It's Belize's number one site for cruise visitors but tour guides who use Nohoch Che'en are worried that their guests may be in trouble the next time they go cave tubing. That's because they've spotted multiple crocodiles in the river. And they're asking NICH to help with relocating them - but, it's complicated. We spoke with one of those tour guides today via Zoom.
Jason Edwards, Belize N Me Jungle & Sea Tours/PR, Central Tourist Guide Assoc.
"For some years we have noticed crocodiles started to show up in the cave system at Nohoch Che'en. And throughout the years we have seen then grow and stuff like that and about 3 years ago we saw one. Now as of a couple months ago, we saw about 3 or 4 of them along the route that we conduct our cave tubing tour. And what's frightening is that the sizes of these crocodiles are not small. For example the one that was seen inside the cave by many tour guides and tour operators from different companies was a little bit over 10 feet according to a lot of them. And at the exit of the cave there's another one which measures about 6 feet. And we have pictures and videos of these crocodiles. And we have made reports to the park rangers, the park rangers are well aware of the crocodiles within the cave system, hence NICH has gotten a report about it. And when NICH heard about it they sent the crocodile research center to the park to speak to tour guides and tour operators about cohabitating with these animals in the cave system which I think is very good for educational purposes but there is no way we could cohabitate with a predator and we're dealing with tourists and stuff like that. And what we are concerned about is that this is our livelihood, cave tubing is our livelihood. It's the highest and most requested tour and god forbid we walk on one of these crocodiles and one of our guests gets injured by the crocodiles in the cave system, what will happen to our business and what will happen to this destination that our guests love to visit so much."
"At the exit of the cave, everybody knows there's a bunch of huge tarpons that's a great citing for our guests and we would always seen them flouncing and these are 5, 6 footers. They're all gone because we had turtles in that area, they're all gone because we know that crocodiles in that area have eaten them."
"Where the crocodile hangs out it's a very deep area so god forbid it bites anybody, it could pull them straight under the water and that's it for us."
