Monthly Archives: January 2011

Belize

Day 1 – Cave Tubing Video

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I woke up at 5:30am this morning and decided not to try to go back to sleep. Went through my usual morning routine and clipped together this video of our cave tubing adventure!

Unfortunately, the Go Pro Hero, despite it’s awesomeness, does not adjust for low-light very well. So all of the actual “cave” part of the video had to be clipped out. Still, there was enough left over to give you a sense of what this activity was about.

Enjoy!

(we have a “professional” scuba video, and people have noticed the lack of this particular song in that video…I decided to use it here. :P)

Belize

Day 1 – 5 Sisters Lodge

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5 Sisters was the best lodging we had while traveling, I would highly recommend this place to anyone traveling through the interior of Belize. The downside of our trip – we didn’t have time to experience much more than the most basic parts of their experience, but it was more than enough to allow me to make this recommendation.

This was the room that Sean and I shared. I have other photos of the girls place and the outside, but they are in day 2 :).

The glass on the left contained a punch/rum drink, which was presented to us when we arrived and consumed minutes later. I’m a big fan of any place that gives you rum when you show up at the door :P.

The dinner table that was set for the 6 of us. A beautiful setup – unfortunately because of the dark the view behind isn’t visible yet. We’ll see it again in day 2. The food was great – but I’ll write about that in a food specific post later. For now, we can marvel that my photo turned out as amazing as it did! This sort of photo makes me really glad I bought a new camera a few months ago.

After dinner (and a few more drinks…) we took the walk down 300 stairs from the lodge to a waterfall/lagoon at the base of the cliff.

More camera geekery – these two photos were taken in full-dark, by the light of the full moon. 🙂 We went swimming. I made the brilliant decision to use the waterfall as a water slide. In hindsight, this was a bad idea – the next morning I found that my tailbone had swollen up and it reminded me of the last time I had hit it on something – I almost ended up in emergency because of an infection >.>. (3 days later and a lot of Motrin the swelling had subsided and no one was the wiser…:D) Sliding down was lots of fun though…the waterfall had made the rocks completely smooth.

300 stairs back up later, Sean and I had a game of Carcassonne in our room and then fell asleep.

Day 2 will probably be split up as well, with some more 5 Sisters love at the beginning and then the rest of the day. But we’ll deal with that tomorrow. Later!

Belize

Day 1 – Seattle, Houston, Road-side Food

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Day 1 started around noon on the 18th of January. I left my house and took the skytrain to Main St. I got on a bus from there down to Seattle – saved about $300 with this plan.

I’m on a bus.

I got off the bus in Seattle and was pleased to notice that I actually knew where I was, and where I was going. All of those years going to PAX have paid off! A quick walk over to the Link Light Rail and I was good to go.

The Link Light Rail shares the same road with bus’s for about half of it’s route – very strange if you’re used to the Skytrain and it’s very separate track.

A half hour trip later and I’m in the Seatac airport. My plane leaves around midnight. My plan was to sleep on that plane for 4 hours and then again for 3 hours on the Houston-Belize leg of the trip. Unfortunately…my body had other plans and I completely failed to sleep on the Seattle flight. Bad news, since I’m landing around noon Belize-time and we have plans to hit the ground running! I managed to catch some sleep in the Houston airport, and then again on the second flight, so I wasn’t actually much of a sleep-dep zombie when I landed. It was pretty close though. >.<

Some people changed into shorts and t-shirt on the plane. They were smart. I hadn’t thought of that and had to wear jeans when I landed in Belize. Bad call. It was hot and humid the instant I left the airplane.

The pack picked me up in front of the airport and we were off.

The folks in the truck:

  • Sean, driving.
  • Kerry, his wife.
  • Diane, Kerry’s mom.
  • Sandra, Kerry’s aunt.
  • Dayl, Kerry’s best friend.
  • Me

They had rented a Super-Duty (I think) truck with a huge bed and a cab that comfortably fit 6. This truck was worth every penny since most of the roads in Belize that we traveled on were dirt and not paved.

My first Belize experience was lunch:

Delicious road-side pork, rice and salad. Good times :). From left to right: Kerry, Sean, Sandra, Diane, Dayl.

The plan for the afternoon was cave tubing. It sounded like it would be an adrenaline sport, but it was pretty low-key. My only photos of this are videos and I don’t want to post any videos yet, so you’ll have to wait for a couple days :). But essentially you sit in a yellow inner tube for about 45-60 minutes and slowly drift down a gentle river through some caves. Very interesting, even if it wasn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be.

After that we drove for about an hour and a half along a dirt road to the 5 Sisters Lodge. Sean and Kerry had been there before, but the rest of us were worried – the road was crap, it was the middle of the night and I was pretty certain we were driving into a dirty, middle of no-where place. It turned out well though…I’ll cut this post in half and leave this here for now.

Belize

Welcome!

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Hello friends,

I came back from a significant vacation through Belize and Guatemala with a large number of photos and stories to share. Facebook is good for photos, but it’s pretty miserable for stories, and I really like typing. A bare-bones WordPress installation is exactly what I needed!

My plan looks something like this:

  • Several posts of day by day commentary.
  • Several posts of food specific talk.
  • Probably at most one post of board games played throughout the trip.
  • Probably one or two posts showing off scenery. Scenery is pretty, but it doesn’t need much typing to go along with it.

If you can read this, and were there and want to get posting access to this blog, drop me a line – I’d love it if others were interested in sharing their points of view. If you can read this and weren’t there, feel free to add a comment if you feel the desire.

And with that….I’m going to get some lunch! woot! 😛