burble, burble

I got home from Long Caye on Glover's Reef, off the coast of Belize at 1:00 a.m. Monday. Slickrock (where I stayed) owns about half the island, and Off the Wall Dive Resort owns about 1/4, with the last quarter unoccupied. It's a rustic resort. The cabins have a bed and a couple of rough benches and shelves and thatch roofs. No air conditioning. But all the decks are just steps from the surf. The drinking water is rainwater, but the showers are salty well water, so that, along with the humidity, you never feel really clean. The island is covered with coconut palms so there's all the coconuts you want. Slickrock offers snorkeling, sea kayaking, kayak surfing, wind surfing, and hammocks. The food is pretty good for the most part. The guides offer lessons for all the offered activities, and everything is included except tips. Meals, all the orange juice you want to squeeze for yourself, and unlimited beer and soda pop.

I had a disposable underwater camera which produced 27 lousy pictures.

After the first week, I had attempted all the offered activities, and had pretty much failed at everything other than snorkeling and sea kayaking. So I decided to have a go at scuba diving. Scuba is not offered by Slickrock or included in their package. But the dive resort welcomes Slickrock guests to come diving, and offeres PADI courses. When I was 10 years old, my step-father let me scuba dive in my aunt's swimming pool, but since I was too squeemish to remove my mask underwater, he would not let me dive in the ocean. I had not attempted scuba since. But on this trip, with little else to interest me during the second week, I earned the PADI Open Water Diver certification. I think I still prefer snorkeling. But diving is cool and I look forward to diving some more when I'm in the Bahamas in June.

The first two pictures, dull and blurry, are from my disposable camera, taken while snorkeling. The last 4, bright and clear, were taken by one of the co-owners of the dive resort while we were diving. Obviously, that's me wearing the scuba gear.

If you like very rustic accommodations (crude cabins, composting toilets, salty lukewarm showers heated only by the sun, unlimited beer) and lots of water activities on a tropical island, then I can highly recommend both/either Slickrock and/or Off the Wall Dive Resort. And if you're thinking of learning to scuba dive, you won't find a better place to do it, or a better instructor than "Lucky."

 

The snow may be melting out there on the coast, but inland, at alpine elevations, it will be well into July before the snow starts to disappear.

In June I'll be in the Bahamas again, swimming with dolphins at the same place I went to last September, and maybe doing some diving as well. At the end of June I'll be up in B.C. for some low-elevation hiking, well below the tree-line. Then Alberta in early July (there's less snow in the Rockies than in the Purcells and Selkirks) and then back to B.C. and the higher elevations for the rest of July and August.

All this assumes my neck and shoulders recover from the damage I did to them sea kayaking. Paddling as hard as I could, for the pure fun of the exertion.