Cycling Belize | Guidiary

The ‘travelling’ jury is quite divided about Belize – some people REALLY love it, and some could give or take it.

Amazingly, we’d heard from some people that it isn’t that different from the rest of Central America. Having now travelled more of Central America, I’m not really sure what those people were on.

From the moment we crossed the border you could tell the country was different. A man with dreadlocks sat in the shade near the customs booth.

“Whatcha got in the bags?” He asked in a strong creole drawl.

“Personal stuff” we replied.

“You guys have a good day”. He waved us through.

First photo of Belize…nay too shabby!

We headed off the main road onto some backroads to the small town of Copper Walk. After only about 20 minutes in the unpaved dust, Konstantin screamed and slammed his brakes on.

“Shit” He yelled.

“What?” I cycled up, curious as to what could elicit such a reaction in my usually calm husband.

“I thought THAT was still alive!” He pointed to the crocodile that was half on the road. We looked a bit closer, someone had chopped off its tail. Well, the roadkill had certainly moved up a notch from Mexico.

Roadkill crocodiles

We headed on to a ‘crank ferry’ to get across one of the rivers. There were loads of very pale, very blonde people standing around with shirts, suspenders and cool hats.

“Mennonites” I hissed to Konstantin, wishing I had the innocence of a child and could just properly stare at them. The Mennonites of Belize have an interesting background. Very religious and traditional – they fled persecution from Russia and Poland in the late 19th Century and settled in the US and Canada. But after, I think, the US and Canada wanted to tax them in the 1950s, they moved to Belize, which accepted them with open arms. They speak Platdeutsch (a kind of ancient type of German) and basically do all the farming in Belize.

They don’t like having their photos taken, but I really wanted a picture of the ferry and they happened to be in front of it, so….I would say that’s kind of posing.

Mennonites waiting for the ferry

After, the ferry we eventually got to Copper Walk. I’d found a cool sounding place by the sea and we decided to do a 5km diversion to there. We arrived in time for lunch and Ernesto, the owner, was like “Oh, man, well, you see I got up this morning and I couldn’t be bothered to make any food”. Erm, we replied, do you have anything? We were pretty hungry.

“Well, you see, I’ve got some crisps”. He reveals the tiniest crisp packets ever created. Basically an individually wrapped crisp.

“We’ll take two” we replied, “Do you have any sodas or anything?”

“Nah, only beer”. Ernesto replied. To say he was laid back about his commercial enterprise was probably an understatement.

As we sat down to relax and eat our crisp, Ernesto realised he could make us a prawn ceviche if that worked. Yup, of course. Any food was welcome. We ended up camping in the restaurant yard, spending the afternoon watching the gorgeous blue sea under a palm tree. Not bad for our first day!

Ernesto and our first place camping in Belize

The next day we headed back out onto the backroads and got to our second hand-cranked chain ferry. It was pretty cool. Our crank man sang the praises of the area.

“It’s so remote, you can do anything. The police don’t come out here. Do you smoke?” He asked us, lighting up a joint. We explained we didn’t. “Ah, that’s a shame, you’re more than welcome to have some”. We graciously declined.

Back roads of Belize….and trucks carrying cane sugar

As we cycled on we noticed the British influence in a very subtle way. ROUNDABOUTS. 4 in the space of 2 days, equalling the sum total of the roundabouts we had used in North America to this point. Empire and colonialism is a pretty awkward topic (Belize was still part of the ‘empire’ until 1981), but it is amazing what delight you can find in some home comforts. Even exciting town-planning based ones.

We made it to the town of Orange Walk and used it as a base to do an awesome river tour to Lamanai, one of the Mayan ruins in the area. It was a fascinating trip and we got to see howler monkeys and funky birds!!

Our trip to Lamanai

We met up with Joey, another cyclist who was going to take a different route through Belize – over to the famed Caye Caulker. We’d heard it was a party place, and both being 30+ in mindset, we were instead off to go birdwatching.

Joey!

Amazing lunch place on our route

Inside of the lunch place

Cycling past the prison….with a gift shop!

Having lugged a set of binoculars all the way from San Diego we felt Belize was the best place to put them to use. We visited Crooked Tree National Park and organised a sunset bird watching tour for 4pm.

At about 3.50pm the heavens opened. Spectacularly. We’d seen rain up to this point, but this was something else. Naively, we hadn’t even pegged our tent down and it flapped around violently in the storm. We sat under a ‘shelter’ that, in theory, would have kept us dry. But the wind was piling in the rain from all sides. We were soaked through and actually started to get cold! After 45 minutes of driving rain, we’d got through the worst of it and were able to escape to our bird watching tour. This was nice, we got to see lots of very similar looking greyish birds. I like birds, but identification is not my strong point.

On from our soaking we heading down the country to the famous Belize Zoo. We’re not usually big zoo fans – but this one is a bit different, more of an animal rescue and rehabilitation centre. We’d also read quite a lot about it in the excellent book Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw (set in Belize with the owner of Belize Zoo as one of the central ‘characters’). One of Belize’s ‘problems’ (if I can be so bold to say that as a foreigner…) is the lack of education about what they have – how incredibly diverse their country is and why it is so valuable to protect the natural world. Massive strides have been made, partly because of the work of the team at the Belize Zoo, but there is still a lot to do.

Monkey at Belize Zoo showing us its best side

From the Belize Zoo we headed on down the Hummingbird Highway (I saw at least two hummingbirds, so it’s a pretty good name). Many people in Belize had talked about the hummingbird highway with trepidation when looking at our bikes…”It’s hilly” they declared. Thankfully, compared to some of the stuff we’d been doing in Mexico, it was anthills. And beautiful.

We stopped for the day near the Blue Hole. We’d seen a place on ‘iOverlander’, an app for people driving and cycling to share good places to stay. But, when we arrived there was no one there. We wanted to leave our stuff and spend the day swimming and relaxing at the blue hole, but were in a bit of a dilemma. Do we just trust some random people we’ve never met? We left a note and decided on yes!

The blue hole was really nice – a very deep cenote (you can’t see the bottom!), and also very cold, which was absolute bliss in the jungle humidity.

Blue Hole, Belize

When we got back to the ‘campsite’ no one had stolen all our stuff, but still no one was there. Now it all felt a bit awkward. What to do? We put up our tent and hung out in their hammocks. And waited. Time ticked on. It got dark. This was getting more awkward. Eventually we put a note on the gate and went to bed. At about 9pm they rocked up, very surprised to have two foreigners camping in their garden. But, we shared a beer and all was fine!

Camping in someones garden without asking…

On from Belize we made it to Hopkins. Here is a photo of Hopkins:

Hopkins

Hopkins looks lovely doesn’t it? It had a beach, beer and seafood. A perfect concoction you’d think? Alas, Hopkins also had sandflies, and sandflies are the work of the devil. Impossible to see and completely vicious around the ankles. Our legs looked like minefields. Yay for nature.

After Hopkins we continued on our nature-geek-out in Belize, heading to the Cockscomb Basin Jaguar Reserve. It’s difficult when you’re on a bike to work out whether a 20km round trip detour is worth it. In this case, it really really was. The reserve is the first of it’s kind in the world to specifically try and protect the habitats of jaguars. As an aside, this also protects the habitats of hundreds of species of birds. We spent days hiking (a welcome rest from the bikes), tubing down rivers, and swimming in waterfalls.

In the awesome Jaguar Reserve

Nature geek out in Belize

Morning hike above the clouds

We also met a great group of biology students from the University of Southern Mississippi who entertained us with great Southern American accents, free dinner, and stories of the various types of grey, and slightly more grey birds they had seen on their trip.

After Cockscomb we headed back out to the coast to the gorgeous little town of Placencia. It was super cute – all the houses were different colours, the people were super friendly and relaxed, and we didn’t get AS attacked by sandflies as in Hopkins…!