Cruise Caching
Belize, Belize City, Locations November 18th, 2010For our 25th anniversary, my wife and I went on a cruise in the western Caribbean. We absolutely loved it and had a great time.
Before we left, I thought I’d see about geocaches near our ports. I wasn’t sure exactly which cities we were going to be at, so some of this was guesswork. I found some that I thought would be within easy walking distance of the port, copied the descriptions (and hints) into a document and did a screenshot of the satellite image of the cache surroundings. My GPS is my phone, and I didn’t want to pay the huge international rates, so I had the data/GPS connection turned off while we were out of the country.
Also, some of the potential caches had pictures that other cachers had made of the area, so I copied some of those as well to help me make sure I was in the right area.
When we got off the tender (the boat that takes you from the cruise ship to land in some ports) in Belize, I immediately recognized the area from one of the pictures I’d seen, so I quickly snapped a photo to at least prove I was at the zone.
We visited the local Mayan ruins (Altan Ha), and the return trip to Belize City was to be down the River Wallace (named after a Scottish pirate) looking at the wildlife. Well, within about 10 minutes of starting, it began pouring down rain. There was a break for about 10 minutes at one point where we did get a reprieve and some pictures, but it started up again and didn’t let up until the end. Over an hour of boating down the river, top speed, to either get past the rain or shorten our misery. Ah well, that was the worst of it for the whole week, so can’t complain too much.
When we returned to this dock, I started to do some searching in the area looking for the cache, with only my "where would I hide it" geosense to work with. Within about 3 minutes, I found it. I took the log into the jewelry store and signed it, trying not to drip too much on it, as we were soaked to the skin.
And with that, we had our first cache find outside North America!