Starting my day a few hours after the sun and a few hours before my comfort zone, I throw on clothes and begin a Google Maps route toward coffee. The journey ahead is only a few hundred meters, but on this mishmash of a map, few businesses are labeled correctly. With some luck, hearing “arrived” means I’ve landed within the ballpark of my destination.
The slow-moving community is vibrant enough that I revel in bemusement. With enough cafes in this borough to power half of Manhattan, it’s a wonder that the people here move to the laid-back beat of bongos among palm trees. From the bikers to the pelicans, there’s hardly a being here that seems hurried.
Even the fish put up little fight. They swim to the shore in droves and feed themselves to a tourist town full of people.
Hammocks line huts that sit on rickety docks along the sea. Riders, drivers, dwellers, and tourists are in near-constant commotion, but they move along in a muted frenzy. With carefree smiles, they meander, weave, and barrel between the burly blemishes that line every dirt road of this tropical getaway.
After only a few minutes of hunting, I come face to face with the most highly reputed coffee joint in all of Caye Caulker. And from only the storefront, I can make out what appear to be three more cafés. Tourists apparently like their lattes as much as I do. I am, after all, a tourist through and through.
But nearing the end of my latte and seeing a golf cart rental shop within sight, the decision before me is clear.
“Do golf carts have cup holders?” I wonder, walking warily into the store.
One reasonable rental fee and a surprisingly unbureaucratic business dealing later, I’m given a cursory run-down of my cup holder-equipped four-wheeler by a woman who looks five years too young to legally drive it herself. Mud is spattered along the outer edges like flames on a Ferrari. But as she quickly runs me through the ways of a vehicle I’ve never before driven, I begin to fear I won’t make it down the street without inadvertently pummeling a pedestrian.
“So now I can just… drive?” I ask meekly, certain there’s still a driver’s ed hurdle I need to clear before setting out in this doorless deathtrap down the crater-laden street.
“Yep,” she replies brusquely. She’s wearing the heard-it-all look of a woman two to three times her age.
“So forward to drive, and backward to reverse?” I double-check.
“Yep,” she repeats, duly ready to get rid of another clueless tourist. I place my latte in the cup holder with purpose and turn the key in the ignition.
A few bumpy revolutions around the town and a couple of carefully averted cart crashes later, and I find myself fortuitously in front of the office for “Mario’s Catamaran Tours.” With a few friends poised to go on tomorrow’s snorkeling venture — accompanied by the mustachioed Koopa crusher of my childhood, no less — I praise overcast skies for bestowing this tiny shack-exteriored serendipity upon me.
As a child, I’d spent countless hours traversing the Mushroom Kingdom with Mario at my side. So, seeing the sign, I realize I’m surely in for the adventure of a lifetime.
Inside the store is a portly man with a tan that verges on sunburn and a gently wandering eye. His pupil is askew enough to notice, but far too virile for the eye to aptly be called lazy. He focuses his gaze on me, the second dot in his eye mere milliseconds behind the first.
“Hi, there!” I say, star-struck and looking toward the man who looks oddly different than he did during my peak Nintendo playing days. Unperturbed, I press forward with an anticipatory gleam in my eyes. What this Italian video game protagonist is doing in Belize, I’m unsure, but I struggle to conceal my excitement.
In a foul twist of fate, he returns my doughy-eyed expectation with the asymmetrical glower of a cretin ready to crush souls. A twisted look surfaces on his face.
“Oh, I’m not Mario. He just owns the place,” he explains, shattering my hopes to a thousand pieces and laughing maniacally as they crumble along the lightly sanded floor.
“He doesn’t even have an Italian accent!” I notice in horror with a betrayed gasp. I look around the room in search of solace and spot a bobblehead with a red “M” hat sitting on his desk with a frozen look of horror written across his face. My heart sinks.
“Is this what happened to the real Mario!?” I cry out in silence.
Sensing a discouraged customer, the soul-transmuting imposter attempts to reel me back in. The petrified Mario figurine bobbles in the breeze. Salty wind travels through the bathroom-sized building and lifts the tour sign-up log on this slightly discordant cue. “Yeah, Mario owns the business and uh, the kids all like Mario, so the boss figured that the bobblehead gives uh… personality,” he explains with a reflective look toward the little overalled mannequin. I’m not sure I can buy his story. There’s a pointed sort of urgency in the bobblehead’s bleary-eyed detachment.
The cogent wizard behind the counter presses forward and shrugs off my suspicious stares toward the beleaguered Bowser-beater. He delivers his sales pitch on the diving tour his team offers.
But little does he know my mind is already firmly made up. Even veritable war crimes committed against Nintendo characters aren’t going to keep me from the colorful reefs of these cerulean waters. “I’m going snorkeling,” I think to myself as I allow him to continue his catamaran elevator pitch.
Five minutes, a few colorful photos of fish, and an unrequited, reassurance-seeking glance toward the nodding plumber in red later, and I interject — “I’m in.”
Waking up only a couple hours after the sun, I throw on clothes, board my golf cart, and begin the bumpy trek toward coffee. But realizing that my day-long cart rental is set to expire while I’m sailing out on the Carribean, I reach a sudden impasse. I divert course away from caffeine in a begrudging decision to return my crater cruiser before I’m charged a late fee.
Though I’m only blocks away from the rental store, I’ve failed to account for the fact this little island is a maze. While it measures only a couple of kilometers across, I’m shockingly able to get lost on the bustling little isle. Wandering it freely, I’ll walk past the same store fronts 3 or 4 times in a single outing. But with a destination in mind, every venue seems to become elusive.
With a GPS less useful than a pager, I search for the cart rental in a mild panic. Determined not to delay my soon-to-be crew, the municipality’s “Go Slow” motto slips out the window and into a silty puddle.
I circle the island’s entirety twice and eat up all of my remaining latte time without seeing a single sign of the rental shop. Whether I’ll even make it back to Mario’s in time for departure now is doubtful. I woefully envision a mini cruise ship full of people leaving the idyllic shores without me.
But with the clock ticking, the storefront comes magically into view and the drop-off is as simple as the pickup. Handing over my keys, though, a heavenly light shines in through the store window and a wave of compassion overtakes the attendant.
“Do you need a ride anywhere?” she asks.
And with that, we reboard my newly-acquainted companion for a sober, final time and the kindly cart enthusiast escorts me back to the catamaran hub.
Exiting the cart of my suspiciously young driver, she plants me precisely where I need to be, my new friends eagerly awaiting my fashionably late arrival. With shades across my face, it’s hard to deny I’ve arrived in style. The golf cart labors over a couple of potholes upon her departure and drives off into the distance. And as my four-wheel jalopy of 16 hours rounds the bend never to be seen again, I sigh a solemn sigh.
On the boat, there’s room for 20. Climbing aboard, it’s even larger than it is from the distance. Once we’ve all arrived, we’re quickly guided through safety procedures and the complicated inner workings of catamaran bathrooms. But two explanations deep and I’m still puzzled when it comes time to piss. Whether the knob above the toilet is turned to the left or right, the water remains motionless. Defiant.
Back on the deck of the ship, I scoot toward my new German friends. Language barriers force us into small talk as waves slosh against the side of the boat. After a few minutes, though, I stubbornly press the subject of politics.
But when I realize that the country that endured the rule of Hitler has a surprisingly positive attitude toward Trump, I astutely decide that the topic is best avoided. Scooting a little further, I’m face first with my appropriately-opinioned Canadian friends. We’re all North American enough to know the danger The United States’ 45th president poses.
In the heat of the afternoon, I develop my first sunburn from my time in Belize. With a religious aversion to sunscreen, though, it’s only par for the course. With subtle splotches of red appearing on my shoulder, braving these waters with snorkeling gear begins to look enticing.
But when my Canadian friend informs me that the wind speeds today are triple what would be considered good snorkeling conditions, I begin to second guess myself.
As a child, I loved to swim. However, after a succession of ear infections and operations, my love for water dramatically dwindled. As people begin to disembark the boat behind our tour guide, I feel like a first-time skydiver.
The Belizean waters are warm enough not to freeze, but the whipping wind turns the task of simply staying stationary into something slightly terrifying. The life jacket keeps me bobbing above the water, but does little to soften the blows of the saline crests stampeding toward us from the nearby barrier reef. The first one that hits me sends my ear plug descending into the deep.
The tour guide is impervious to the winds. “If you look down, you’ll see a red snapper,” he instructs from a bearly audible distance as I begin to fear whether I’ll even make it back to the boat. Swimming with nearly all the force in my body, though, I notice I’m not even moving forward. Looking toward the septuagenarian at my side, I can see I’m not the only one being worn down by the waves.
“And if you look down here, you’ll see some parrotfish and a stingray,” he explains nonchalantly, hardly taking notice of the nearly drowning. “And here you’ll see a few sharks,” he sprinkles on top.
Fortunately, I know that the nearly-human-sized carnivores are of the non-people eating variety and keep my battle focused on the unrelenting current. Each glimpse of reef I glean through my goggles is sullied by my growing fear of a salty grave.
The snorkel works for minutes at a time. But every time I feel as though I’ve finally gotten the hang of my hand-me-down breathing contraption, it fails me without warning. Each time I regain composure, the air tube falters once more. Returning to the surface to adjust my snorkel, I’m ambushed by the vengeful sea.
The flippers on my feet only seem to make matters worse. Even with hydrodynamic footwear at my disposal, struggling against the tide is a futile endeavor.
With quickly dwindling strength and a few mouths full of saltwater, we finally begin back toward the boat. Taking the better part of 10 minutes to swim 20 meters, I breathe a premature sigh of relief as I strain and toil to reboard the catamaran. I lie my wave-battered body in the sun and fruitlessly attempt photosynthesis as I wait for the rest of the group to return.
We’re given two more opportunities to snorkel at separate locations within the wind-tousled sea. But having nearly achieved the laudable feat of dying in a floaty, I fork over my gear to a more eager snorkeler and elect instead for sunburn.
The afternoon wears on and the sun beats down until even the most thoroughly sun-screened among us begin looking like lobsters. I take a few sips of rum and coke before a rogue wave sends it hurtling into the ocean toward my lost earplug and seatmate’s hat.
As the sun begins to set and I place my flipper-worn feet on solid ground, I’m one terrifying snorkel experience wiser.
Your analogies are captivatingly funny. Good work trying on those windy waters. I spent two weeks in Caye Caulker this past June and the weather only cooperated the day we were leaving. After getting caught by a storm crossing the Split in a kayak, I chickened out from snorkeling on the windy stormy days, next time. ;)
I've had my share of struggles at sea both diving and snorkeling - so I applaud you big time.
I lived in the Keys for 20 years, and I've been on a lot of those boats, in weather you describe. Bravo for capturing that experience.