The alarm was set for 6 am, but I shut it off at 5:59 as not to disturb the peaceful serenity of the early morning. Today we were going to the mainland for the Lamanai Jungle River Adventure. The sun wasn’t up yet and I stepped outside to see if a sunrise photo op would present itself. I estimated where I thought it would rise from, but there were clouds on the horizon so I went back inside. Of course within minutes the sun came up slightly to the south of where I had expected. I was slightly disappointed that I had missed a clear view of the sun rise, especially because I probably wouldn’t be up that early again.
We packed up our bags, loaded ourselves with sunscreen, laced up our tennies and were out at the pier at 7 am. Eli, the activity coordinator at the dive shop, told us yesterday to be patient and stressed to only get on the purple boat with the SEAduced logo on the side. She said it wasn’t uncommon for them to be running 15 minutes behind since it picks up at northern hotels first. 7:15 rolls around and we spot a purple boat on the horizon, packed with people. We stand up and start collecting our belongings as the boat came around the pier, but it stopped at the pier south of us instead. Hmm… that’s strange, we thought maybe they’d come back for us, but it didn’t. The dive shop wasn’t open yet, but we figured it was just a different SEAduced boat. It seems like they are a big company here and they probably had different tours. At 7:25 we spotted another boat, but that one drove past us at full speed. We realized we didn’t have any sunscreen with us, and seeing the dive shop had opened up, Nick ran inside to add some to our ever tab. We waited for what seemed like eternity when Kristen spotted him summoning us inside. Woops, somehow our reservations didn’t get changed from Thursday to Wednesday (we had been present when Eli called and confirmed the change). We quickly decided to occupy our day with diving instead. We signed up for a two tank dive and went back to the room to change for breakfast at Rico’s.
While we were killing the remaining time between breakfast and our 9 am dive, Eli called to let Nick and I know that Sylvin would be coming along so we could finish up our last advanced course dive, the multilevel dive. Our first dive was to be with him and we would be joining everyone else on the second dive.
After our dives we were pretty beat. Nick left his Nintendo controller t-shirt on the boat so he took a long hike to the main dive shop to get it. Curtis, Kristen and I set up shop at the pool close to 1 pm. I finished reading my book, A Beast in the Garden, and napped until 3:45 when I a couple stray rain drops rudely interrupted my snooze.
Per Sylvin’s recommendation, we had dinner at Caliente. Sylvin said it was a Mexican restaurant, but it was a bit different than those back home. The chicken nachos were great. Nick and I both ordered chicken fajitas, and I think we both agreed they were the best fajitas ever. Kristen ordered some jumbo shrimps while Curtis branched out and ordered some sort of Cere… it looked like a chowder with fish and bananas.
After dinner we stopped at a shop across the street so Kristen could purchase treasures to redecorate their kitchen with. When we got back to the condo I went straight to bed because my belly was kind of achy. Besides, we had to be up at 6 am again for the jungle tour!!
Nick came to bed around 10:45. Shortly after the power went out. The room, normally slightly illuminated by a light outside the window, was completely dark. We couldn’t see our hands in front of our faces. We decided to venture our to see if the entire hotel lost power or just our complex. We stepped outside into complete darkness. To the north the coastline was completely dark. To the south there were lights far in the distance. The night sky was completely clear and moonless so we took the opportunity to do a bit of star gazing. I have never seen that many stars in my entire life. The normal constellations were so bright and it seemed like the entire sky was covered with stars. It looked like a photo out of a magazine. We even saw a large shooting star. The power came on around 11:15. Good thing too, because it would have sucked to finish up our trip powerless. We reset the clock so we could get up on time and went to bed.