It has become a fast-growing tradition to take visiting friends and family to Secret Beach. Because of its north-west location, we often look to friends for help getting there.

So when my friend Kendall asked me if I wanted to do a country road trip in my borrowed wheels, to show his visiting friend Mark, I was in. The two of us had just taken my mom there but it was too cold to swim that day so we paired it with a yummy lunch at the Truck Stop instead. Although we were all bundled up, none of us passed on ice cream for dessert.

Island Style Day Trip

This time around it was picnic perfect weather and I was anticipating a chill day at the beach and getting my brain away from everything for a while. On the list of places that can make you instantly stop thinking about your to-do list and a million other things, this ranks high.

We enjoyed a tasty lunch of grilled bacon and egg sandwiches on everything bagels. For dessert, it was fancy sodas (Crush and IBC rootbeer are rare finds) chips, pudding without spoons and endless pudding jokes.

After our meal the three of us floated, explored and relaxed in our usual spot (first fenced stretch of beach to the right) for hours. We saw tiny fish, experienced natural streams of bubbles and felt temperature changes in the water as we walked far out in the clear shallow water.

Eventually, Kendall mentioned it was time to stop being lazy and get to the real reason we came to the west side of the island – adventure.

It is known that a network of underwater caves (cenotes) exists beneath Ambergris Caye and we were about to go in search of one.

We piled back into the cart and drove the cart up a small sand dune through a short tropical corridor and parked at the next stretch of beach. I had only been this far on foot before and had never seen the cave so it was fun to take the cart and explore going further north in a different way.

The secret underwater cave was easy to find marked with a big stick. Both Kendall and Mark decided to don masks and snorkel. As they explored the area, I opted to check out the cave from above and take pics. Had my underwater camera not just crapped out on me that second I would have done some underwater cave shots. Thankfully I had two cameras.

Eventually, we ended up sitting and chatting around the cave. In the interest of safety and not pissing off a big barracuda Kendall had seen inside earlier, we decided to just watch the fish action from the edge. I managed to get a couple of cool fish pictures from above the water.

Looking to balance work and pleasure that day I did not take out my camera till we got to our final beach destination and the cave area. I knew there would be no shortage of pictures there and on our sunset drive home. I ended up with so many that I decided to go collage style (except for 3 at the end) so you could see more without being faced with annoying endless scrolling.

Landscape in the area of the cave (I love the zoom capability on my Nikon)

Sargent Major’s and a blue tang in the underwater cave

Tropical landscapes on the north-west side of the island

Water weathered rock and leaving the cave beyond Secret Beach

Heading back towards civilization

We stopped at the tower and caught a nice sunset on the way home

Below are 3 pictures that needed to be posted large size in order to do them justice.

Looking like wasps nests on steroids, termite nests are a common sight in trees here. They are, dark brown or black in color. Apparently, their inhabitants taste slightly minty – I have not tried one yet but would if it was offered to me. The smoke of a burning termite nest is also used as a mosquito repellent, a tip from our boat captain Elito Arceo when camping near Robles Point.

The large Iguana in the other two pictures quietly sat there while I snapped away, when he decided he had enough, he made his exit climbing the tree.

Large termites nest

Iguana strutting his stuff

Climbing higher up the tree

I will leave you with a few short video clips of Secret beach before it became popular and developed and the country road.