With a few days to spare before the next festival back up in Mexico, we decided to break up the long road journey, ignore warnings of a country of overpriced ‘meh’ and check out Belize. If you’ve done any of the reading we have you won’t have found much to say about Belize; few people seem to stop there mainly due to the higher prices and the only ‘attraction’ I’d heard of before arriving was the great blue hole (irrelevant if you can’t scuba dive).
These lame reviews end here! Belize has got to be one of my favourite countries I have ever visited. Step over the border from Guatemala and suddenly people smile and throw jokes around and they’re black and sassy and they speak English and want to help you with things instead of sell you tours. The people are honestly the nicest I’ve ever come across, but also sort of cool and groovy and witty – think the friendliness of Cambodians married with New Orleans swag.
The entire country is quaint and adorable, like 1950s America has been transplanted to a tropical landscape. Billboards and brand names don’t seem to be much of a thing (as opposed to Guatemala and Mexico where it’s very normal to paint your home with the Coca Cola logo). All the signage and shopfronts are candy colours and hand painted in the national language of English with incorrect grammar (legit! I saw an ad for Shell saying “the engine starts even when the harvest does’nt”).
Apart from awesome people Belize also has an AMAZING cuisine which I cannot believe hasn’t been disseminated throughout the rest of the world. After Guatemalan food which was mainly Mexican but bad, Belizean dishes have been a breath of fresh air. We were sceptical at first having heard that the national dishes are rice with beans or beans with rice, but oh mama let me tell you I could munch on Belizean rice with beans for a loooong time. Maybe due to the environment, the ingredients used are so unique! Coconut shavings through the rice, and sauces simmered with mango and rum and chilli and unnameable spices… Pig tail and split peas, fry jacks and deep fried corn empanadas, every meal was a ‘mmmmmm my god’ moment. Our encounter with Jenny, a bombastic melon-boobed mama with a streetside kitchen in Belize City, sums up the Belize experience well. After dolloping mammoth piles of black eyed peas with red rice, pig feet, deer, butter fried fish, okra, spinach, fried plantain and lentils over our disposable plates – “and lemme tell ya somethin darlin, now you’re Belizean! You’re gonna leave two pounds heavier in four days!” – she advised us on the spicy sauce – “hot, just like first love, honey” – and sent us off on our ferry to Caye Caulker full of gooey goodness.
It’s true that Belize is expensive but I would 100% recommend it to anybody passing through the area.
We stopped in San Ignacio (lime and salt chocolate, shrimp burritos, Rastas), Orange Walk (not much to be honest but a really lovely local granddaddy called Cliff who took us around his town and showed us scars on his neck where he’d fought a crocodile “like Steve Irwin”, and also a community of Minnonites, Amish Europeans who migrated here during WWII and speak an archaic form of German -?!) and Caye Caulker, an island off the capital which is the main draw for backpackers in Belize. The whole island is a postcard, complete with palm trees and white sand and Ye Olde Ice Creame Shoppes and little golf buggies that traverse the two streets. The only problem with Caye Caulker is that, as is the nature of islands, it’s a trap and you can’t escape the crazy prices. We did manage to successfully score a priceless (but not actually that pricey) lunch from a local lady’s kitchen: hudut is a local dish of a whole fish in a coconut milk soup all spiced up with jalapeños and okra and peppercorns, with little patties made of mashed up plantain to dip in it like gooey cookies. Diviiiiine darling diviiiine. Oh and I nearly forgot – we also swam with manta rays and nurse sharks and technicolor fish and snorkelled over labyrinths of alien coral underwater landscapes in crystal clear warm water in the second largest reef in the world.
I know it sounds like all we did in Belize was eat, and this is quite true, but honestly there was something special in the humid air above this pretty country. There’s definitely a flavour distinct from the Latin American neighbours I have visited. Caribbean island life comes with a ‘don’t worry, be happy’ attitude to time and shoes and haircuts. Sunblushed bellied Buddhas loll around and twiddle guitars and Bob Marley can always be heard somewhere in the distance. Also the slightly metallic/powdery taste of mega hostels and the hordes of drughungry dogs that inhabit them seemed absent from what we could observe of the tourist landscape which was a lovely change. It says something about Belize that we found ourselves observing locals rather than commenting on gringo culture. I’m struggling to say this in politically correct terms, but Belize had enough third world confrontation to entrance us, but not so much as to scare us off. What’s more, the culture was a unique smorgasbord for the senses that I’d never come close to experiencing. Here I am at 21 thinking ‘I’ve done it all’, and suddenly there’s a whole new shape to the world that I couldn’t have conceived of!
We are very out of money and in savings mode, which means battling with public transport and involved an interesting border crossing. However, all limbs attached and butts plugged with anti-diarrhoea medicine, we are back in the promised land of Mexico, heading for Tulum to reunite with swagsisters Mildog and Harms for another festival in a few days time.
Coconut rum and conch curry,
PT
inneedofdirections 