Tarpon Feeding

Steven took us to special places in Belize, both in San Pedro and Caye Caulker, where you can buy a bag of sardines and hand feed the local tarpon. Growing 4-8 feet long and weighing 60 to 280lbs, you have to be a little extra cautious in this process, just keep your palms flat as they really burst to the surface with force.

These fish are interesting for a number of reasons. Their modified swim bladders allow them to breathe air, surviving in oxygen-poor waters of brackish marshes but also leaving them tethered to the surface to breathe.

This flexibility around air also lets them take large gulps for short bursts of energy such as lunging for sardines, and this same jumping makes them popular game fish, although they are typically released afterwards as their flavour is not great.

We had our insta360 camera and an underwater housing along on this trip as well to share this tarpons-eye view of their feeding group under our boat.

Secret Beach

Given how widely advertized it is right from the airport, Secret Beach is certainly more of a “wink” secret than an unknown gem. In fact, it is possibly the most visited area of Ambergris Caye and perhaps all of Belize.

Until very recently, all development on Ambergris Caye was along the (eastern) reef side as the fishing, diving, and trade winds that brought people to the island were all there. 

However, in the last decade developers have built a road through the mangrove lagoons that form the centre of the island, making the (western) leeward side more accessible. Currently there are a number of scattered residences being built up along this road, but whether they are foolhardy or ahead of the curve remains to be seen.

 Once on site at Secret Beach there are a number of venues to choose from but the general theme of the spot is consistent: swim, eat/drink, sunscreen, repeat.

We took an afternoon trip by golf cart across the island and down to the crystal waters for a mellow afternoon of floating and eating nachos in a semi-submerged palapa. Despite my best efforts I am not really a natural-born loafer so after half an hour relaxed in the sun I was ready to be off on our next adventure.

Fortunately, the drive to and from the beach was a big enough part of the outing to fill out the day and provide some fun stops and detours to along the way.

Cockscomb Basin

Established in 1986 and deriving its name from the nearby mountain ridge which (to some) resembles a roosters comb, Cockscomb Basin Wildlife Sanctuary is 400 square kilometers of rainforest. One of its key reasons for creation was to preserve jaguar habitat, and it remains on of the premiere sites for these cats in the world.

With only a single morning of hiking near the entrance, it is unsurprising that this is as close to a jaguar as we got.

The park consists of two water basins (west and east) with access and trails getting more difficult the further west you venture. Wildlife highlights in our self-guided hike include coati, aracari, toucans and guans. There were also some tracks we believed to have been recently made by a tapir, but that was as close as we came to sighting one.

One guaranteed sighting in the park is this crashed plane, which occurred as a result of an attempted landing on an access road during a thunderstorm in the early 1980s. A researcher used this plane for tracking jaguars via radio collars to learn more about their behaviour before the park was formed, and it remained an artifact of his efforts when the park opened.

Fortunately, none of the pilot, photographer and researcher on board at the time were seriously injured in the crash.

Hopkins

Tucked between the Cockscomb mountains and the Caribbean Sea, Hopkins is the Belizean cultural center of the Garifuna population, hosting its own community holiday and drum ceremonies. In 1942 the nearby village of Newton was devastated by a hurricane and Hopkins was built to replace and rehouse its residents.

Hopkins itself was a pleasant place to spend a little time with some very enjoyable food but not more than a few days of activities. The north end of the town (Baila) was  quite touristy while the south end (False Sittee) was a sprawl of enormous fenced houses, typically with multiple boat launches tucked underneath.

 

The Garifuna are a people of mixed African and Amerindian ancestry that began on Saint Vincent. Much of the populace were transplanted to Central America in 1796 after a series of conflicts with the English known as the Carib Wars. The Garifuna language is an offshoot of Arawak with numerous European influences and in 2001 was declared, along with their music and dances, to be a “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible History of Humanity” by UNESCO.

 

The Garifuna have their own flag are very proud of their culture, in a manner which reminded us of the Metis in Manitoba. We experienced several instances of Garifuna music and culture in our visit, including a very memorable music performance in Hopkins with a band that would randomly increase in size as additional members arrived.

 

Kathryn was of course dancing in the thick of it and having a grand time.

 

Caves Branch Night Walk

 Night walks looking for wildlife can be a mixed bag. Sometimes you have incredible encounters with all sorts of creatures of the night and other times you walk for hours, lose out on sleep, and see a handful of bugs or sleeping birds bums overhead.

Caves Branch was a mixed bag with a few highlights below but not as rich an outing as we'd hoped for. Still this helmeted iguana is undeniably a neat little character, and the only one of his species on this particular trip. He was also content to stay still and cling to his branch, so we had a good opportunity for pictures.

Cuban tree frogs were quite common in Belize - Steven routinely catches them on his condo grounds - but this one looks a little more naturally posed on the side of a tree than it does in a bathroom sink.

We also had a valuable lesson in learning how large a spider has to get before we do request housekeeping to extract it (they had a good net and this was clearly not their first time with the ask). While the macro perspective does undeniably make this Tiger Bromeliad Spider look a little larger and more dangerous than you'd want to share a room with, it was still a comfortable hand span across and a little more than we wanted to have crawling about overhead as we napped.

Caves Branch Birding

We stayed for two nights in the rain forest at Caves Branch on our way from the central highlands of Belize to the coast. Having gorged on Mayan history for a week it was a fresh change of scenery and photography challenges. Forests can be particularly difficult areas to spot and identify birds, so we arrange for a full day guided tour with Ishmael, a local guide with the perfect combination of enthusiasm and patience to help us get the most out of our time.

There were plenty of interesting birds right on the grounds and we spent the morning just on the trails and pathways around the lodge, picking up local characters like this hooded warbler, which was boldly flapping around the breakfast tables while my camera struggled a little with morning humidity.

I am always a big advocate for getting local guides because they not only know the birds by appearance but they often know the habits and haunts of individuals that you would never notice in a million years on your own. A prime example of this local knowledge is the bard owl that was tucked between some coconuts in the top of a palm tree. He looks obvious in the photo below but was anything but, especially given the thousands of trees to choose from.

Local guides are also great for finding species you didn't know you were looking for and would struggle to identify without them, such as this Morelet's Seedeater. Of course even the best guide can't guarantee that you'll get more than a fleeting look or be able to fumble through with your own gear - of the 68 species we saw on our outing, I would say I have "okay" pictures of maybe a third of the species and "good" pictures of half of those, but that's all part of the fun and challenge of a day like that.

Caracol

Originally thought to be a fringe player in the Classic Period of Mayan history, the city is now known to have been one of the key political centres. Located on the Vaca Plateau at an elevation of 500m in the foothills of the Maya Mountains, the modern name means “snail shell” on account of the winding access road to the site. The ancient Maya would have known it as Uxwitza meaning “Three Water Hill.”

Although famous for its altars and stellae, Caracol’s biggest draw is Caana, the “Sky Palace,” which remains the tallest structure in Belize at 43m. Designed with Mayan cosmology and numerology throughout, Caana has two sequential stairways to a top platform, which is itself topped by a trio of pyramids. The other major highlight is the celestial observatory, which still has the original wooden timber supports

Caana is a stunning structure to behold, but its tiered pyramid design doesn’t do it favors to the conventional camera lens. What looks imposing to the eye invariably comes out as squat and unassuming in pixels. If we’d had our drone with us we might have done it justice, but for now we just recommend everyone go see it for themselves.

Once covering 200km2 with a suspected population of 180,000, it covers an area larger than modern Belize City with double the number of inhabitants. Occupied as early as 1,200BC, Caracol flourished as Tikal’s main competitor, but ultimately collapsed with all the other Mayan city states around 950AD. Rediscovered by a woodcutter in 1938, the ruins were surveyed in the 1950s but major excavation didn’t occur until the 1980s.