"My Review of Belize" or "Another Reason To Avoid Mexico..."
Back in 2004 I traveled to Mexico City (a.k.a. Mexico Shitty). It was supposed to be a magical trip that would re-invigorate my faith in our neighbors to the South...
On the ENTIRE PLANET there are only 4 third-world countries that border what are considered first-world countries. Three of those are Iran, Iraq and Syria, which border Turkey. (I would personally contest Turkey being considered first-world...)
The fourth country is Mexico... which in 2004 had the illustrious title of "Kidnapping Capital of the World."
However, Mexico City didn't turn out to be the utopic paradise that you might image...
The driving of a culture is, in my opinion, a good reflection of the culture in general.
For example, in germany, the people drive VERY fast, very well, yield to each other, and obey the laws... They are uptight yet very skilled and precise drivers.
My experience of Mexico City was that people drive 5 cars wide in three lane roads, drive over the center median into oncoming traffic to get a few extra car-lengths ahead, and take red lights to be a vague suggestion. (people sit perched at red lights looking for an opening to shoot through...) I saw three brutal t-bone accidents and one pedestrian dead in the road in a whopping 2 days of driving in Mexico City. My cab driver spent 15 minutes trying desparately to enter a traffic circle leaving the airport because no one lets anyone in... you have to jam your way through traffic like a bull.
To add to the glee of driving in Mexico, the government and people take such pride in their capital city that the roads are pitted with potholes the size of open graves... I drove the length and width of Belize without a hitch, but blew out both tires and bent a rim hitting a 4 foot pothole on a freeway overpass between the two largest freeways in the capital city. Hecho en Mexico.
Much like the drivers, the shop owners and police officers seemed to view us as obstacles to be navigated, pushed around and taken advantage of. People were continually trying to screw the stupid tourist out of money, send you in the wrong direction, and generally make life miserable. (And in the police's case, they were successful).
A mere three days into our Mexico Shitty vacation, we decided to rent a car and get the hell out of dodge. We were pulled over by police before we could leave the city, who wanted to give us the 'going away present' of claiming I ran a red light (note: I was quite possibly the only person in mexico city who wasn't running red lights), and literally had us empty our wallets into his sweaty hands, rather than take us to jail.
Ah, the memories.
On our drive to the coastal jungles to the East, we started to think perhaps we made a mistake... Maybe Mexico wasn't all that bad. Maybe we weren't thinking clearly becasue of the horribly polluted Mexico City air, which you can TASTE as much as smell...
But then we passed Pueblo... Pueblo is a sweeping city that looks like it was constructed with the exclusive use of cinder blocks... However, prior to the completion of a single building in Pueblo, there was apparently a mass exodus of all the adults, leaving only children to live in the post-apocalyptic garbage heap that remained.
In this lord-of-the-flies hell, the inhabitants have apparently created a currency using garbage. It's literally a city of 3 walled, half-roofless cinder block houses, with glassless open windows and ladders instead of stairs to the mounds of garbage piled on the rooftops.... The most prestigious members of this society have the most garbage on their rooves. Or so it seems... We didn't stay to find out.
Ah, Mexico.
Never again.
We headed south to the jungles of chiapas and the Zapotista rebels who are sticking it to mexico's version of "the man" (who in this case wears cammo, and carries a big machine gun which he points at you while searching your rental car's trunk because it's more fun to screw with obviously harmless tourists than keep sticking it to the rebelling peasants who have guns and communist flags...)
The jungles of southern mexico are dense and amazing. It's an incredible country, which has only one problem... It's filled with Mexicans... Mexicans who view the countryside as a large garbage bin.
As a matter of fact, if there's a theme to Mexico that I've detected outside of the most touristy of the tourist spots, that theme would be garbage.
Exhausted yet relieved, we rolled across the border of mexico into Belize.
Amazingly, Mexico's very poor neighbor to the south, Belize was spotless, and the people were honest and incredibly friendly... Something we hadn't encountered once in the entirety of mexico.
When I was there we stayed near Belize City... We stayed at the Best Western Biltmore (which was more of a motel, although a reasonable pool). It shows quite expensive online when I look now, but I don't remember it being expensive at all.
The airport is in the north (we drove in from the mexican border to the north... not much to the north so you're not missing much if you don't go up there... just a lot of flat land...).
Belize City isn't all that great... I was there more for jungle/nature, and we drove all the way down to Punta Gorda in the south (the southernmost point). Make sure you have plenty of gas, because we were almost out when we got down there, and the ONLY gas station in all of southern belize closed early that day (like 3 pm!) so we were stuck going door to door in the middle of the night looking for gas from total strangers, and hoping we didn't get shot. That's the good news... people are exceptionally friendly in Belize. (we did get gas and get back to our hotel eventually!)
The further south you go, the more rural and less populated it gets. There was pretty nice, burly jungle down there.
But as we discovered a little too late, the treasure of belize is not on the mainland, but the islands or Cayes (pronounced Keys). Cay Corker is to the NW of Belize City... you can take a ferry out there for pretty cheap, and it's loaded with young people who are diving and generally partying and enjoying the beach lifestyle. It's nice, and very touristy. There's amazing diving/snorkeling once you get out to the Cayes, and I definitely recommend you hop on a boat and at least snorkel out by the reef (to the east of the island). We only were there for the day, so I don't know where to stay there... but if I went back, I'd wager most of my time would be spent diving from that island, not on the mainland (but I've taken up scuba diving since that trip).
Back on the mainland, as I said, there's very little to Punta Gorda... It's a one gas station, couple of resteraunts kinda place (population 6,000). We went there basically to get as far from civilization as possible, and to see where the road ends... we drove to the south west corner of belize off-road in our rental car (rally style... it was pretty fun), and did day and night hiking out in the middle of nowhere with a 'native' guide.
There are, however, quite lovely Mayan ruins throughout the land, and the further south and west you go, the more there seem to be. The 'night hike' we took was actually in an area where there were supposed to be zip lines and bridges through the trees... we drove all the way out there only to find that the last hurricaine took them all out, and now there were just remnants... But the river that ran under ex-zip-lines pours out of a huge cave near the top of a hill... it's quite spectacular... and our 'native' guide took us to the cave system's 'back entrance' waaay up in the hills, where there was a tiny hole in a cave that I birthed myself through to emerge into an underground cave rivaling anything you saw in Lord Of The Rings (no shit). It was apparently an archealogical site that had just been mapped but not really explored, so I saw a couple of very rough and fairly uninterestingancient artifacts in the cave (again, no shit). I'm proud to say I didn't take the broken clay bowl piece that I found, which anyone visiting my house would look at and go "eh", and instead left it for science. But the underground caves were very cool. Belize is cool for caves...
Another great thing as you certainly know is that ENGLISH is the official language of Belize (unlike the U.S.) so everyone speaks it... even the 'natives' who are literally living in cinder block houses and sometimes HUTS. Yes. Huts. (the further from the city you get the more you see this).
We drove to the Guatemalan border (not so interesting), of which there is only one road because the Guatemalans are bastards and no one likes them (there are also only two roads from mexico into Guatemala. No body likes them... they should sulk). Near the border there are towns called Santa Elena/San Ignacio... all quite uninteresting, but there are hanging suspension bridges that you can walk through the 'jungle' and see some lovely waterfalls from. Not worth driving there for that, but if you're going to the border anyway, it's worth a stop.
About half way to the Guatemalan border, there there's an area called Caves Branch River and a 'resort' called Jaguar Paw. There are fabled to be Jaguar out in this area, although we never saw any. but what we did find we loved... That was CAVE TUBING.
Ah cave tubing.
You see, there are all these underground aquifers pulsing with tons of water because this is, after all, the tropics. But belize is quite jagged, with small, sharp peaks and underground caves, and what happens is the ground collapses all over the place, and the aquifer is exposed... So what is a tourist such as yourself to do?
Grab an innertube, hike about a mile and a half/two miles through a lovely jungle, and toss your tube into the crystal clear water... drift down stream INTO UNDERGROUND CAVES. Yes... it's really as cool as it sounds. These caves are HUGE. Bring a head-lamp that is water proof (good thing to have in the tropics anyway), and you can see underground caves, formaitons, and waterfalls.. then erupt back into the tropical sunlight that feels like the Jungle Book... and then float back underground itno another huge cave.
There are generally guided tours of these things, although once you do it once, you can do it again on your own. We hired a guy at the parking area for the one we did, and he ended up being our guide for the rest of the trip.
That's the other thing... the people are very friendly... and very poor. Food and services like guides are pretty cheap if you go native. The cave tubeing was magical, and still one of my favorite experiences ANYWHERE so you have to do it. I demand it.
Belize also has a "babboon" sanctuary. There are, of course, no babboons outside of Africa or zoos, but the babboons in Belize think the Howler Monkeys they have are babboons... Anyway, they make an impressive roar and although we came too late in the evening to see them, they ARE there and they give guided tours if you get there earlier than we did (after sundown). We still got the guided tour (bribes work) but only got to talk with the angry male monkey who sounded like a lion... never saw him just the tree he was shaking to intimidate us. That was OK, but I'd recommend you learn from us and NOT spend your days hunting for monkeys (we called our trip the quest for monkeys because we went to all these jungles in southern mexico and Belize, hoping to see our first wild monkeys, and not a single damn monkey was to be found... Of course every person we talked to had just ridden a jaguar through crowds of monkeys and aligators...
Fortunately, I later went to Costa Rica and Thailand... Two countries where they give out free monkeys when you step off the plane, so not only did I get my fix, I was completely monkey-jaded by the end of those trips, slipping monkeys a few bucks to steal chips from (and fling poo at) other eco-tourists).
But for all it's wilderness, the most exciting wildlife we saw in Belize were Jesus Christ lizards, so named because they stand up on their hind legs and run across the water, making you shout "Jesus CHRIST!" as you fumble for your camera trying to get a photo.
There was also a place we visited called "blue hole" which was essentially a natural spring that emerges with amazing blue water in the middle of a cave/hole in the ground in the middle of jungle. It was lovely, but not worth the drive, or the amazing mass of mosquitos that were there.
OHHHH... The mosquitos! Especially on the mainland, you need to get used to this sound: "Whack. Whack. Whack whack. WHACK!" That's not the neighboring hotel room's over eager teenage son. That's you smacking the mosquitos which have also figured out that Belize is a much lovelier place than Mexico... when you cross the border from Mexico to Belize, you suddenly exchange people who don't speak English and are constantly trying to screw you out of money while creating huge piles of garbage everywhere, for friendly and helpful people who speak english and keep their very poor country quite clean, but whose national bird is the Mosquito. They're everywhere in Belize and good repellant will be your friend.
If I were to do Belize again, I'd probably spend two days on the mainland... one for cave tubing and the attractions along the road to Guatemala, and one day to head south and see the jagged mountains and mayan ruins of the Southern region. Then I'd hop on the ferry out to the Cayes and spend my time diving and relaxing in the truly caribbean splendor of Belize's island life.
By the way, Belize has a FASCINATING history of british pirates who were continually screwing with the spanish fleets that were busy pillaging the rest of the Americas.