Blogs from Belize, Central America Caribbean

After 9 months of waiting, I have returned to Belize. I'm so happy to be back here. As soon as I stepped off the plane, I felt overwhelmingly happy. Last year was my first year working for the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project. Even though Belize was foreign to anything I knew, I felt welcomed. Now after getting settled into my house in San Ignaico for the second time, I feel a sense of home. After relaxing for a minute, I walked down to the main street and immediately ran into familiar, smiling faces. Becoming re-acquainted with this town and its populace is exciting. Already I have met a childhood friend of the project's director and had a pleasant conversation over a slice of pizza at my favorite bar, Greedy's (if you ever come to San ... read more

So our last day on Caye Caulker was spent eating and sleeping. Thursday we checked out of the hotel and wheeled our bags down the dirt street back to the boat dock. We could have used a taxi which was a golf cart but it was just as easy to walk. We took the next boat leaving the island for Belize City. In Belize City we took a cab to the local bus station and got on the next chicken bus to Orange Walk. No there weren't any chickens on the bus but there could have been. Two and a half hours later after picking up and dropping people off every couple of miles we finally made it to Orange Walk. We had a map with the bus station shown on it but the bus dropped ... read more

We started our reef fishing trip at 8 AM. We hired got a guide from Raggamuffin Tours. He had the poles and boat and we were off. Our first stop was for gas for the boat then we drover to Chapel Caye were the caretakers of the island used a net to catch us a bunch of sardines. We drove out to an area where you could fish and used the sardines as bait. We were catching Silk Snappers. Our guide was catching a bunch just using a line and a rubber finger cover. They don't use poles here because they get in the way. We used the poles though and had fun. About halfway through the morning a storm roled through and we had to pack everything up quick and take cover. The water pelted ... read more

This is two days in one since yesterday both Dave and I were sick. It seems we ate a bad apple in Tikal. We postponed our trip to ATM until today. Luckily Pacz let us change dates a 7AM the day of the trip when we called from our hotel. We both went back to sleep until checkout time then packed up to move to our next hotel. We had a three hour wait until we could check into our next hotel, Martha's Hotel so we went around the corner and did our laundry. When we finally got into our room we went right back to bed. We had dinner later at the hotel restaurant, then went back to bed. This morning we made it to the ATM caves. This was really fun. We had to ... read more

We took the early morning ferry from Ambergis Caye to Belize and dozed on the ferry. From the ferry terminal we took a taxi (unmarked, like they all are in Belize) to the bus station. Belize city was really run down. It had the same wooden houses on stilts with timber frontages whose paint was faded and peeling, just like in Hopkins, but here, some looked like they were about to fall down. We didn't see any shops, just people selling clothes by hanging them on fences and selling bits and pieces by the sides of the roads, none of which were tarmacked. To be honest, after hearing about how dangerous it could be, Hannah and I felt a little intimidated and were happy to only be passing through. The bus station, a corrugated iron and ... read more

A midnight ride on the comfortable air conditioned Mexican ADO bus service brought us down the Yucatan Coast to Belize City. Arriving at first sunlight, we witnessed the city awaken from an antique taxi to our $15 a night guesthouse. The proprietor welcomed us with smiles and small talk, explaining the building was built 200 years ago during English colonial times. In fact Belize was noted as a perfect pirate hang out, raiding Spanish galleons heavy with gold and silver. English pirating eventually led to an English colony which makes Belize one of the few English speaking countries in a predominately Spanish neighborhood. Venturing from our guesthouse, we walked a short distance to downtown Belize, a dilapidated, worn and weathered city that seemed struggling to survive. A bit intimidated by the begging and decrepit conditions, most ... read more

So, as you know we made it to Belize.... Now we just had to get to Sittee River and after a nightmare with trying to get cash we made the choice to head to Hopkins as that was in the must sees of Belize, had a great beach and looked big enough for us to stock up with supplies ready for our week on our Robinson Crusoe island .... We'd been told by the lady at the bus stop that we just got off at the Hopkins Junction and walked either left or right to whichever set of accommodation we fancied, north or south end of the beach..... So the bus dropped us off at the junction at the top of the main road junction, not that of the town..... However we were oblivious to this ... read more