It seems that we have been averaging about one crazy passenger a week lately. And those are just the ones who make it into the press!

You typically read about the in-flight drunkards, angry folks, and people with out-of-control children. But I can't remember the last time we had a 'misbehaving nudist' story.

The AP reports that an American Airlines flight from Boston to Los Angeles was diverted to Oklahoma City yesterday after a passenger emerged from the bathroom naked. He then tried to open an emergency exit door before being subdued by other passengers, specifically the members (no pun intended) of a professional soccer team.

Members of the New England Revolution of Major League Soccer (and others on the plane) saw the erratic passenger near an exit door, grabbed him, and placed tie wraps on the man.

American Flight 725, a Boeing 757, arrived in Oklahoma City at 1:35 p.m. CDT, and said nudist was taken into custody in Oklahoma City and placed under psychiatric evaluation.

Makes you wonder what he was doing in the bathroom naked. Some sort of mile-high club self-initiation?

It's good to know people don't always torture sharks and sharks don't always torture people. Sometimes, we even help each other out.

David Blyde, a veterinarian in Australia, was willing to plunge his arm up to his shoulder into the throat of a 10-foot nurse shark to save the animal after it swallowed a large hook. It was stuck in the animal's digestive tract, leaving a long metal handle sticking from its mouth, AP reports.

The gray nurse shark is apparently one of Australia's most endangered marine species because it was fished to near-extinction, with some estimates running as low a fewer than 300 animals left in the wild in waters off Australia's east coast.

I wrote about nurse sharks just last week. In Belize, you can swim with them and pet them. The Australian grey nurse shark is a little different than the kind they have in Belize. Still, it is generally much smaller than the more aggressive great white. It is also not considered a threat to humans, but its bite could still do serious damage.

The "hooked shark" was spotted by divers on Monday as it swam with a group of others near Byron Bay, 500 miles north of Sydney. After the animal was captured and placed in a holding tank, rescuers pushed a stiff plastic pipe into the shark's throat. Blyde then reach down through the pipe to free the hook.

Blyde told reporters that "as a veterinarian you often end up putting your hands in places that people find somewhat unattractive."

I think I could think of several different professions with the same problem.

Greetings from Belize.

I took this photo just a few days ago from the plane (hence the quality), during one of my island-hopping trips between Belize City and the island of Ambergris Caye.

Check it out. Some guy built a house on a tiny island in the middle of the ocean several miles of the coast of Belize.

I think that qualifies as "wanting to get away from it all."

Can you imagine bringing all the wood and building equipment here on boat? What happens when the hurricane season comes? I know hurricanes are not too frequent in this area, but still. A big storm could probably blow this house right in the ocean.

I'd love to meet this person. I picture him looking like Robinson Crusoe. I would be very disappointed to find a white-collar dude trying to create his own personal tax haven. (God knows Belize attracts those people.)

Greetings from Belize.

If you come to Belize, chances are you'll stay on one of the islands, not mainland. Not only is it easier to find nice beaches on the islands (cayes), but it is much closer to the Barrier Reef. And if you are visiting Belize, you simply must see the reef. Even if you don't dive, the ocean is shallow around here and the opportunities for snorkeling are plentiful.

If you're not sold on the idea of island vacation and decide to stay inland and spend time in the jungle instead, you should at least visit the islands for a day or two.

Flying tips
If you arrive in Belize by plane, you will most certainly land at Belize City International Airport. The most convenient way to get to the islands is to fly straight from here.

There are two local airlines that operate all those island-hopping routes: Maya Airlines (owned by Belizeans) and Tropic Air (owned by American expats living in Belize). I have flown both and I couldn't really tell the difference in quality or service between the two. Both use the same planes and operate efficiently. Tropic has more planes than Maya.

Greetings from Belize.

Those of you who have been to Belize before might not find these surprising, but this is my first time here and they surprised me. Here is a brief laundry list:

• The U.S. Dollar is widely accepted. With the Belize Dollar pegged at 2:1 to the U.S. Dollar, it's not surprising. Guess where you should be traveling when the U.S. Dollar is practically worthless? Where they accept dollars, of course! Although Belize is pretty expensive comparing to other Central American countries, the cheap dollar makes it affordable.
• English is all you'll ever need. While guidebook after guidebook tell you people speak Spanish or Creole, Belizeans almost universally speak perfect English. It's the official language, don't forget.
• It's not all jungle. While the UN pegs forest cover at 79% in Belize and the country itself claims to have 44% of its land under some legal land-protection regime, there are whole sections of the country that are open, rolling hills and farmland.
• It's not just the Blue Hole. There's great diving all up and down the world's second-largest barrier reef. The terrain is varied, and so is the wildlife. I can tell you that first hand, as I squeezed in 5 dives in 2 days off two different islands.
• There's a surprising level of development. Literacy is above 75% (depending on the source). The economy is rapidly growing. While the UN's human development index generally puts the country at about number 80 of 177 countries studied (in terms of education, GDP per person, etc.), life expectancy here is in the top 40 worldwide.
• The population density is one of the lowest in the world. With 300,000 or so people in an area the size of the state of New Jersey (which has almost 9 million folks), and 1/3 of people living in Belize City, it's not surprising, really.
• The rainy season (May-November) is quite pleasant here, especially if you stay in the north. We are in the middle of it right now. It rains about once a day, if that, for a while and then it's sunny again. The benefit over the dry season? It's cheaper and there are hardly any tourists.
• People are really friendly, helpful and pleasant. The islands have a Caribbean feel, while the inland is more Spanish-influenced.

I give Belize two thumbs up.

Greetings from Belize.

Yesterday, I made one of my life-long dreams come true. I dove the Great Blue Hole, a submarine cave about 45 miles off the coast of Belize. They say after diving it, divers are usually either utterly disappointed or absolutely blown away. I found it absolutely amazing.

The Great Blue Hole is circular, over 1,000 feet (330 meters) across and 400 feet (120 meters) deep. It was formed as a limestone cave system during the last ice age. As the ocean began to rise again, the caves flooded, and the roof collapsed.

The trip

To get to the Blue Hole, we booked a diving with the operator Aqua Dives Belize. They offer a $199 per person special now, which was the cheapest deal going, from what I could see. It includes the boat trip out there, breakfast, lunch (on a tiny caye on the same atoll) plus yummy rum punch (after diving), purified drinking water, 3 tanks and weight belts.

(We'd tried Ambergris Divers earlier, and found their staff friendly and competent, but we preferred Aqua Dives and their newer equipment.)

You start out at 5:30am, and make a 3-hour boat ride from Ambergris Caye to Lighthouse Reef. After a total of three dives, they get you back at 5:30pm.

I am in Guatemala today and this picture reminds me of how women carry fruit on their heads up here. (I tried it and it is not easy.)

Granted, none of the arrangements here were quite so fancy.

Danner00 took this picture in Bali. The women look so graceful, dressed in the same color scheme as the fruit.

***To have your photo considered for the Gadling Photo of the Day, go over to the Gadling Flickr Pool and post it. Make sure it is not copyrighted, otherwise we can't post it here.***

Greetings from Belize!

In San Pedro, "the big town" on the Belize island of Ambergris Caye, the preferred form of transportation is a golf cart. (Most of the roads are not paved and the main inhabited part of the island is only a few miles long.)

Although golf carts don't have seat belts, there are some rules associated with using these things.

Most importantly, the first two weeks of each month, you are supposed to park them on the right side of the road. The second part of each month, they should be parked on the left side. It's only fair to those who live on those streets, I guess.

So far, I have seen a golf cart used as a vehicle for:

• grocery shopping
• place to conduct cell phone calls while driving (with a toddler or two on one's lap)
• doing "donuts" in sand
• place for local youngsters to kiss
• a way to distribute "sticky green" to those interested
• and, of course, preferred form of transportation for lazy tourists who can't walk a full mile into town.
  

Greetings from Belize!

Something just dawned on me today while walking through "downtown" San Pedro, Belize: you can judge the "development" of an area by whether or not it has soymilk readily available in grocery stores. Sure, I'm waiting for a flurry of criticism on this post, but hear my logic first.

I'm not lactose intolerant, but a lot of my friends are. Seems like everyday, I hear about someone, or their child, being unable to drink milk.

The generally accepted idea is that early Europeans developed enzymes to digest cows milk, which helped get them through tough northern winters. Much of the world doesn't have this ability. Why? They don't drink cows milk. Babies drink mother's milk, and there it ends most everywhere.

In the West, you see milk everywhere there's refrigeration. And most people drink at least some. But now, it seems, more and more Westerners are developing allergies, and developing intolerance to milk. So, they switch to soymilk...if they can afford it.

And where did it all start? Probably China, where soy has been widely used for many centuries...but not generally as a soymilk drink. From what I can find, the first soymilk factory was founded in Paris around the turn of the last century by someone of Chinese origin, and some production followed in the U.S. and elsewhere. It took off in Hong Kong too, where it beat out Coke for a while.

But the big production of soymilk didn't come until the 1990s, and it seemed to start only in the most affluent, urban areas. (A ten-fold increase occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.) Where did I see it first? San Francisco, then Seattle and Portland, then Manhattan. It followed in most other cities in the U.S., from what I can tell. (You want to test me? Ask for it in every Starbucks outside major metro areas.)

Hence my "soymilk development index": where you have Westerners with the most money to burn and increasingly discerning tastes, you'll find soymilk.

Can you find it on Ambergris Caye (the most touristed area in Belize)? You bet, two brands.

Hello from Belize! What a beautiful little country this is.

I have wanted to come here forever, being a diver and all. As you probably know, the Belize Barrier Reef (stretching from Yucatan all the way to the coast of Guatemala) is the second largest reef in the world, after the Great Barrier Reef.

We took our first dive trip today, right off the Ambergris Caye island. It was just a shallow dive with a bunch of snorkelers who desperately wanted to "see some sharks." This part of the reef is know for its abundance of nurse sharks, pretty harmless types of sharks who eat by suction (hence the name). Still, they are sharks, aka beautiful creatures.

The dive instructor threw in some bait (an enormous fish head) and a few minutes later, a bunch of sharks (I saw five, the largest at least two meters long) and sting rays (the largest was over a meter across) came by for the feast. It was an incredible sight.

I don't know how I feel about the whole "petting the shark and sting ray" aspect of the whole thing. The instructors caught a couple of the sharks by the fin and let everyone in the group touch them. Same with the sting rays. I felt a little bad for them. I can't be good for them to have a hundred people a day touch them, right?