Ten Days in Belize

Having arrived in Belize almost ten days ago and immediately traveling the entire length of the country almost to its southern extreme. We passed by many of the locations we had considered staying in but for the reasons we had pondered over from afar. We pressed on and eventually arrived at our preferred location of Punta Gorda.

We chose to come down to this location because of its not being overrun with tourists and hoping to get settled into the area and established before it does. We had arrived late at night and easily found our pre-booked accommodation, an apartment for our first month in the country. The next morning we started settling in, firstly unpacking and then venturing out around the town. We began with breakfast, and then checked out the street market followed by the stores. After purchasing our many essential supplies our next task was to check on our internet capabilities. We had been assured of an internet service as part of our rental package with a free Wi-Fi connection. We were living across the road from the main hotel building and were unable to use the service inside our accommodation. An outdoor patio area was available to us for this service but was not really suitable to use after dark due to the prevalence of insects. After only one or two days stay we had an ever increasing list of unread emails due to the slow connection speed. The next day was even worse, we had no internet. An overnight storm had caused the service to fail. This being Central America with a relatively relaxed pace of life meant the internet would not be repaired anytime soon, in fact it took all of 4 or 5 days to be fully running again. Before we left the UK to come down here to Belize we knew the importance of a reliable internet connection and to be able to use it on a daily basis. Without this we could not adequately fund our being here, if this was to be an ongoing problem then we would have to seriously look elsewhere. At the time of the internet failure we had been informed that any storm down here could knock out the internet for days at a time. Our response was to start looking for a new location. We had paid for a month's rental with an option for longer, we had no chance of a refund if we left early, so we had the remainder of the rental to find a new location. We set out the next morning.

Belize has a good network of buses; they are nearly all the yellow school buses from the USA brought down here at the end of their service on school runs. These old buses are not the most comfortable forms of transport, also not known for their leg room but they are cheap. It is possible to travel the length of this country by bus for the paltry sum of $20US.

We took one of these buses for about 2 hours north (all except local buses go north from here), to a small town called Independence. After getting ourselves off the bus it was good to walk the ten minutes or so to the edge of the clear still waters of a large lagoon, to where we would catch a water taxi across to the resort of Placencia. The water taxi was run by a company calling itself the Hokey Pokey water taxi. The lagoon itself was full of floating islands of mangrove; the only wildlife we witnessed though was a swimming iguana. We have seen so many of these odd looking creatures in our short time here.

On arriving in Placencia we went off in search of somewhere to stay for the night, it was lunch time and many places here looked to be taking an early afternoon siesta. It was so quiet with hardly anyone out and about. We soon found one quaint looking wooden house offering overnight rooms at a reasonable rate and quickly decided this would be a convenient place to stay for the night. Internet was available as well, the only drawback being that we could only have a long term rental until November. Being as it had now passed lunchtime we decided we should go off in search of a place to eat as well. After walking in a few directions we eventually found a restaurant which also had rooms available. This building was brick built and a lot more modern than the previous one, also we could have a full year's rental at about the same price as the wooden place we were staying in. It didn't take too long to decide and we paid a month's rental in advance ready for moving in once our present rental finishes.

After only a few minutes in Placencia we knew this to be the ideal we had imagined Belize to be and we happily took a stroll along the almost deserted beach with the clear Caribbean waters lapping at our feet. The next morning as we retraced our route back to Punta Gorda we both knew it would be a long three weeks before we would be able to return with all our gear, but well worth the wait.

Source: - personal knowledge and experience.