and more deeper parts of the ocean. Unfortunately in the morning we could not spot one. The guide told us it can be hard to spot them sometimes because they can be under water from more than 15 minutes.

During the day with did some snorkeling on different spots. Saw turtles, nurse sharks and stingrays.

The guide from the tour desk was really nice and pretty concerned about the environment and animals during our trip. He asked us to collect pieces of plastic when snorkeling and made sure we did not interrupted the animals too much.

The reef in Belize is pretty vulnerable and in some places pretty damaged by recent hurricanes. There were a lot of places where we weren’t allowed to snorkel because they were replanting coral and trying to keep the reef healthy. The underwater world was so different compared to what i saw in Thailand a few years back (which also struggles with a lot of overfishing). The coral is quite damages on most places because of hurricanes (even the island of Caye Caulker is split in 2 parts because of a hurricane).

In the afternoon we got tipped by another boat about a manatee. We rushed over and were just in time to see it as it was swimming away from the reef. Amazing animal.

In the end we really enjoyed the trip and collected a nice amount of plastic. However collecting the plastic is like carrying coals to Newcastle. The amount of (tiny) plastics we saw drifting in the ocean was just frightening.

Anyway. Hope you enjoyed my blog and the attached photos/videos. Please let me know what you think of the small videos. Do the qualify as alternative for photos? Or maybe the loading takes too much time. Please let me know what you think.

If you are interested in reading any of my previous post:

• Visiting the northernmost point of Vietnam!
• Traveling Vietnam off the beaten track
• Visiting the Mayan National Park Tikal in Guatemala
• Hiking the Acatenango volcano in Guatemala

Cheers to you all and enjoy your weekend!

!steemitworldmap 17.766132 lat -88.028169 long Caye Caulker Belize d3scr