If you are ever in a position where you can choose only one place to visit in Central America, choose this one! We absolutely adored our time on Caye Caulker in Belize. This is the place that island dreams are made of.  As soon as we stepped off the ferry onto this island paradise, we knew we would love it here.  First, we had to find a place to stay.  We ended up looking around and found one of the cheapest places to stay on the island, and also one of the best places to stay on the island.  This was called Mara’s place and was right near the spit (the only place you can go swimming on the island).  We stayed in the front green cabin which was huge and had a constant breeze coming through the window (very key!).  It also had a front porch with a hammock that we could chill in and watch the ocean.  Mara’s bar was across the road from our cabin with a long jetty out into the water.   It was a bit noisy during the day but everything closed down about 7pm at night which was perfect. Honestly I cannot rave about this place enough, we had a great time here.

You can do a bit of snorkelling around the spit but the main thing to do is get on a boat and head out to the reef. There are a lot of places that can take you out and they all have the same price of US$65 – $70 for a full day trip, including lunch snacks and drinks.  We saw some sailing boats out in the water and decided we wanted to try this first.  So we went with Ragamuffin Tours on one of their sail boats.  We had a really good time with them.  We got to snorkel with turtles, many tropical fish and a lot of manta rays and nurse sharks.  Jumping into the water and seeing all those sharks and rays gave us a bit of a shock but it was very exciting.  On the way back to the island we got to gorge on freshly prepared ceviche and drink a lot of rum punch.

Obviously while we were on the island we ate a lot of seafood. The crayfish here is cheap and plentiful so we ate a lot of it.  There is also a neat bar near the spit called the Lazy Lizard, where we drank many cups of their Lizard juice…lethal.

After being on the island for a few days we discovered a tour that would teach us how to spear fish as well. This is something we had both wanted to learn for a long time so we jumped at the opportunity.  This turned out to be the best value for money tour on the island and we had one of best days of the trip with them.  The tour company is called The Spearfishing Shack, and if you go to Caye Caulker you will not regret going with them!  They only take 8 people out on their boat and they hit all the good spots.  We swam with turtles and manta rays and I even got chased by a nurse shark! Another amazing thing was the biggest moray eel we had ever seen. But by far the highlight was the Manatees. Yes we swam with Manatees!  It was incredible.  They are by far the oddest sea creature we have come across, but they were awesome and curious – see the photos below!

At the end of the trip we got to do about an hour and a half of spearfishing. We managed to punch a few holes through some fish but they just swam away unfortunately.  But we did get some crayfish! On the way back to the island we drank lots of rum punch again, ate ceviche and played drinking games.  Once back we were able to cook up the seafood and gorge on crayfish once again.

We had an absolute blast on Caye Caulker and could not recommend visiting this place highly enough. Take us back please!!!

Here is a breakdown of our costs for 5 days:

Budget = US$537 (NZ$750)

Accommodation – US$135

Activities – US$287

Food/Drink – US$180.50

Travel (incl. Taxis) – US$52.50

Miscellaneous – US$71

Total spent – US$726 (NZ$1013)

So we were US$189 (NZ$264) over budget. We definitely under estimated how much the activities would cost on Caye Caulker.  But it was all worth it, we would not have changed a thing.