Ambergris Caye, San Pedro and La Isla Bonita

Orig­i­nally, Caye Calker was the back­packer hang­out while Amber­gris Caye, more devel­oped and big­ger, catered to richer peo­ple. We shrugged the stereo­type off and hopped on the boat.

In The Chicken Bus

Take a chicken bus, one of these old U.S. school buses painted blue, pur­ple, red or any bright colour. Lis­ten to reg­gae music blast­ing through the loudspeakers—by the end of the trip, you will know the lyrics to every Bob Mar­ley songs, resis­tance is futile. Observe the peo­ple as the hail the bus on the side of the road or as they get off in the mid­dle of nowhere. That’s Belize for you.

Caye Calker

Some­times, going back to places you love isn’t such a good idea. It’s like see­ing an old crush again—you know you prob­a­bly changed, that he prob­a­bly changed, and that noth­ing good can come out of it.

Yet I was look­ing for­ward to our trip to Caye Calker, one of the small islands off the shore of Belize City.

Belize City

Belize City, like a lot of cities in Cen­tral Amer­ica, doesn’t have a good rep­u­ta­tion. It is much less laid-back than the rest of the coun­try and few find it charming.

Yet it changed.

Dangriga

The ride turned out to be sur­pris­ingly pleas­ant. Sure, my legs are always too long to fit com­fort­ably in buses orig­i­nally designed to shut­tle North Amer­i­can kids to and back from school, but the road was good and the scenery quite relax­ing. Reg­gae music blasted through the loud­speak­ers for the entire 2.5 hour long trip but this too was relaxing.

Back in Belize, Placencia

Our first stop in Belize is Pla­cen­cia, a small town some­what pop­u­lar with British, Cana­dian and Amer­i­can tourists. It’s quiet, pic­turesque and the pace of life is Caribbean-slow. Rows and rows of colour­ful wooden houses, more or less dam­aged by the humid­ity or the rain, kids in oh-so-British school uni­forms and clus­ter of tourists at the bars.

The Boat Ride From Hell

I’m usu­ally very com­fort­able on boats. I’d take a boat ride over a bus ride any­time and I’m not scared of water. So I was feel­ing pretty good about our 2.5 hour long trip to Belize.
That said, the boat did look small.
We all climbed aboard and off we went. I quickly felt like we were a cork jerked around in the huge waves. A tiny boat in deep open water.

Puerto Cortes

Puerto Cortes, despite its evoca­tive name, is a fairly unin­spir­ing place for trav­el­ers. Not much to do, not much to see. There is less traf­fic there than in La Ceiba or San Pedro and it has a bit of a small town feel (at least on a Sun­day dur­ing day­time). But the cranes that are part of the sky­line and the num­ber of bars give it away: Puerto Cortes is a port, an indus­trial one, from where half of the exported Hon­duran prod­ucts are shipped.