Belize Blog – Belizeadventure.com

Recently I was a guest blogger on the premier Belize blog, Tacogirl. We exchanged some emails, and Tacogirl asked to use one of my emails in an upcoming blog post. Of course I said yes! In this email I reminisced about Slickrock’s very old days when we based our sea kayak trips out of Placencia, Here is her post, with some old pictures I sent her from our original days way back when: http://tacogirl.com/2012/01/belize-history-and-san-pedro-weather/

On the beach we used to rent in Placencia, Belize, about 1988.

“2012 will be a momentous occasion, not only for Belize’s large Maya population, but for all Belizeans,” said Yanick Dalhouse, the Belize Tourism Board’s Director of Marketing. “Given the amount of interest we’re seeing from around the world, it’s generating global excitement as well.”

Read more on this topic on the Huffington Post. The article was written by Joshua Berman, who has visited us out on Long Caye in the past.

A past guest on our Mayan Odyssey tour, at Caracol Mayan ruin.

Six days ago I blogged about fares dropping almost completely across the board, but commented as an aside that the fares to Belize are impossible to figure out. Well, I just checked flights today and there is one really weird anomaly. If you fly from Dallas to Belize City, with one stop in Houston, the fare is currently $498, which is a VERY VERY good rate. If you fly out of Dallas, GET YOUR TICKET NOW. However, if you fly from Houston directly, the rate is $664. Huh?

You can view our Belize flights chart on our website, but the summary is right now if you fly from Dallas, LA, Miami, NYC or Washington, DC, the prices for Belize flights are very good.

I ran across this excellent travel blog, Pebble Pedalers, written by two young men as they rode their bikes, self-supported, 17,000 miles  through 15 countries—from Prudhoe Bay, the northernmost point accessible by road in Alaska, to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of Argentina. But it seems they did a lot of fly fishing along the way, especially when they got to Belize.

If you love fly fishing, you’ll want to read their first-hand account of fishing on the reef in Belize (the section on Belize starts half-way down the page at the section titled Tarpon Caye Lodge. Here’s a sample about their pursuit of their most difficult prey, the permit:

“Casting to permit is like taking a freethrow to win the game with one second on the clock. The pressure is always on, you have one shot and if you miss your chance you replay the scenario over in your head a thousand times. God it is addicting.”

Last February Meg Griffiths, our kitesurf and advanced windsurfing instructor, kept track of wind speeds through the month of February. Sailors visiting us this February will be glad to see most days are plenty windy for Belize kitesurfing! (photo above by Pete McDermott)

Can you say cute? Watch this short video of a small girl learning to paddleboard at Long Caye.

Visit our Family Vacation web page for more info and special prices for kids at our island adventure resort.

Our island is located off the coast of Belize at Glover’s Reef Atoll, a National Marine Reserve. In order to protect the marine life there, the Belize government has prohibited fishing at Glover’s reef for tourists except for sport fishing, or catch-and-release. The only exception is if you are a native and own one of the few fishing licenses issued for Glover’s Reef.

There is one other exception: lionfish — anyone can spear them because they are an invasive species from the Pacific Ocean (the Caribbean is an Atlantic sea). Lionfish are very detrimental to the native species population, and killing them is encouraged. Watch this short video of our guide, Victor Myers, spearing one.

The lionfish, native to the Indo-Pacific region, have infiltrated their way into the Caribbean. Their introduction is believed to be a result of hurricanes and tank releases during the early 1990’s. They have been spotted along the eastern seaboard spanning as far north as Rhode Island to as far south as Columbia. Protected by venomous spines, lionfish are voracious predators. When hunting, they herd and corner their prey using their pectoral fins, then quickly strike and swallow their prey whole. With few known natural predators, the lionfish poses a major threat to coral reef ecosystems in the Caribbean region by decreasing survival of a wide range of native reef animals via both predation and competition. While native grouper may prey on lionfish, they have been overfished and therefore unlikely to significantly reduce the effects of invasive lionfish on coral reef communities.

Help us do something about this problem! Bring your spear gun with you on one of our island trips!

Airlines are so hard to figure out. I have been watching Belize airfares for 26 years and STILL I can’t predict what they will do. Today when updating our Belize flights page I saw a strange pattern I have never seen before. It may never happen again, but it’s weird, so I thought I would tell all of you about it.

A week and a half ago I checked airfares and they had dropped from 5 cities only: Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, NYC, and San Francisco. So I blogged about it. Today, they dropped from every single city EXCEPT those 5 cities. They went up in those 5. Go figure.

The largest drops were from Philadelphia and Baltimore. Those flights to Belize on March 2, returning March 11, are $160 less than they were 10 days ago. The other 19 cities that I found lower fares mostly show a $100+ savings. The least amount of savings was from Phoenix. The rate to fly from there is $42 less this week than last.

To see the full list with current flights to Belize, visit our Belize flights page.

If you’ve ever wondered what our guests experience while visiting Long Caye in Belize, this 35 min. video, shot by one of our guests and posted on Youtube last October, is a true, full immersion experience. The clarity of the photography is amazing, especially the close-ups of the reef and associated marine life through the crystal clear water.

Construction workers laying new pipes and cables on Burns Avenue in San Ignacio in western Belize have stumbled upon a cache of Maya artifacts dating back more than 2 thousand years. The pottery and human bones were unearthed during work that is part of a $2.7 million dollar beautification project in the small town. The workers were using an excavator to open trenches on the street on Saturday when they made the find. The area is home to the nearby Cahal Pech Maya Site. … Read more