Missing! One Pink Purse. (Day 4)

Gorgeous, Brilliant, Superb – all truly British exclamations and all definitely accurate descriptions of the Snorkelling tour that we took Christmas morning. I have snorkeled before, but never somewhere with such an incredible array of sea life and coral formations. We set off early with Carlos of Carlos Tours. He is a very friendly and interactive guide – highly recommended. There were 2 highlights: the Hol Chan Marine Reserve and Shark Ray Alley. Hol Chan is a 10 meter deep channel cut into the reef . There we saw hundereds of different types of fish – parrot fish, spotted moray eels, a green eel (it was amazing – a 6-foot brilliant emerald monster with bright blue eyes the size of a quarter), octopus and even a rare spotted eagle ray. After that we popped over to the nearest Caye, San Pedro, for a leisurely lunch. Following closely after lunch we cut through the crystal blue water to Shark Ray alley. This area is a sandy, shallow spot known specifically for the 4 foot sting rays and 5 foot nurse sharks that make circles around nervous foreign snorkelers. It was remarkable being able to swim so close to such large sea creatures and have them rub up against you playfully. Kind of freaky having a 4 foot ray flapping its way towards you, stinger and all. When we all had called it quits, Carlos cut up a bunch of fruit for us and cruised back to the island.

That night one of my pax had made reservations at “Habeneros”, a quaint restaurant on Front Street . We set up on the patio and started chatting. Christmas dinner for me was coffee with Kahlua and the Christmas Tree Special – skewers of lobster, shrimp and snapper propped up on a plate of fixin’s made to look like a tree. I’m talkin’ Daddy Good!
The Christmas Spirit soon evaporated when one of the girls (Emma) in my group started to freak out that her purse had been stolen. She apparently had it resting on the back of her chair and someone had snuck under the stilted patio and ganked it. She was really freaking out because everything was in it – passport, $, travelers checks, camera, etc. We looked around and then we walked back to the hotel to make sure that she hadn’t accidently forgotten it there. When it was there she knew that it had been swiped. She used another pax phone to call and cancel her credit cards and then we hoofed it over to the Police Station to make a report. This turned into a 3 hour affair. I was a simple one room station that looked more like the garage office of an auto mechanic than a house of the law. The officer that dealt with us was a young black islander that seemed as exited about helping us as he would be about eating a bowl of sand. He kept saying that he couldn’t understand how a purse could just disappear. Then he purposefully started asking us questions with a thick, creole Jamaican style accent that we couldn’t understand. Finally Emma just grabbed the police report and filled it out herself. It felt like a bad episode of Jamaican Dukes of Hazard and we were dealing with the dimwitted Ras Cooter. After she filled out the report, they simply refused to give us a copy. “Caye Caulker Police Policy” is what they kept repeating. They wouldn’t even give us a slip of paper that said we had been there. Emma was adamant on not leaving until she got a copy for insurance purposes, so we were in a Mexican, I mean Belizean Standoff. I finally ended up having to call the British Consulate, they called the Belize City Police Headquarters, who in turn called our buddies on Caye Caulker and told them to give us a copy.
Didn’t get out of the station until 1 o’clock, but we still managed to hook up with a couple other pax and sip down some rum and cokes on the dark beach before going to bed.