Cycling Central America – the Logistics

This blog gives an overview of our route and some of the logistics involved for our cycling trip through Central America in May-July 2018. We’ve written more about what we did in Belize and Honduras and El Salvador in separate blogs.

A little bit of a disclaimer though – we didn’t really take a conventional route for one reason or another so this will have varying levels of usefulness!

Our Route

Why this route?

Well, firstly, we wanted to go to Belize, so that meant we knew we needed to get east in Mexico. Our original plan was to go to visit Palenque in Mexico and then head through northern Guatemala via Flores and the ruins at Tikal. We’d then head into Belize via San Ignacio and head south, probably back into Guatemala (shown as the purple starred route). But, as you can see on the map – sometimes plans don’t go exactly to plan (that said, this Plan A would probably still be my recommendation!).

Konstantin wasn’t feeling very well in Palenque, and after doing some research about good hospitals in the area it turned out the closest (slash most logical for our plans) was in the town of Chetumal on the Yucatan Peninsula. We headed there by overnight bus and then we then dropped down into the North of Belize and ended up travelling the whole way through. We then headed over to Utila Islands in Honduras for some free diving, and back down the country into El Salvador.

You’ll notice a glaring omission though – we didn’t visit Guatemala on the bicycles. Nope, given Konstantin’s ongoing feelings of ‘meh’, the heat, and the stories of hideous levels of steep mountains, we decided that Guatemala might be better visited on a side trip of “pannier packing” (you can read about it here)

And then, of course, the next glaring omission. The line stops in San Salvador. Yup, we didn’t go to Nicaragua, Costa Rica or Panama. In April 2018 things started getting a little dicey in Nicaragua as groups began protesting against the government. It all seemed a little volatile and we made the decision that we didn’t want to cycle through the country. Once we’d made that decision it wasn’t too much of a leap to decide to take the flight all the way to Bogota, Colombia, rather than flying to Costa Rica and then having to either fly or fork out money again to sail across the Darien Gap. We’ll visit those three countries another time. And, honestly, there is not a moment that we have regretted this decision.

Route – Big Picture Decisions

So, for Central America there are a few ‘big picture’ decisions to make:

To Belize or not To Belize?

Unless you’ve been cycling around the Yucatan in Mexico, the likelihood is Belize is a little bit out of your way. And, in bicycle terms, that means potential weeks worth of detour to visit the country. So, should you or shouldn’t you?

Well, for us we figured that it was unlikely we’d ever come back to just visit Belize on its own, so we better visit it now. And, we loved the country. It had a completely different vibe to the rest of the places in Central America we visited – more of a Caribbean feel. It’s a tiny country so if you have the time you can really see a lot – and even if you don’t have the time, it’s pretty quick to get across. It’s also mainly flat which our legs enjoyed for a bit. We love nature and we spent our time visiting lots of different bird reserves and getting the binoculars out. And, if you’re a diving/snorkelling nut, it also has the second biggest barrier reef in world.

BUT, it is out of the way.

El Salvador/Honduras?

So, if you wanted to, you can completely skip El Salvador. And (apart from basically a days worth of cycling) the same can be done for Honduras.

Now, because our route was a bit unconventional we probably spent more time in these countries than most. But it is kind of hard to make any firm proclamations of go here or go there. Ultimately – we had a great time in El Salvador, but that was partly because we had quite a few things go wrong and we had to lean on the support of local people a lot, and they were all amazing. We had a mixed time in Honduras – the northern area was awful to cycle in (terrible, terrible drivers), but the southern area was much nicer – beautiful mountains and much nicer drivers.

Our friends from Spinning South took a route that allowed them to cycle through El Salvador and then take the boat around Honduras – read about that here.

Belize – Logistics

Route Options

The lovely thing about cycling in Belize is there aren’t many route decisions, and even then it’s mainly about where you come into the country:

Northern Entrance (via Chetumal)
- Beaches or Birds: So, most people who visit Belize visit only one place – the Caye Caulker islands. If you’re a fan of diving, beaches and/or partying, these sound like an amazing place. We don’t particularly care for any of those so we avoided Caye Caulker like the plague! Instead we meandered down and tried to hit most of the main nature reserves. Geek time!
- Head into Guatemala via San Ignacio OR go all the way south and take a boat to either Guatemala or Honduras. This is actually quite a hard one. There does seem to be quite a bit to see on that route into Guatemala via San Ignacio, BUT we wanted to visit the Cockscomb Jaguar Reserve AND we also thought the town of Placencia was adorable. Oh, and of course, we were avoiding Guatemalan mountains!
San Ignacio Entrance
- The main thing here is whether you go back up and pick up on any of the Northern stuff you might have missed. Honestly, although we had a great time visiting Lamenai from Orange Walk, I think if you’ve been to Tikal, you wouldn’t need to do this bit.

Our Schedule

We were in Belize for 13 days and this was our schedule and daily kilometres:

20/05/2018	Chetumal to Copper Bank	48
21/05/2018	Copper Bank to Orange Walk	48
22/05/2018	Day trip to Lamanai	N/A
23/05/2018	Orange Walk to Crooked Tree	45
24/05/2018	Crooked Tree to Belize zoo	72
25/05/2018	Belize zoo to Belmopan	35
26/05/2018	Belmopan along Hummingbird Highway to the Blue Hole	24
27/05/2018	Blue Hole to Hopkins	66
28/05/2018	Hopkins to Cockscomb	41
29/05/2018	Day in Cockscomb Park	N/A
30/05/2018	Cockscomb Park to Placencia	55
31/05/2018	Day in Placencia	55
01/06/2018	Ferry to Honduras (Porto Cortes) and on to San Pedro Sula	56

Our Highlights

The awesome Cockscomb Jaguar Reserve

Morning hike above the clouds in Cockscomb

Our trip to Lamanai

Things we would avoid:

Belmopan really had nothing going for it
Hopkins was full of sand flies and was not nearly as quirky and cute as Placencia.

The boats from Belize

There are two boat options:

From Punta Gorda to Puerto Barrios in Guatemala

and

From Placencia to Puerto Cortes in Honduras

We don’t know anything about the first option, and we found it pretty hard to find information about our chosen option. Unfortunately, despite having amazingly good intentions on writing out all the things we wish we’d known about this journey, I didn’t and now I can’t remember all the really useful things like prices.

Anyway – I think the most important initial thing is that this boat DOES EXIST! With the lack of information, we really weren’t sure. It goes once a week on Friday morning at 9.30am (officially) from the end of the main pier. We were there at 8.30 to load out bikes on and the boat ended up heading off at 9am, half an hour early. You need money for the boat and to leave Belize (this is where I annoying can’t remember how much!) they also charged us extra for our bicycles.

It was a very long day, we ended up getting to Puerto Cortes in Honduras at 3.30pm, so we decided not to cycle off that evening and checked in to a hotel around the corner from the port. Bring food, water and sea sickness pills (everyone got a bit queasy in the afternoon). Checking out of Belize and in to Honduras was really smooth. In the port in Honduras there were load of people more than willing to change your money – of course the rate isn’t as good as you might be able to find in some places, but to be honest, for the lack of hassle it seemed pretty good value.

Honduras/El Salvador – Logistics