Circling around the Great Blue Hole in Belize felt like the realisation of a dream. Seeing it was one of the big goals of my six-month backpacking trip, flicking out my iPhone in pubs and showing people pictures of it when they asked where I was going or what I was most looking forward to.
A perfect deep blue circle, sinking 407 feet (or 124 metres) underwater, surrounded by a ring of turquoise coral reef reaching land that borders the hole like the white of an egg in a frying pan.
The water around it beamed a radioactive blue shimmering off the midday sunlight, begging the question of what exactly lay beneath that deep blue abyss?
The answer is sharks, mainly. Caribbean reef sharks, bull sharks, hammerhead sharks, lemon sharks and black tip sharks all patrol the Great Blue Hole, as well as several fish species such as the midnight parrotfish.
You can scuba dive here, but you need to have completed your Advanced license as well as logging 24 dives. I hadn’t managed that by this point of my trip, but I thought flying above it was a better choice anyway to get its staggering full perspective.
Located by the Lighthouse Reef, about 70km east of the coast of Belize City, I thought I was looking down on an alien planet. Perhaps not, but the hole’s almost perfectly circular area is said to be visible from space.
It’s been around for a long time, formed at the end of the last Ice Age when rising sea waters flooded a series of enormous caverns. Geologists reckon the caves formed about 153,000 years ago and became completely submerged approximately 15,000 years ago.
For a long time the hole was a secret kept between Belizean fishermen, but now word is very much out. In 1971, legendary explorer Jacques Cousteau visited, well and truly putting it on the map by declaring the Great Blue Hole “one of the top 10 diving spots on the planet”.
These days scuba divers can be found diving inside the hole while sightseers like me take the aerial route.
I managed to negotiate a price of USD$175 (£132) for my flight. As a backpacker without strict time constraints, I had the luxury of being able to shop around and wait for a price I liked.
The price seemed to go down the closer to full the plane was, so make sure you ask how many others are flying before agreeing a deal. Once the fifth person booked I confirmed via email.
I booked through the strangely-named Tsunami Adventures from a shop on the beachfront at the main dock on Caye Caulker.
As I was staying on the tiny island of Caye Caulker during my six-day trip to Belize, I arrived at 8.30am on the day of the flight ready to catch a boat to San Pedro.
I paid Heather at Tsunami Adventures an initial BZ$75 (USD$37.5 / £28.50) deposit, shortly followed by a charge of BZ$30 (USD$15 / £11.40) to Ocean Ferry Belize for the boat across.
As the journey from Caye Caulker to San Pedro is only half an hour, I had plenty of time to spare at the teeny-tiny Aeropuerto de San Pedro after walking from the dock.
After paying the pilot from Javier’s Flying Service BZ$275 ($137.5 / £105) at about 11.30am we boarded the plane and departed.
My excitement built as we soared above the warehouses, boatyards and houses that make up the town of San Pedro, with its population of just 16,500.
At the edges of the island, we swapped murky dark water for bright blue reef.
The flight out shows off the scenery of the Belize Barrier Reef in all its glory, a 300km series of coral reefs described as “the most remarkable reef in the West Indies” by Charles Darwin in 1842.
Bubbles of land punctuate the crystal clear waters like holes in a giant block of cheese.
As far as I could see, the Caribbean Sea was made up of a medley of beautiful blue, darkening in the distance and then growing lighter as it met the sky, with a layer of wispy cloud sitting on top.
A comprehensive aquamarine world, the Belize Barrier Reef includes three distinct atolls – Turneffe Atoll, Glover’s Reef and Lighthouse Reef.
The green shrubbery and navy waters remind me that we are definitely on Planet Earth.
Turneffe Atoll consists of a network of flats, creeks and lagoons dotted by more than 150 mangrove islands and thick forest.
During the 18th Century, infamous pirate Blackbeard was said to harass ships in this area while Turneffe has also been compared to the fictional island of Neverland from the Peter Pan stories.
As we get closer the Lighthouse Reef comes into view and with it the Great Blue Hole.
The plane circles the giant marine sinkhole below while everyone on board is transfixed – studying it, filming it, not taking their eyes off it – except for the pilot of course.
Scientists claim the hole won’t be around forever to explore, as every day waterfalls of sand drop into it, slowly filling it up like an underwater hourglass.
But time is not yet up and in 2018 a crew from Aquatica Submarines decided to get to the bottom of things.
But more eerily they also found two of the estimated three people that have lost their lives down there, deciding in conjunction with the Belize government to let them lay to rest rather than to try and salvage their remains.
On their descent to the deepest depths of the Great Blue Hole they spotted some classic evidence of human littering in the shape of a two-litre bottle of Coca Cola and a rusting GoPro camera.
In 2012, the Discovery Channel ranked the Blue Hole in top spot on its list of 10 Amazing Places on Earth – and who am I to disagree?
The flight was around an hour long overall – 20 minutes out from San Pedro, 15 minutes circling the hole itself and another 20 to get back.
In total the flight and return boat trip to Caye Caulker cost me BZ$380 (US$190 / £145). It was the most expensive single thing I did on my trip but well worth the money. I’ve never seen anything so blue.
