Every summer, the beach becomes a very popular place to go. After all, it’s a place where you can relax and smell the aromatic sea air.
Unfortunately that’s not the case this summer for tourist beaches from Belize, Central America to Barbados, Caribbean. A smelly disaster has come to visit and nobody knows how long it will stay: a giant tide of the sargassum seaweed.
Barbara Hall, from beachside hotel in Placencia of southern Belize, recalls her experience as “something out of a science fiction movie”.
The sight that greeted her that morning was a gargantuan tide of sargassum – a type of ocean seaweed that had swept in overnight. At sea, sargassum is an essential habitat for some marine life, but when it reaches land it rots, sucking up oxygen from the water and emitting hydrogen sulphide gas, which smells like rotten eggs.
Image: The San Pedro Sun Newspaper; Victor Ruiz Garcia/Reuters
Sounds like a great time for a discount visit. Sure the beaches may stink but you'll have them all to yourself. Also many of these places have other wonderful non-beach attractions.
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