For our shore excursion we transferred right to the boat that took us to our snorkel point, so we also came straight back to the ship instead of to shore. Cort and I decided to clean up a little bit and then take the next tender to Belize City to see what there was to see. Side note with bonus half-rant: We had been told over and over by the ship's staff not to go out of the touristic area right off the dock because it was unsafe.
I don't know if it's because I travel by myself alot or what, but most of the time I'm really suspicious when people say stuff like that without anything to back it up. Don't get me wrong I'm a very careful traveler, but a lot of times people have told me that somewhere wasn't "safe" to visit, or "safe" for women, or "safe" to explore, but they just have a low tolerance for venturing outside their carefully curated comfort-zone. /end rant.
That said, with a giant hole in my foot, I wasn't exactly in any condition to go adventuring anyway. So I'll never know if it was safe or not.
Cort had heard somewhere that you can get your passport stamped (maybe on the tender) and that was something she really wanted to do. So, when we docked we looked at a the map of stores and stuff - decided that we maybe wanted to do to the chocolate factory, and find the immigration place for passport stamps. We eventually asked directions to the immigration place (it was close to the chocolate place!), got our passports stamped, and had the guy tell us that Roatan (our next port) also had a dockside immigration office, and headed to Moho Chocolate.
The original plan was to go do the factory tour and make our own candy bars, but we ended up just buying lots of chocolate and getting milkshakes. I got a pretty good sampling - the only types I didn't get were the plain dark chocolate, and the one with chocolate nibs. Pretty tasty stuff.
Our tender ship on the way back was crewed by some locals that looked in their 20s or so. They were crazy-comfortable on our fast-moving boat. One skirted around the tiny ledge outside to close the windows (while we were moving), and sometimes I'd just see one leap up on the roof, and we could hear them walking around up there the whole time. Sometimes one of the guys would just leap and disappear and then you'd see them reappear at the other end of the boat. Crazy balance those guys. I'm pretty envious of that ability, tbh.
