Belize has got two things going for it: a beautiful barrier reef, and a tropical rain forest. We've been here a couple of times on dive charters and it's great diving. The remaining option, if you didn't take a tour, was basically to wander around town. Belize City is not a pretty place; a very poor country, the capital city is choc-a-block with vagrants and panhandlers, people out to hustle you in one way or another. "Worth a miss", we say. Or, at least, not with re-visiting.

I'll bet the Tourist Information Centre doesn't represent it quite this way.

We were pretty much resigned to that fate of wandering the city, but the evening before, somebody alerted us to a diving trip leaving the next morning at 8:00am. It wasn't a ship-organized tour (which means it's a bit more cost-effective), but the manager of the ship's tour operation was taking care of it. We knocked on the office door (the tour office was closed) and by good luck found the manager there.

"They have capacity for eight; there's seven now. Show up at 8:00 and we'll see how it goes".

"Yes! Diving at last!". We'd carried our dive computers and wetsuits from New Hampshire through Argentina, Antarctica, thru the south pacific, and back -- without ever using them. Redemption was at hand!

The diving was great, it wasn't that we had any great new discoveries or exciting "big prey", but it was lovely Caribbean diving, with good underwater visibility ("viz" it's called) and good companions. One of our fellow 104-day passengers, Marli, had recently "re-certified" (gone through the training procedures in order to get a certification or "C" card) and this was her first dive since. She's recently turned 81 and we very much admire her joie de vivre. We aspire to have even half the enthusiasm she shows, when we get near that age.

Anyway, the trip was a bit of "hurry up and wait", but once we got into the water (Kathy found it a bit chilly at temperature of low 80s. Jaded girl!) it was pure relaxation. We did two dives with a hour break between ("surface interval") on a tiny fisherman's island that was stacked with hundreds of lobster traps in various states of repair, and a single resident. We were provided with a basic lunch which and we hung out until it was time for the 2nd dive.

One of the passengers suffered a bad twisted ankle with a likely bone-chip, and had to wait out the 2nd dive on that island. It was unfortunate, but better that it happened at the very end of our trip, than at the beginning. Some of the crew and passengers helped her into the boat and we headed back for our ship.

We returned to the ship around 3:30, and crashed, tired and contented.

Belize was our last real "port of call" for this 104 day tour of the "ring of fire". The next stop is Nassau, and we return to "reality" after that. We've got a lot of thoughts on the trip -- I guess they'd be "reminiscences" at this point -- which we'll share in the next and final page of this log.