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).