The Itinerary of Belize

I wanted to give you all a picture of the kinds of places and things we did in Belize, the awesomeness of which is self evident when you look at our Itinerary. I sent this out before we left, but I wanted to annotate this a bit more, the flush out the awesomeness and add some pictures.

We spent our first couple days in the Community Baboon Sanctuary, which is an agreement between several villages to leave habitat in place for the Howler Monkeys along the Belize River. We stayed at a guest house in Bermudian Landing, where we had a hammock and meals prepared for us and could hear Howler Monkeys all night long. Among its great features, I instantly fell in love with the place names in Belize. There is a major highway junction at Burrel Boom, and we launched our croc tour from Double Head Cabbage- how could you not love that?


From there, we took at water taxi out to Caye Caulker, which is one of many Cayes of the coast of Belize on the Barrier Reef. This community is uber laid back, there are a lot of Rastafarians and a couple dive shops. People generally don't wear shoes. The roads, such as they are are made of dirt and driven on by golf carts. From here, we took a boat tour to see the manatee sanctuary.

On our way to our next point south, we stopped at the Belize Zoo, where we saw a family from our manatee tour. Yes, the country is that small. The zoo is practically a post on it's own, thoguh, so I'll get back to that later. We headed to the community of Maya Center, a village at the mouth of the Cockscomb Basin (Jaguar) Preserve. The village had a major boom in 1985 when the government told the Mayans they were no longer allowed to live in the jungle. Our host told us about his experiences transitioning from living the traditional lifestyle in the jungle and being a modern bussiness owner. The next day we went into the Preserve, and while we didn't see jaguar, we did take a dip at the waterfall. The picture is of a Blue Morpho butterfly, which is such a brilliant blue color it overexposed in the picture. Beautiful!


It took a few hours to drive to the south to Punta Gorda, which has unencombered views of the Bay of Honduras, and hosted the market that brought people from all the Mayan villages in the south and a few Mennonite farms to share their produce and wares. From here we were able to tour a cocoa farm, and visited the ruins of Lubantuum. We stayed in this kitchy quirky hotel, with over grown vegetation, carved woods and no other guests.


On Christmas Day, we moved to the Garifuna community of Hopkins, and stayed in a classic beachside bungalow owned by a couple from Canada. Once you leave the highway, you drive 3 miles down a red clay road to the community. The beach was fantastic. It was pretty clear if we would have stayed up past about 8, the entire village was going to turn into one rockin' block party. It's here we tried the cakes and Cassava bread.

On Boxing Day, we headed a couple hours north to Orange Walk Town, to a St. Christopher's Hotel on the New River. Very modern. The community was pretty well shut down for the holiday, but there were some bilingual taco vendors out and a lot of Chinese restaurants for us to choose from. Lobster Fried Rice? Sweet and Sour Conch? The next day, we took a boat tour to the ruins of Lamanai, which our tour guide told us was so powerful it caused the Great Hiatus in Mayan History. The site is giant, and only barely explored. The picture at the bottom is me on top of the main pyramid, you can see the river we came in on.

From there we moved to the Crooked Tree Preserve. We took a bird tour, and spent a lot of time walking around looking at birds. This is actually an inland island, surround by lake and lagoon. The preserve includes all the land in the village- the directions for the 'self guided tour' takes you down the main roads and then has you turn and walk up the beach. It makes you feel like you've come to gaze at someone's yard, but it is someone's yard with 4 snowy egrits and a tricolored heron in it. It seems to work.

We flew home from there, and although for most of the time it seemed like we were some of the few travelers in the country, there were at least a couple planes full of Americans heading home. I half expected to see someone we knew there, we'd been getting so familiar with the place.