Belize has been a delicious bite of Jamaican flavor added to the somewhat homogeneous mass of Central America. It's a blend of cultures I would never have dreamed up, and I'm glad I didn't have to, it's better in real life. It's possible I could just be on another of our 10+ hours bus rides dreaming of not having dried-up refried beans, so I'm imagining hearing people speaking sort-of English and eating cajun food. This place is for real though, and the marine life is amazing.


The Barrier Reef
The reef here is the 2nd largest in the world after Australia, and it takes my breath away (with the help of my snorkel gear). The ocean is so clear and the most incredible blends of dream-like blues and greens that only the ocean can create. The sand is whiter than me, and the two together make it impossible to take a bad photo. We got out to the coral reef and snorkeled, and it's the best I've ever seen. The coral itself has probably seen better days, but it's been a reserve for 20 years, which helps its cause A LOT. 

The coral is a blend of deep yellows like Mac N Cheese, light orange Sponge-Bob masses, and super purple large fans made of veiny strings.  The marine life takes the cake though.  We swam with nurse sharks whose vacuum-cleaner mouths feed from the ocean floor, sting rays so big and black they look like shadows, huge dark grouper with eyes like dark golf balls, 2 ft long barracuda that glide under the water's surface, and lazy sea turtles and colorful fish that had me quoting Finding Nemo.  (I wish I had pictures to show it all, but the under-water camera had technical problems.)  We took a 7 hour sailboat ride there and back just to make the day that much sweeter.  Oh, and true to Caribbean form, they filled us with rum punch on the way home.

Colorful Belize
The striking ocean blues are intriguing enough, but the people take the prize as shocking me the most. The majority are Creole (descendants of African slaves and British pirates), many are mestizo (descendants of Spanish settlers and indigenous), some are Mayan (who had this land pre-europeans), and the rest are a hodge-podge of Chinese, Indian, and gringos. The groups seem to interact pretty homogeneously, although in some places tending to stay in their own cultural pockets.

It's not odd to see friends of any age group, any race, and crazy smatterings of Spanish, Creole (sort of how people talk in Jamaica), and indigenous Mayan. For instance: a Creole my age and a mestizo 20 years older walking onto the bus talking like Bob Marley and seem like old friends. In some countries, different races don't blend together, but maybe here in Belize during their plight to run-out the european rule everyone became buddies. It's inspiring, and out of some politcally correct tv ad.


They're doing alright
In a place where American culture seems invited (and not just invading like other places) and it's on the right track to maintain it's natural beauty, the slow pace here and unique lifestyle might just be here to stay. The country abounds with a relaxed, go slow pace, and its in their blood. People spend about as much time riding on one-speed cruiser bikes as they do sleeping. It also helps that less than 300,000 people are spread out here in a region where over-population is common (El Salvador is smaller and has 6 million more people). Conservationists have been fairly successful in protecting the reef and the jungles throughout the country, and unlike most places, their jaguars and other animals are growing in numbers due to awareness campaigns.


It's an intriguing place for sure, this Belize. It would be way to small for me to live in, but slow and super small-town diversity is nice to visit.

(Creole translation: Fisherman [that] never sees a fish, stinks.)

...or should I say "Good Bye" Belize, since it is an english-speaking country?  Well, it's kind of english speaking; definitely not your queen's english.  More like the queen's english as spoken by Bob Marley with marbles in his mouth.

Anyway, we only spent a total of 3 days and 4 nights in Belize, but with a country that's the size of Massachusetts, it's pretty easy to just pass through.  I have been to Belize before; 4 years ago I spent a week and a half exploring the country, so for me this is not new territory.  Being older and only slightly more wiser (well, I have more facial hair which makes me appear wiser) it was definitely fun to revisit a place and see it all over again.

Caye Caulker
Caye Caulker has a place in my heart as the place where I learned how to catch crabs and organize crab races, both highly employable skills.  While I was not able to do that this time, I was able to re-visit some old haunts and do some of the same things I did years ago.

In all honesty, Caye Caulker is your typical Caribbean island.  Bob Marley music blares everywhere, people call each other "mon" (or "boy" or "buddy"), and people seemed more concerned with having a good time than making money.  If you didn't look on a map, you would probably have no idea that you were in a Central American country.  Looking around, there are Asian people running the grocery stores, Rasta guys speaking Creole, Mayan people selling handicrafts, and Mestizos running restaurants and speaking spanish.  It's really a bewildering mix of people.  I could even overhear people mixing Creole with Spanish when they were talking.  Seeing as I only half understand Spanish and Creole, picking up what people were saying on the streets was difficult.
 

So, what's there to do on Caye Caulker?  Well, your main options are snorkeling and drinking.  We did both of those fairly well.  There's enough beer and rum on the island that it's hard not to start drinking by lunchtime.  Plus, who can resist drinks with names like Panti Rippa?  Actually, we were able to go on a snorkeling trip that combined the best of both worlds: after the snorkeling, we were served endless Rum Punch for the 1.5 hour return trip.  Needless to say, we made some friends on that trip.

Punta Gorda
The trip to Punta Gorda was interesting.  We got to pass by a lot of little villages and see a lot of the landscape of the country.  With under 300,000 people in the whole country there is a lot of open space and most towns that we stopped in probably had less than 1,000 people.  Surprisingly, the whole trip was almost always on smooth paved roads as well.  This is Central America, right?

Punta Gorda itself is sleepy, probably to a fault.  Most of the buildings seem half built or half falling down.  I almost felt more lazy as soon as we arrived.  It's almost like an addiction.  After only an hour or so, I caught myself thinking, "Well, they could finish that building, but there's a half built one across the street and a ramshackle one next door, so what's the point?  Half a building seems good enough."  While I'm sure PG has many things to do (or not), we decided to move on after a night and head to Honduras.  Sorry, PG, maybe for another time.

So, if I had to sum up Belize, I would say "It's OK".  It's agreeable enough; nothing truly awesome about it but nothing terrible about it either.  It's a nice, safe introduction to Central America for the uninitiated and a good, compact place to go if you only had a week of vacation to spend.  It is not a place that I'll be rushing back to, but if someone wanted to take me there, I wouldn't say no. 

Belize did offer one experience, though, that is going to be hard to replicate: riding down an active runway in a bicycle!