Day 21 31.07.15
Today was a busy day! We were going to leave the island at about midday, so we decided to try and “hunt” Manatees in the early mornings.
We got ready, I even managed to post some postcards, and went off to the trip shop to equip ourselves with flippers, masks and snorkels and off we went to our little motorboat.
Seeing as we weren’t sailing this time, we got to where we wanted to go to much quicker and then the hunt began. You have to picture the captain Amando standing at the steering wheel, looking into the ocean and every once in a while saying things like, “I tink we are gunna be locky tuday, I tink a see one”. You see, we had an amazing deal. Since we hadn’t seen any manatees on our trip the day before, we managed to talk to our captain Amando, who said, “If you don’t see any manatees during this trip, you will not have to pay.” Surprisingly nearly our whole group took him up on his offer and so we also heard Amando saying this like, “I tink, no I am 90% sure dat we gone get paid today!” The first time we all frantically hopped into the water, was unfortunately a false alarm. What Amando hat seen was more like a big round lump of corals. So we all got back into the boat – surprisingly relieved of having cooled down in the fresh ocean – and drove on to the next “tis is where they hang out” spot. He did spot something and so we all frantically got into the water again and swam off as close to the corals as possible, scanning every centimetre for the manatees to appear. And then they did.
They clearly are some big majestic creatures. I think Seekuh (seecow in German) doesn’t really do it justice. They looked more like really fat dolphins to be honest… We all huddled around them at the ocean surface, but some of us got overly keen and dove down and swam really close to the manatees, scaring them off a little, until they returned to just swim off again.
I managed to get some really nice photos of these animals and some videos too. It was such a great experience! They were there out of the blue and left spontaneously too. Unlike with the tortoise, we didn’t get to see the two grazing the ocean floor as the water was quite deep at that point, but we still saw them floating and swimming about quite gracefully.
After they had left we spent some time swimming about the corals for a bit, and then returned back to dry off, pack our bags and leave.
We were sort of thrown out of the hotel at about 11:38, when the room service knocked at our door, and said “Check out is at 11:00” and I just replied, interesting, as we were told check out was at 12:30. No, 11:00. As I wasn’t wearing my watch that instant, I thought it was something like 10:45 or something. As I closed the door telling her I was going to pack quickly to get out, I checked the time and realised, that it was already 11:38 and that I would never make it before 12:00. Apparently another group had checked in for that day and they wanted to get the rooms cleaned as quickly as possible – at our expense. Nevertheless, after being rushed into packing and getting out of the hotel room, we sat down for a quick lunch, waiting until it as time to board the boat back to Belize City. I tried some lobster fritters here for the first time. To be honest, they were a bit weird. They tasted like proper Chicken McNuggets, but instead of there being Chicken in it, it was lobster. A strange experience.
We boarded the ferry and drove back and I instantly fell asleep even though the waves weren’t the smoothest.
We then took taxis to the bus station and hopped onto a chicken bus to San Ignacio.
The chicken bus was an American school bus that was surprisingly comfortable. We only drove for about 3 hours, but enough air came in through the windows and it never got too hot. I fell asleep here too, it seems as though I haven’t had enough sleep in Caye Caulker… We arrived in San Ignacio with only one police stop, and one moment were to many people got on the bus and stood in the aisle, until we drove past an inspection and everyone in the aisle ducked down as to not be noticed by the police. Apparently only recently there was an accident concerning a chicken bus flipping over and instead of only the 54 people that can sit on that bus dying, double the amount did as overfilling busses was something very common. This now has stopped and they try to regulate the amount of people entering the busses.
We arrived at our hotel and checked in and straight away went out to book our trip for the next day, do normal errands and grab a couple of drinks to relax after this travel day. We unwound at a little bar down the street and then decided it was time for dinner.
We went to a place called Ko-Ox-Han-Nah just up the street from us, and were rewarded with some absolutely delicious food. I ordered myself a coconut soup with chicken and rice and it was lovely!
The food from the others looked great too and I let my fork wander around the plates trying it all. We eventually paid after a great night with a lot of laughter and jokes, and went back to the hotel to sleep a bit before the big tour tomorrow.
