Saturday Dec. 2, 2006
A short ride south after Buzz's fumigation and a 1-1/2 hour border crossing I arrived in the small town of Corozal (the district's capital). Not only was the countryside completely different than what I had seen in Mexico, so were the people and their way of life. Even the houses were built differently. Homes built with wood and standing on stilts in the air replaced concrete on ground construction. There was also an absence of the roadside vendors selling everything from fruit to tortillas, something I had unconsciously become accustomed to.
Most people I saw were black and everyone seemed very laid-back, mulling around talking and riding their bicycles in the streets. Restaurants and small convenience stores seemed to be mostly owned by Chinese, who had figured out the power of buying in bulk and splitting between themselves.
Gas was $5 US per gallon, and the entire population of Belize is only around 250,000, so there are more bicycles than cars on the roads in most towns. English, Creole, Spanish and Chinese are the primary languages and $2 Belize = $1 US. And unlike the Pacific coast, there are no beaches to be found here. I learned that's because the Barrier Reef runs parallel to the coast and breaks the waves before they reach the mainland. So, unless you take a boat to a caye or island, rocky, sea grassy shoreline is pretty much the coast of mainland Belize.
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Luckily, I stumbled across the clean and reasonably priced Paradise Bay Villas on my second pass through the tiny town of Corozal where an intelligent, 13 year-old girl (the owners' daughter) offered to give me a walking tour of her town. Shanny spoke English, Creole, German, a little Spanish, had perfect manners and was in the police cadets getting a better understanding of law so that she could become an international lawyer someday. I gratefully accepted, in exchange for a slurpee, and was glad to get to know her and her town. Shockingly, it was here I first saw an electric shower head used to heat the water, whereas in Mexico, most of the hotels just had one temperature (no matter what their sign said).
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Before I went any further I wanted to see the beautiful beaches and tropical waters of the famous Caribbean. So I decided to take a two hour boat trip to San Pedro (a small village on the southern part of Ambergris Caye) where I hired a local to take me out on a small fishing boat for a few hours of snorkelling and fishing. Almost as soon as our baited hooks hit the water we were catching red and black snapper, grunts (they actually make a grunting noise) and several other - unidentified and equally amazing to me - fish. Shortly after we dropped off the side of the boat into the 82 degree water for my first snorkelling experience we spotted a large stingray flying through the water and a 2' turtle along with schools of multicolored fish and coral swaying in the current on the Barrier Reef - all right beneath us in the shallow water. Unfortunately, I didn't take my camera for the snorkelling part, but the experience was amazing. The weather wasn't great though, and it was an expensive day for those couple of hours on the water before having to head back to Corozal on the evening boat.
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I would like to have stayed in San Pedro for a few days longer to snorkel in the more desirable natural reserve area just to the south, but I needed to be in Punta Gorda in a couple of days so I kept on truckin' for a night in dingy Dangriga - a kickoff point for tourists to visit several nearby cayes and islands. Along the way the highways were littered with citrus fruit from the overloaded trucks carry harvests from the plentiful orchards. I arrived to the sound of Jim Reeves Christmas music being played in the streets by one store, and reggae by another.
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