Around the World with K & M: Belize

New Year's Day in Belize!

Belize - December 31, 2006 - Jan. 5, 2007

(Cont'd from previous post) We really didn´t expect Belize to be so rundown. Being the only English-speaking nation in Central America, and having heard that many wealthy U.S. businessmen lived and worked down here, we really expected to see a more developed country. But it really is third-world, but a very EXPENSIVE third-world nation. We arrived in Belize City, and no building was higher than 3 stories. People just roamed about aimlessly. It´s a very dangerous city - lots of shootings and gang wars, but we didn't see anything except poverty. We took a boat to Caye Caulker where we spent the next two nights. The water taxi cost $7.50 U.S. each one way!!

Belize has had its Belize dollar pegged to the US dollar at 2 BZD to 1 USD for a very long time. There has been pressure and talk of devaluing it, but the corrupt government is having too good a time with their waterfront properties on the Cayman Islands to give it all up for the good of the population. Not that there's much population left either! The biggest city, Belize City, houses just about 60,000 folks, while the entire country's population is a mere 287,730 (est. July 2006). And we thought Canada's population was tiny!

Mangroves in the sea

Back to Caye Caulker - we stayed at the Seaside Cabanas for the duration of our island adventure. It was nice, but again, expensive for what you got. We went to several decent restaurants. The first night was a Dutch-owned Italian restaurant on Belizean soil - go figure - called Don Corleone's. It was alright, but the price was ridiculous. We had a tiny dish of seafood linguine for about $20 US per plate. We spent the evening walking around the tiny island - it's only 4 miles long and and its widest point is 0.7 miles across! What we did find interesting was a)the lack of dental floss, and b) the large number of Cantonese people owning a multitude of convenience stores. We chatted with several of them. One man had come about 33 years ago to work as a fisherman as Caye Caulker was merely a fishing village then. He then started to own stores, and now has a chain that would make Honest Ed proud. Another woman who owned a convenience store came about 5 years ago. She hates it there, and can't speak a word of English, but her two little kids with very Chinese names like "Yang" or something like that, fit right in, hanging out with the Garifuna (the name for black Belizeans) and speaking Creole with the best of them.

Street scene in Caye Caulker.

Taxi, anyone? This golf cart ride costs $5 US to anywhere
you want - if you really can't bear to walk the 20 minutes down
the lenghth of the island!

The pool at Seaside Cabanas.

The pool-side cabanas.

The next day in Caye Caulker was spent wandering around the island (again). We saw iguanas fight, stared out at the clear blue ocean, sat beside the swimming pool, ate at a restaurant called "The Happy Lobster," where we had a taste of conch ceviche (Belize is known for its conch, and a ceviche, it turns out, is a raw seafood concoction with tomatoes, onions, lime juice, sort of like a salsa that you eat with tortilla chips), went to the expensive internet cafe (at its cheapest time, happy hour (3-6pm), it cost $5US per hour!), then went to eat again, at Rasta Pasta Cafe, known for its gigantic burritos, then relaxed in our cabana.

We stumbled upon this breakfast place.
Notice that the directions for the location are:
"Dark Blue House"

Glenda's - the "dark blue house"

Caye Caulker's "#1 Barber Shop"

There are a lot of Mennonites in Belize - we thought
this was an interesting shot of them at the beach!

By the "split" - a hurricane a few years ago basically
tore the island into two pieces - now there's ocean
in between.

One of the iguanas that helped us pass the time.

Watching this pelican also killed some time....

The shot above this one took awhile to get,
cause the pelican kept "hiding"!!

Kris, the Saskatchewanian, at Rasta Pasta Cafe.

A night shot of the beach in front of our cabana.

We left Caye Caulker the next day after a not-so-great breakfast at the Sand Bar (literally a bar with a floor of sand - its motto - "no shirt, no shoes, no problem!"). Again, we couldn't make a journey without making it really exciting. We left on the boat just as the large black clouds rolled in, thundering and pounding us with a torrential COLD rain. The boat wasn't covered, of course, so we huddled underneath a tarp as best as we could. What did it really matter? We had been soaked just walking from the hotel to the pier anyway!