Friday, December 14, 2007

Un-Belize-able

Here are some pictures from an adventure Chad and I took. We went to Belize for six days for a little expedition time. Chad had free airline miles for us to use, so months ago we began planning our journey. We picked Belize because it is home to the second largest reef in the world. There are hundreds of Cayes (pronounced keys) dotted all up and down this reef. Those are little islands. We found a spot that had some Cayes grouped together that we could camp on called the Queen Cayes. The island we picked was maybe one acre in size. It had exactly 13 palm trees covered in coconuts which was awesome as we ate and drank a great deal of them. They are NOT easy to break into. Right now I am writing the short summary of our trip with some pictures, but over the next few days I will post more about the trip and what we did, saw, and learned.

We paid for a shuttle to boat us and all of our gear to these Cayes. They are 25 miles off the coast of Belize so once we got there we were out in the middle of the ocean. We did not see another soul until the very last day, it was awesome. We spent our time Kayaking from island to island and snorkeling the many incredible reefs that surround the islands. It was incredible!!! For five days we had the ocean and islands to explore. Enjoy the pics and I promise details soon.




This is the amount of gear that we had to figure out how to get into two back packs! We actually had more gear than this. Now that we have been there we know what gear we could have left behind, but since it was our first time we took heavier loads because we wanted to be sure we had all that we needed. We planned for almost every scenario we could think of. A wise teacher once told me, "failing to plan is planning to fail." So we took extra gear...and I am thankful we did. More info on that on another post.



Once we flew in to Belize we then had to take a bus ride south to Placencia. It took us six and a half hours to get there.


We had a boat shuttle from placencia to the islands. It was 25 miles out and took about an hour and twenty minutes just to get to the islands.


I had the pleasure of sitting next to the boats which kept shifting into me and pinching my legs like crazy, that and I was sitting in the middle of the boat in the worst spot imaginable so every time the boat crashed down on the waves my spine felt like it would shoot through my skull. That part was rough.

Here we are on an open water paddle.