Belize

Currently I'm in San Pedro La Laguna on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala. I have been here a week with my Uncle Ray and I am likely staying another two weeks to study Spanish. My location will stand still and give me a chance to catch up on what I did a couple weeks ago.



Corozal Town in northern Belize is less than a pleasant place. I'm not really sure why I was there. It was Sunday and it seemed like a ghost town. Nobody was there. I found a hotel thanks to my taxi driver, but even though the road looked no bigger than the street I live on in my small neighborhood in Connecticut, it was apparently one of the main highways in Belize. ALL NIGHT trucks and cars where zooming by my hotel and thanks to "habitaciones sin arquitectos" (rooms without architects) the acoustics of my room made it feel like I was at NASCAR event. I walked around to look for a place to eat and discovered the only restaurants in Corozal town are dirty Chinese ones. I dined solo staring at posters of half naked girls holding beer bottles while I timidly ate the heaping plate of lo mein in front of me. I thanked my lucky stars the next day when I experienced no ill effects. When you travel like I am doing it is not always a vacation. It is life. Sometimes you make stupid choices. This time mine was going to Corozal Town.

In the morning I got a boat that brought me out to the island of Ambergris Caye and the town of San Pedro. Prices in Belize are about the same as those in the United States and after having just traveled five weeks through Mexico, I wasn't liking the changes. They have their own money in Belize, but it is also okay to use the United States dollar. The exchange is simple for even the most inept person. One US dollar equals two Belizean dollars. One Belizean dollar equals .50 cents US. Got it? In San Pedro the prices were terrible. $12 Belize for an hour on the internet, $25 BZ for a decent breakfast, and $10 BZ for a bag of tortilla chips. I brought $60 US dollars with me on this trip in anticipation of needing to use them in emergencies. That bastard at the Mexican border took the first $20 US from me and I turned the other $40 in for the emergency of having no money to buy beers at the bar connected to my hostel. I saved $4 US in one dollar bills given to me as change. This has now replaced my $60 US worth of emergency money. Hopefully I don't have a very big emergency.

The crap thing about San Pedro are all the damn golf carts. Golf carts are the main form of transportation. The taxis are golf carts and every fat, lazy, and old tourist that comes to the town (aka - everyone) rents a golf cart to drive around the town, which cannot be much more than a mile long (The island itself is much larger though, but mostly uninhabited). I walk everywhere so I was in constant danger of being run over by a golf cart. Once again, I somehow survived. I was thinking about diving in San Pedro, which sits next to the second largest coral reef in the world, but opted to simply take a snorkeling trip. Well worth it. I swam by sting rays and only remembered Steve Irwin after I was safely on the boat. I swam down and ran my fingers over their smooth "back". Thankfully it didn't pop its' tail through my heart. Coral, fish of all colors, and crystal blue water. It was awesome. In this place called "Shark Ray Alley" there were loads of nurse sharks hanging about the boat eating food thrown in by our skipper, but they took off when we got in the water. I was hoping to have the chance to swim around the harmless sharks, but settled for the rays and loads of other impressive looking tropical fish. It was an experience I'll never forget. I spent three nights in San Pedro. A couple days being stupidly hungover thinking I was 'as good as I once was' hanging with some younger guys. There was also a nightly poker game at the hostel and I lost more than I usually spend in three days traveling. Aside from snorkeling in some of the best waters in the world, I've been making some stupid choices in Belize.

From San Pedro I took a boat to Belize City, and got on a US converted school bus from the 70's and headed to western Belize and the town of San Ignacio. Belize (and Guatemala) get all of the United States old school buses. These are the main source of transportation. I'm telling you. Mexico's transportation is unbelievably nice compared to those countries and I haven't even made it to some of the more difficult countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Mexico is amazing. Go there. I'm telling you. Not Cancun though. That isn't Mexico. Cancun is meat heads from the U.S. giving us a bad name getting plastered during spring break because they never learned how to drink because we're the only country with a drinking age of 21. Was that a runon sentence?

In San Ignacio I was staying in this guest house ten miles away from the main town on dirt roads in the middle of the jungle. Check some pics on facebook and you'll see. It was very nice. Jungle hikes, swimming in clear water having just emerged from underground caves, and enjoying the peaceful sounds of nature. An American family owned the guest house and lived there with their three children. One was a nine year old boy, who took it upon himself to bother the shit out of me. He was a nice kid and I had some fun with him, but it started to feel like I was babysitting after day one. We played cards, connect four, he took me on a hike, and we made paper airplanes together. It started to feel less fun. I like kids, I'm a teacher, but sometimes I want to throw them off a cliff. Does that make me a bad guy?

I was waiting in the border line to exit Belize and enter Guatemala when I over heard a couple of woman who had hired a guide to take them across the border and help them arrive safely to their hotel: "Does anybody ever just walk across the border without a guide??" I don't consider myself a special case. There are literally thousands of travelers like myself. Well, all of them have three times the amount of stuff I do, but still, travels traveling solo, crossing borders with no guide. I hear all the time people say how they wish they could do what I'm doing. How lucky I am, etc. It's not always easy my friend. In your head, you may think its easy, but when you cross that border, and realize you still don't know the language being spoken and you have no idea where the bus station is and how to get from one place to another and everyone sees that, and knows that, and is trying to rip you off, you may not wish to travel the way I and the thousands of others are. It's amazing and I love it and if you really want to do it YOU CAN and YOU SHOULD, but it's not a vacation, it's my current life. There are good days and bad. It's hard and sometimes scary. Understand what you're wishing for before you say it.