You betta Belize dat!

Continuing the Cruise saga, our second stop was in Belize City, Belize. Some of you may have heard that Belize is a poor and scary place to have a stop in and that you need to be very careful. We had heard that same thing from several people and that we should only do the excursions through the cruise and that we should...blah blah blah. We didn't. We went and booked a Cave-Tubing tour with VIV tours through shoretrips.com and we don't regret it at all.

So, when we first met our guides, I was honestly just the tiniest bit judgmental. The first one we met was Rocca. He's a black dude with yellowing eyes, dreadlocks, and baggy clothes. As we left the safety of the port with him silently leading the way I was thinking: "I hope we don't die." We jumped in the van with the other guide, Kareem, driving and began our trip. Rocca sat so he could face the back of the van and all of us and just began telling us all about Belize, the city, the people, the language, and the places we past as we made our 45 minute drive to our destination. Once he got going he seemed to open up a lot and was just super friendly and knowledgeable about everything around us. It made for an interesting drive, despite Jessica and I not being able to sit next to each other and whisper sweet nothings to each other. I had to settle for the stranger in the back.

The place we went to for the Cave Tubing is a national park where a lot of different tour companies bring their people. We were lucky enough to arrive just as it began raining a little and cooled the place down a bit. Our tubes were the Cadillacs of tubing, but for the first bit of the tour we had to carry them before they could carry us. We walked with our tubes for about 40 minutes through the jungle to get to the entrance of the cave. The trek was long, but we enjoyed talking to Rocca and Kareem about the plant life and animals around us. Kareem said he used to work in an office with a never-ending stack of paper work to do. Now his job is to take people through a 2 mile cave every day. Guess which one he likes better. I have to admit I'm a bit jealous of his current job.

Although, apparently not every tour guide has it so great. As Rocca and Kareem lazily pulled our 8 person groups down the river in the caves we were passed by a few tours on a time crunch. The cruise-booked tours are so big and are so time sensitive that the guides have to go as fast as they can. We watched a few poor guides working as hard as they could to pull 8 lazily floating tourists passed us. We enjoyed being able to listen to our guides talk about the caves, but honestly it was just interesting and on the verge of boring. Most of this trips enjoyment came after we got out of the cave. We jumped off rocks, we chewed allspice leaves, we watched people get stuck in the weeds and panic in three feet of water, we skipped rocks, and we laughed with Rocca and Kareem. And when I say we laughed with them it was because it was impossible not to laugh when Rocca laughed. It sounded like this, and this is only my second rate impression of what his laugh was.

 The video is short because I think if the laugh was looped you'd all go a little bit crazy. As I was making it Jessica gave me the evil eye.

Anyway, after the caves Kareem and Rocca took us to a little restaurant with authentic food, and although it was not iguana like we wanted, the chicken, rice and beans were really good.
On the drive back to port as Rocca was telling us about the city we passed an LDS church and simultaneously we said "Hey that's our church!" and Rocca said "Hey, that's my church!" So it turns out he is a member there in Belize and we compared primary stories with him. His favorite primary song is "Popcorn Popping". Go figure. No matter where you go in the world the church is the same right down to the primary songs.
Its hard to really adequately describe how much fun we had in  Belize, but it really was - great company, great conversation, great scenery, and great helmets. Being with our friends and making new ones with Rocca and Kareem was just a great experience and a lot of fun. "Don't stop Belizen!"