Our first stop was the beautiful country of Honduras. After a fun day of zip-lining through the rainforest, we decided to stop in one of the tourist gift shops to get a souvenir to bring home. As we browsed through the plethora of trinkets and goofy tee-shirts, I noticed that they had Christmas ornaments with the word "Honduras" intricately carved on the side. I turned to my new husband and exclaimed, "Oh my gosh! That's perfect! I have the best idea. What if we collect a different ornament from every country we go to? We could make it a tradition!" He enthusiastically agreed. After purchasing the ornament, we boarded the ship and headed to our next destination -- Belize.
We had pre-paid for all of our excursions online before coming on the trip in order to save the hassle of carrying a bunch of cash around. We left the ship that morning with only about $40 to use for food and souvenirs. That's all we needed, or so we had thought.
A bus picked us and the rest of our group up to take us to the infamous Belize caves for a day of cave tubing. It was a total blast, but after boarding the bus to head back to the boat we ran into some trouble. The man started coming down the aisle to collect money from the day's activities. I was starting to get worried because I noticed that every single person on the bus was paying him cash. When the man finally approached us, I explained that we had already paid online. He informed us that the online system had shut down 5 years ago and there was no way we could have paid online.
Luckily, the man found out that it was our honeymoon and told us to just pay him what cash we had ($40) and he would cover the rest. I handed him all of our cash, just relieved at the fact that we were not arrested or in huge trouble. My husband and I were talking about how dumb we were and how it was sad that we could not get our ornament from this country.
I was surprised when a young family next to us overheard our conversation and kindly offered to give us $20 to use to buy the ornament. I turned them down, not wanting to take their money, but I thanked them for their kindness.
We left Belize that day, a little sad that we didn't keep our new tradition, but we decided that we would find a Belize ornament online instead.
A few days later, we were walking around the ship when a young mom started yelling "wait!" at us. We were confused, but stopped to talk to this woman. She quickly explained that she had been on our bus and had heard what happened to us. She felt bad for us and so she decided to buy us an ornament at the gift shop. She said that she wasn't sure if she would run into us again, but she thought she would take a chance. I fought back tears as I took the ornament and gave her a huge hug.
While this world is becoming more and more terrifying each day, it's amazing to know that there are good people still out in the world, proving that the world is still a great place.
I served my mission in Belize! What happened with the online situation doesn't really surprise me, sketchy stuff like that tends to happen. But, as for your main point, there are a lot of great people in the world! A lot of tourists, as well as natives, did some really nice stuff for me while I was there and I was always impressed by that.
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