Getting to Belize


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Published: December 4th 2014
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It was one of the busiest travel days of the year when we leave Spokane at 8:30 pm on Sunday, after changing planes in Phoenix, then Miami, we are pretty much bags of dirt by time we arrive in Belize City at noon the following day. We always said we would never fly on United or Amerian Airlines, but there we were for 8.5 hours in the air with our knees cramped up on the seats in front of us seated in one of the last rows on all three planes - needless to say that getting here was less than pleasant. Good thing that all turned around once we transferred onto Maya Air in Belize City.

We loaded onto a small single engine plane heading towards Placencia, our final destination. The plane could hold 12 people but there were only 5 of us. We get a great aerial view of Belize City, the shoreline, penninsula, islands and jungles of the country. The entire crew is just one person, the captain. We watch him texting on his phone while flying, obviously very comfortable with what he is doing. After about 20 minutes of flying, we start descending towards a gravel airstrip (Ian thinks it's called Independence airstrip.) Basically it's just a clearing carved out of the middle of the jungle with one gravel path. There is nothing there, no buildings or anything - just one pallapa. One guy deplanes and there is one truck there to pick him up - that's it. The captain gets out and opens the door, puts down the stairs, lets him out and gets his luggage then gets back on the plane. Talk about the middle of nowhere! The captain then turns the plane around and we take off again, about 10 or so minutes later we started descending again, this time into Placencia, a tiny village at southern-most tip of the penninsula. There's a tiny airport building but we don't go in, we just pick up our luggage oustide. There is one taxi, an old van, with a cool and friendly Rastafaran-type driver named Sam. All we have for an address is 'Placencia Pointe,' Sam isn't really sure where it is, it's a private residence as opposed to a known rental, so he drives us around for a bit and we find what we are looking for which is a small covered bench on the side of a canal with a sign and a buzzer which looks like a doorbell. We push the buzzer and a few minutes later, the caretaker, Edwin, comes across the lagoon on a small pontoon boat to ferry us across to our condo.

17 hours since we first started off on our first plane - we are finally here - thank God!

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4th December 2014

Getting to belize
Sounds like the trip from hell! Glad you arrived (finally) and looking forward to your blogs about Belize. Hope the country makes up for the uncomfortable plane rides to get there. No snow here, temp around minus 5.

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