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San Pedro, Madonna’s “Isla Bonita”.

5.30 a.m. The sun is reluctant to come out and in the background you can hear the 80’s hit, “Isla Bonita”. But make no mistake. We’re not in an old fashioned bar still partying. On the contrary, we just woke up in San Pedro to dive in the Blue Hole. This is Belize, a little country in the Caribbean, no more than 30 years old and barely 250,000 souls, more or less, inhabiting it. When the Union Jack flew on the flagpole, this place was known as British Honduras, though curiously it’s Guatemala now that claims sovereignty.

Belize is a melting pot of races and languages. So much so that Spanglish is just a children’s game when compared with what they talk here. English, creole and Spanish mixed in such a way that each one is unrecognizable. “Amos pa’la.” Let’s go there. While we sail toward the first diving point, the captain gets rid of Madonna and puts the music our bodies actually ask for: pure Caribbean reggae. Dancing to the rhythm, we cross the first crown jewel: the longest coral reef in the world, with the permission of Australia. Almost 1,300 km long, it makes this coastal sea a paradise for catamarans. Good wind, very few waves and much less depth.

Four centuries ago this same spot was hell for the Spaniards. Their heavy galleons with a deep draft couldn’t make it in these waters without running aground, so it was the ideal hideout for buccaneers and other pirates. When business started to slow down and the British crown took their leeway, many stayed here and mixed with slaves, Mayan and some lost Spaniards. In spite of having lost the license allowing them to pirate Spanish boats without intervention of the British, the Empire’s army continued protecting them as if they were another colony. Years have passed and they’ve changed their daggers and guns for diving goggles and fishing rods, each year becoming an increasingly popular tourist destination.

On board we’re getting to know each other better. In the bow, the crew, black as hedgehogs and with hair like spines, can’t stop dancing. In the stern the divers look at each other without saying anything, like prisoners about to mutiny. From the coward muscleman who will back out at the last moment to the retired man dressed like Andy Warhol who fools around all the time. And let’s not forget the German guy who will demonstrate his ability to dive vertically with propulsion methods that escape our imagination. If Captain Cousteau saw us he would rise from the grave upon witnessing what a circus one of his greatest discoveries has become. The guide has got balls because all the gold in the world wouldn’t be enough to dive 45 meters in the so-called “divers cemetery” with such a group of freaks, even if it is legal.

But we don’t have time to think about these things as we’ve arrived. We put on the equipment and start the descent through the Blue Hole. We’re falling through an abyss so blue we’re almost able to touch it. It’s the entrance to an underwater cave whose ceiling collapsed, creating a vertical hole 150 meters deep, with stalactites and stalagmites so thick they seem like the ribs of stone giant, or the columns of some forgotten cathedral. We dive between them, hardly touching them, avoiding them as if we were in the bowels of the earth, trying not to make any noise so as not to rouse the beast. The scarce eight minutes we’re able to stay down this low leave little room for dreaming much else.

For a rest between immersions, we go to Half Moon Caye, an island in the middle of nowhere completely surrounded by turquoise water. “Feeding sharks is forbidden”, says the only sign in this atoll barely 300 meters long. We’ve never seen a place like this, and we’ve visited quite a few countries. We try to stay overnight, but the pirates here are not what they used to be. Blackbeard, the most famous Belizean, would have invited us to dinner if he saw that we were like the great ones, with seven rings in our ears, one for each ocean we’ve sailed. Now a black man with a beard wants us to return on board, like stowaways, but the other way around. In order to stay on the island we need a special permit, our own tent, and who knows what else.

We look and look, but find no one who would sell us a pair of tickets to Paradise, and our mosquito net is not approved camping material, so we have to leave the way we came. And maybe for the better, because now that island is for us like our hidden treasure, one we will return to claim with our own galleon. And by God we’ll keelhaul that rogue and get around all the island’s regulations. We won’t have a tent, we won’t have a permit and we’ll feed the sharks. We hope they like humans with beards.