You better Belize it!

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Central America here we come! After spending almost half our time away in Mexico, we felt very ready to tackle the real Central America and make progress on our route - and entering Belize felt like we were on our way. The plan for Belize was to spend as little time as possible here, and yet see a few things, as it's rumoured to be the most expensive country in Central America. That's not exactly how it worked out for us...

First, a few notes on Belize: It only has about 300,000 people; its capital is NOT Belize City, but the small, unknown Belmopan due to a hurricane almost destroying Belize City in the 60’s; and for good and bad, the Belizean dollar is 2:1 to the American dollar…
The best advice we were given was: smile a lot and make sure you say ‘hello, how’re you doing’ wherever you go. Belizeans are super-friendly - but only once you’ve shown that you deserve it, i.e. with a polite introductory phrase 😊

Belize City

We drove by bus to Belize City from Chetumal in Mexico, and found a relatively cheap hotel (Sea Breeze). After we'd cooled off in front of the fan, we set out to find an ATM and some food. What we had forgotten to take into account was the Belizeans tend to eat their main meal around 5pm, meaning that restaurants and shops are closed if you venture out much later than 6pm. We did manage to find some pizza and a small supermarket for water and breakfast for the next day. Then we zonked out in our room to a happy reunion (hvorfor kan man ikke sige 'gensyn' paa engelsk??) with ‘The Fifth Element’. Ahh, for a little TV once in a while…

It wasn’t really our impression that there was too much to see or do, so the next morning we set off on a walking tour of Belize City. It isn’t big, there isn’t much to see, so it didn’t take us long. We might have been a bit unfair to the place, but we walked along the water, saw the lighthouse, across the swing bridge, saw the old court house, walked through the cute little streets with its wooden houses clad in flowers, declined the entrance fee at the Government House, sat in the park and watched a bunch of kids having fun in the water, and then decided to catch the midday boat to Caye Caulker. We hurried back to pick up our bags, and were really sweaty when we got to the Caye Caulker Water Taxi Association only to find out that the departure times written on a big sign outside didn’t all go to Caye Caulker - half, including the midday one we wanted, went to San Pedro. So after all that hurrying we had an hour and a half to enjoy the industrial strength fan in the waiting area.

Caye Caulker

Caye Caulker is an 8km long limestone coral island on the Belize Barrier Reef, 32 km from Belize City. In some places the island is only a few hundred meters wide. The island has about 1300 inhabitants, mostly living in the village in the middle of the long narrow island near the split which divides the island in two parts. A southern inhabited half and a northern half which only has a few people on it. Although plots are being sold, so who knows how long this will last…

The island is known for its white sand streets, its supposedly car-free status (although we saw a few old trucks used for driving goods from the cargo dock on the back of the island to the various groceries, not to mention the golf carts!), its laid-back attitude and its dress code: No shirt, no shoes? No problem!

We stayed at Marin’s Guest House, where we were really happy with our little hut with a cold-water bathroom, and some sketchy WiFi. The only problem was the lack of fridge/kitchen in the compound, as it gets seriously hot in this region, and a cold drink is a life-saver - literally! We went exploring: swam in the Split at the north of the village, walked around the southern tip as far as we could go until we got literally eaten by mosquitoes, jumped in and snorkelled with sergeant majors off the many docks that stick out from the island. We also managed to both get severely sunburnt despite wearing SPF30, so had to stay indoors for a day or two. We then managed to get sunburnt again, so had to stay inside again… Oh dear, all that relaxing was almost too much. Nah, it was really nice. When we were ready to go, we had a bit of an accident…





The incident of the stretching Elliott and the rusty ceiling fan: So, the Belizeans are not the tallest people in the world, so I’m not sure they had taken into account that someone might actually be tall enough to touch the ceiling fan, rustily spinning above our bed. Neither had Elliott when he got up and stretched one morning, only to splatter blood all over the place when his thumb was struck by the rotor blades. My first reaction was to ask if he still had his thumb! Luckily, the fan had only made a big gash in his thumb. Unfortunately, this gash split his nail down the middle, all the way to the bone, and was impossible for the doctor to sew. So he had it cleaned at the clinic, had the one stitch that was possible, got it wrapped and was told to take 3 days of preventative antibiotics and painkillers every 8 hours. 3 weeks later, it is still healing slowly, but it will take months before we know what will happen to his nail, and how it might grow back.

So we took another few days convalescing (me, sympathetically) to make sure he was ok before we started carrying big bags around and moving away from where we knew there was a clinic. But it’s quite depressing to be on a lovely, warm island where the only real pastimes are water-based. I felt quite guilty when I forced him to come outside and get some fresh air because his face looked like someone who could neither have the cake nor eat it 😞 He did encourage me to go on a snorkelling trip, though, as it was one of the things we had initially stayed on the island to try. The snorkelling near the island is not great (although we did see both moray eels and French angel fish near the split) and you’re not allowed to swim out to the reef although you can see it a few hundred meters out. Apparently it’s too dangerous with all the boat traffic in the shallow waters between the reef and the island. So I paid my $20 to go on a boat with a guide and visit 3 different sites; if I remember correctly they were Zone A, Shark Ray Alley and Coral Gardens.

We chose one of the many tour operators on Front Street that were going out that afternoon with a small group. My small group turned out to consist of a couple from NY, Warren and Vicky, who were new to snorkelling. But it all went fine, they were really nice, and despite having trouble understanding our heavily accented guide, Glenn, we had some great snorkels. We saw a lot of fish on the first one, including a massive moray eel, but there was also another group, so I was happy when we swam away from them. The second stop, was Shark Ray Alley, which is a shallow spot where lots and lots of rays come to feed. It started as an ‘accident’ as the fishermen usually stopped in this same spot to clean their fish before bringing them to shore, and when they realised that this brought big schools of rays and lots of sharks, they started feeding them on purpose to take tourists here. It was quite daunting stepping into the water, as I was in real danger of stepping on a fish!!! That’s how many there were and how close they swim to you. When the other group caught up with us, the guide from the other boat actually picked up one of the rays to show his group that they don’t sting. I obviously don’t condone that kind of behaviour, but I have to admit that it’s quite surreal to have so many fish swimming so close to you that if you stretch your arm out they glide their ‘wings’ over your hands.
The last spot was the Coral Gardens, where we saw a couple of nurse sharks, we looked for a turtle Glenn had seen earlier in the day, but didn’t find, and then we went looking for some French Angelfish as I had my Kodak underwater camera (which Elliott gave me for my birthday) with me, and I wanted a photo.
All in all a very pleasant afternoon, and highly recommended if you pass by Caye Caulker (which I would also totally recommend, by the way).

San Ignacio

When we finally did make our move from Caye Caulker, we made the mistake of doing it on the weekend… Not that our journey was particularly affected. We ran into Warren and Vicky from the snorkel trip on the docks who were going to San Ignacio as well, and shared a taxi and then chats on the bus… No the mistake was that San Ignacio is ‘dead’ on a Sunday! We were going there because I’d read about a Medicine Trail: a place where an American doctor had learned about old Mayan herbal remedies, and has created a walk through the jungle where you can teach yourself about the plants and herbs that offer alternatives to Western Medicine. Unfortunately, when we got there we realised that as elsewhere in Central America, if someone gets a good idea it is quickly copied: there are now at least a dozen different ‘Medicine Trails’. First of all, we couldn’t figure out which one was the ‘right’ one, secondly, a friendly American coffee shop owner told us we couldn’t get public transport there, taxis aren’t allowed to go, so we should call and get them to pick us up on their customary morning run into town in return for spending the day there having lunch etc… We don’t have a phone, and the brochure he gave us wasn’t the place we wanted to go, we couldn’t find an independent tourist office, just travel agencies that made expensive excursions into Tikal in Guatemala. So in the end, we gave up on that idea, decided to go to Xunantunich, another Maya ruin that sounded like it was in a beautiful spot, where we’d have to cross a river and hike a little to get there.

We weren’t too interested in the ruins themselves, but it turned out to be a nice little day trip. The river we crossed, after a quick bus ride, was completely green! I don’t know if that means it’s full of algae or some other bad thing, but it made it look absolutely stunning with the verdant trees reflecting in the water on both shores. We crossed the river on a little hand-cranked ferry, and then hiked for about half an hour up the hill to the entrance. The site was similar to a lot of the other sites we’ve seen, apart from the view from the top of El Castillo, where we naughtily eavesdropped on some of the other people’s guides and found out about the other Maya sites that could be seen on the horizon, as well as some of its history, the rise and fall of the site, and the contraband route on the border with Guatemala…

We considered staying to give the Medicine Trail another go, but we were both ready to move on. We hadn’t meant to stay so long in Belize and we still had a lot on the programme for the next half of our trip. We reached the half-way point of our six months away while on Caye Caulker, and we still want to get to Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, as well as make it back through Belize and up the Yucatan coast to Cancun… So we exited Belize on Monday the 19th of April.

Belize was a big surprise to us, really. Whenever we speak to other travellers, they tend to either rush through Belize because it’s SO expensive, or skip it altogether because they’ve heard nothing good about it. I think this is unfair to Belize. It hasn’t been much more expensive to us on average than Mexico - you just spend your money on other things. In Mexico travel kills your budget, in Belize travel is cheap but food and accommodation is a nudge more expensive than Mexico.
Furthermore, there are things to see in Belize that you don’t see anywhere else in Central America: a richness in diversity, a coming together of different cultural pasts to create a unique Caribbean country where European, African and Latin heritages melt together. You never know if people are going to start speaking Spanish, English, Creole, or Mennonite German together! The food is varied and exciting. The coral reef and its islands are a lovely get-away, and so different from the lush, green hills of the interior.
We’re looking forward to passing through again, on our way back to Mexico, where we’ve just booked our flights home from. I was sorry to miss the Garífuna culture (African decent with no slavery history) in Southern Belize, and maybe we'll stay a few days on one of the smaller, less touristed cayes…

So from us, it’s not ‘Goodbye, Belize’, but an anticipant ‘Hasta la Vista' 😊

Love,
Kristine

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Photos

Cruise ships on the horizon
Belize receives twice its population in cruise boat tourists each year!

Comments

[Memo Aviles]

Great photos.
My wife and I loved the photos. I am originally from Belize City, we live in Cancun Mexico, but are movieing to Belize soon.. We enjoyed your photos my wife is American and never been to Belize. Thanks for helping her see a little bit of my Country.