During the first week in August, ten of us went to Belize to dive at Ambergris Caye, and during the second week two of us went to the Cayo District near San Ignacio on the Guatemala border to see the "jungle" side of Belize.

Diving at Ambergris is of two types, inside the reef or outside the reef. Inside is very shallow in fairly calm water and mostly snorkeled. Outside the reef there are large swells of about 3 to 5 feet making the short transit to the mooring buoys a little rough, but after submerging there's no current in water of 45 to 100 feet deep depending on the site. The reef gently slopes down with deep canyons cut through the wall with "swim throughs", some of them very long. The marine life is sparse but the coral is very lush.

On the way back from a dive, the dive master asked if we wanted to see sharks. He had a sly grin on his face as if something was up. We, of course, said yes to the chance to dive with sharks. We proceeded down the lagoon about three miles and anchored. We learned later that this was Shark Alley. I did a backward roll off the boat with just mask, snorkel, and fins, and as I looked around I counted 14 sharks coming toward me. Actually, they were looking for a handout as they were used to being fed. Several large stingrays came up to us so close they were touching us almost like hungry cats. After a while both the sharks and stingrays lost interest and we left, but we returned on other days. The dive master sometimes smeared bait on people as they got into the water and this drove the stingrays mad. You could not get away from them.

Ramon's Village is on the beach, just south of town, with it's own pier and dive shop. The end of the pier has a nice covered deck, often used by topless European women, and a ladder to the water. Rooms are air-conditioned, either stand alone or in groups of 2 or 4. All the buildings have high, thatched roofs and rough exterior, to give the resort a very rustic look, however that's only a veneer. Around the swimming pool there is a nice restaurant/bar with high prices.

The town on Ambergris, San Pedro, has 2 - 3 thousand people. The three streets are sand and the traffic is golf carts that are ignored by the dogs that sleep on the warm sand. There are shops, wood frame hotels, a bar without walls, restaurants, and dive shops that offer both local diving and trips to the outer cayes and the famous Blue Hole.

The flight to and from Ambergris on Tropic Air is on 10 passenger, single engine turboprops or by boat from Belize City.

The Cayo District is on the western border with Guatemala in low (3,000 feet) mountains. It's very lush with lots of rivers. The hub is a town of 8,000 people, San Ignacio. The area attracts lots of adventure travelers. The main attractions are birding, canoeing, horse back riding, caving, Mayan ruins, and trips into Guatemala.

The resorts are mostly on rivers and feature rustic lodge settings. Our resort, DuPloy's, had a generator that ran up until 10 O'clock. DuPloy's is known for its deck overlooking a narrow canyon with a river below. The deck is used for bird watching and coffee in the morning and socializing (telling wild stories about each day's outing over cocktails before supper).

Most people canoe into town on the Macal River, 3 hours through a Tarzan setting, and have lunch at one the very funky restaurants in San Ignacio. Some people go to Takal, a major Mayan ruin four hours into Guatemala, which has the added attraction of having bandits alone the road. The drivers have tactics to avoid the bandits and at times there seems to none. The area has many caves. I visited two of them. One, Rio Frio Cave, is really a natural tunnel through a mountain--a quarter mile. A stream flows through giving a very neat, low risk, experience. Another cave I visited was very different and it was an Indiana Jones experience. The guide took three of us in a farm trailer towed by a tractor, 30 minutes through orange groves, followed by a 5-minute walk into the woods to a shallow, fast flowing river. From there we inner tubed up stream to a high cliff were the river came out of a cave. At this point, I wondered if I was using good judgement, entering a cave on an inner tube totally dependent on the guide and our lights. (I also remembered that I had been told this cave was not for the faint at heart.) The cave was used by the Mayan Indians for thousands of years for ceremonies, including human sacrifice. Although the cave goes over six miles into the mountain, we only explored the first mile, mostly walking except where we needed inner tubes to cross pools of water. In one of the large chambers, above and to the side of the main cave, we stopped to rest. We were dry by this time and feeling pretty confident. The guide asked us sit quietly, turn off all lights, and listen. Clearly we could hear what appeared to be women chanting way back in the cave. Occasionally, we would hear a very base sound. I would describe it as sounding like a crowded auditorium before a play starts, but a long way off. Of course at that point we were convinced that we were hearing Mayan spirits coming from the sacrifice chamber. I had heard of the cave and it's spirits before and in bright sunlight everyone knew it had to be some strange acoustic phenomenon, but in the cave it was from spirits.

There is much more of Belize to be explored, every place is very different from the others. Even the rain falls varies from only 16 inches in the north to 210 inches in the south. Each outer caye is unique. But, those places will have to wait for another, longer trip.