This morning was sunny with only a little wind. We were up early once again to order breakfast and relax on the deck to wait for it. We saw an unusual sight while we were waiting, a garbage truck driving down the beach to collect the garbage from all the beachside hotels, restaurants, and homes. I’m always interested in the way things run here, they do things so differently but that doesn’t mean one is better than the other. After another wonderful breakfast at our hotel, we made our way to the dive shop. We got “stuck” in school traffic. It seemed that everyone on the island had at least one child in tow headed to school. Small children in uniforms, most  with at least one parent either in a golf cart,walking, or even riding on the handlebars of a parents’ or older sibling’s bike. We were probably held up at least 2 or 3 minutes in the traffic jam, so we made our way directly to the dive shop. We signed up to dive on the same boat with the girls and got busy trying on equipment and setting it up. It turned out we were the only 4 people on that boat. The small boat was a little rough on the way to Hol Chan marine park. We knew there was an entrance fee but we couldn’t have imagined that there would actually be buoys and a rope around the marine reserve area and a boat collecting money out in the water. We were in an area know as “shark ray alley” and we were particularly excited because the man from Australia from the day before told us that he saw more marine life at shark Ray alley than he had ever seen in all his years of diving at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia! So we excitedly prepared for the dive. We felt like Adolfo has been an excellent teacher to the girls,and now we saw proof as he had them prepare for and execute the dive under his watchful eye. Christian and I dove with a separate divemaster (Turiano- who Christian kept calling TerenTino) because Adolfo was still making sure the girls had mastered various skills. We had not been in the water even one minute before we saw our first shark. As we swam toward the reef we encountered a large sea turtle grazing on the sea grass on the ocean floor. We hovered within 10 feet of him and watched him eat for at least 10 minutes. It was thrilling! I hated to leave, but there was more to see. We saw sting rays, Eagle Rays, barracuda, huge moray eels,more sharks, trumpet fish, parrot fish, conch, sand dollars, grouper, sea anemone, sea cucumber, hog fish, butterfly fish, and hundreds of other colorful tropics fish we couldn’t name all swimming among amazing coral. I have never seen so many fish in one place. Some schools were so thick we could hardly see through them. We swam into a very small cave and saw giant eels hiding in the crevices. We finally returned to the boat after 70 minutes of diving (it was  fairly shallow for a dive). We were so amazed at all we had seen. Mallory and Olivia were also very excited. They had done well on their dive and had seen some marine life as well (they didn’t have the chance to do all we had done since they had skills to perform). We rode back into the pier. The girls had a little more confined water work to do with Adolfo to prepare for the deeper dives tomorrow. It was lunchtime when we finally left, but we were were all so sticky from salt water, we opted to take showers at the hotel before lunch. We did stop at “cay-mart” (which has the K-mart logo painted on the sign). It’s a decent sized supermarket with no A/C (of course) and we got fantas and brands of snacks we’d never heard of (Mexican made) since we were going to eat a late lunch. Once again the prices seemed really cheap. We made our way back to the room and took turns showering. Around mid afternoon we were finally ready for lunch. We decided to try the one locally owned “upscale” restaurant on the island. Elvi’s kitchen was a small un-air-conditioned restaurant (but we did get to sit next to the open window) with beautiful hardwood tables. The Belizean hardwood used in most of the furniture here is a type of native mahogany that actually has different colors within the same piece of wood. The floors were sand, there was a large tree left in the center of the restaurant extending  though the high thatched roof. From what we had heard this was gourmet Belizean food. Everything on the menu involved some form or tortilla (corn or flour) cooked in a variety of ways. The food was fabulous, there were flavors in there I couldn’t possibly name and it was a little spicy for me, but I drank 2 bottles of water with it and kept going because the flavor was so good. The prices were about the same as any of the American owned restaurants around. For desert we stopped by a small local bakery we had seen close to our hotel. Using the tray and tongs method like before we piled on some (more than we needed) wonderful pastries. The rest of the afternoon was exploring more of town. We went into stores that were not what we expected (most local store are not). We bought fresh coconuts to drink the coconut milk/water out of it with a straw and discovered we hated that! That was disappointing, we wanted to like it. It tasted nothing like the coconut meat tastes, it was more like very warm dirty water. We didn’t want dinner after the late lunch so we decided to stop into a beach restaurant that was supposed to have fabulous “caye”-lime pie. And it was good, much stronger on the lime than Key West Lime Pie though. We were back at the hotel early to start packing. Tomorrow we will first have early dives and then we will go directly to the nearby smaller island of caye caulker by ferry to stay the next few days. It’s gonna be a long but exciting day- of course they all seem to be that way here…