Jun 07

Border crossings are now becoming one of the highlights of moving countries. Taking the boat over from Placencia to Pueto Cortez in Honduras we had to take a detour a few miles down the coast to a deserted container port where we somehow found someone with an exit stamp for the passports, then on the way over we were stopped twice in mid ocean by the coast guard, who seemed to care less about the quantites of Marrie Sharps hot sauce we could be smuggling over, but more that we should be wearing our life jackets rather than using them as pillows! Honduras wasn´t really any more geared up, you´d of thought they might be vaguely interested in who was arriving into their country, but jumping off at a random pier at the port it turns out that you have to get a taxi to somewhere across the other side of town which turned out to be little more than a shop with another dude and a stamp before you were officially ´in´ Honduras

The main port of call for anyone that goes to Belize has to be the Bay Islands, a couple of hours off the mountainous coast line just out of La Ceiba.

Utila, billed as the ´cheapest place to dive in the world´ is the preferred destination for most travellers, which unfortunately also means for a kind of Thailand-esq scrum of diveshops trying to ply their trade to the fresh meat arriving off the ferry each morning. But once through the wall of flyers the charms of the little island are quite evident, and living on the water at Altons diveshop became my life for the next week.

The dive sites on the island are amazingly convenient to the main harbour with massive corral formations, wrecks (the Haliburton was a deliberately scuttled 100m long supply ship just off the lighthouse reef, however the powers that be failed to obtain a protection order on the vessel and thus according to maritime law as soon as it goes down it is fair game. So within 15 mins of it being sunk perfectly by the local dive shops, 2 massive salvage tugs were steaming towards here both intent of refloating her and flogging her off for scrap! luckily this was averted giving us some amazing diving round and through it) and sea-mounts within 10 mins of the dock, so managed to get quite a lot of diving in, but again without a decent underwater camera these things can´t really be shown to a wider audience, you´re just going to have to come out here to see for yourself...
One thing a camera can never quite capture is the whole surealness of diving at night, dropping in just as the sun is going down things take on a whole new life, seen by the light of the torch in the real colours they are without the filtering effect of the sea water above you. It really is an amazingly peaceful way to dive and the lobsters, octopuses and weird glowing squids that only come out at night, along with the millions of stars you get to see when you surface in the middle of black sea make you want to give up daytime diving all together.

The whole PADI way of trying to role people through the courses as quickly as possible was again evident out here, with Divemasters qualified at 18 yrs old with less dives than I have as a ´non-staff´diver. And more frighteningly supposed ´advanced´ divers perfoming emergency accents from 20m just because they couldn´t clear their mask out resulting in a slightly worrying trip to the hyperbolic chamber.

Altons was the king of the party schools with regular bbqs on the dock and ´booze cruises´ round the bay throughout the week with compulsory rum. These boat trips turn out to be a great place to perform the final examination of the Divemaster qualification, the infamous snorkle test as Randy proudly demonstrates below





and along with the initiation into the rugby team at uni is one of those things that you really only want to do once in life...

Of all the bars on the island honorable mention has to go to the Jade sea horse aka Treetanic . THE greatest place I have ever been to in my life. Basically one guys lifes work, creating a giant nevernever land style tree house, with exquisitely decorated little niches, even after going there for 3 nights in a row we were still finding new rope swings and grottos to explore and relax in.

Photos really don´t do this place justice in the slightest

Unfortunately with all the diving, swimming and jumping off docks I managed to get quite a nice ear infection; stopping my diving career before it even started. So what do you do on a tropical island when you can´t even go in the water? turn to rum of course...
That lasted 3 days until I realised trying to sit out the infection for another week would pretty much be the end of my liver, and that wasn´t insured for as much as I would of liked it to be, so the next morning I was up at 5am for the first boat out of town.