Getting up early for today's excursions. I booked two - a river cruise with Bruce and a snorkel afterward on my own. I arranged the river cruise with Princess and the snorkel independently. The river cruise was sold as a two-hour cruise starting at 7:00 am. Given that, I felt comfortable booking a snorkel that started two hours later. I confirmed this with the shore excursion desk on the ship, who said it would be tight, but I should be able to make it.
It turns out, 7:00 am was when we were supposed to meet on the ship to be assigned a tender group because the ship doesn't go into a port, as the ports are too shallow for the cruise liners. It also turns out that instead of tendering out in the ship's tenders (smaller boats that don't need the depth the ship needs, usually stored along the sides of the cruise ship), there is a shuttle service. This shuttle service is miserably slow. They are large shuttles, so it takes significant time to fill them. That's the case whether the fill is the first shuttle in the morning (which is controlled by the ship loading by groups) or returning from the dock (which is uncontrolled) because the shuttle won't leave until it's full. Even though they say they leave every 30 minutes or when the next shuttle arrives, they will sit, side by side, waiting to get full before they pull away from the dock or the ship. Therefore, we spent almost the entire two hours I had calculated for the river cruise just getting from ship to shore. When we boarded the boat for the river cruise, our guide, Sharon, confirmed that there was no way I was going to make the snorkel. I had to make a choice, but I had already considered that I might have to. Bruce likes to do things that let him see animals. I mean, yesterday in Roatan was proof of that! But he's not much of a solo traveler. He doesn't like to do things like this by himself, especially now that it's more difficult for him. And I like doing things with him. So I decided to take the river cruise with Bruce and hope to catch a last-minute snorkel when we got back.
It was a really good cruise. We started out in the little delta where the Belize River empties into the Gulf of Mexico, where we spotted manatee. While the Florida manatee and the Belize manatee are different subspecies, their differences are difficult to spot. These guys don't appear to be used to people, and people aren't allowed to go out and touch them, so all we saw was those beautiful snouts break the water for fractions of a second before they submerged again. Not something I could get a picture of. I did catch the frigate birds that were flying around. Looks like two juvenile and one adult, all males.
As we started down the river, Sharon gave us some history of the country, specifically the name. There are several theories of where the name "Belize" originated. The one she shared was that a Scottish buccaneer named Peter Wallace, who established one of the first settlements, was the namesake. The letter W is pronounced as a B in the local Mayan dialect, so "Wallace" was pronounced "Ballace" which eventually became "Belize". I can Belize that. By this time, they were handing out orange juice to the kids and rum punch to the adults. I stuck with water, but did have several "sips" of Bruce's rum punch. It was quite good, and they were not stingy with the rum!
The first animal we saw after starting down the river was the bare-throated tiger heron. That's a new heron for me. It gets its name from the stripes in its plumage, looking like a striped tiger. He was hard to see, nestled in the mangroves. In fact, I shot in the general direction and hoped I was getting him. All I saw was a clump that could have been just a handful of branches or prop roots, but the camera picked him up well.
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