Belize for Half-term

By Chris Parrott

Chris Parrott (Journey Latin America’s Marketing Director) combined business with pleasure on a fact-finding and inspection trip in May 1997. His wife and son accompanied him to Belize on the Caribbean coast of Central America.

When I asked my wife if she fancied a week in Belize, she asked me where it was - somewhere in Africa? I gather it’s a common misapprehension: well-educated professional people who know roughly where Nicaragua and El Salvador are, for some reason don’t know that Belize (formerly British Honduras) is in tropical Central America, squeezed between Guatemala and Mexico. The language of Belize is English. Location established, we needed to sort out a potentially more serious problem. Our 12 year-old son is insulin-dependent diabetic. What preparations, precautions and permissions would we need?

First, flight timings. As it happens, you can’t fly direct to Belize. You have to go via USA, and you have to break the journey with an unavoidable overnight, in either Miami (American Airlines) or in Houston (Continental Airlines).

This enforced stopover is an irksome inconvenience for most travellers, but turned out to be an advantage for us. For diabetics, both meals and insulin have to be taken not just regularly, but at fixed intervals. Leaving Heathrow at 1005 on American, we’d arrive at 1530 local time (2030 English stomach time). By a combination of a specially requested airline meal, some rolls and an apple, we were able to re-adjust by two hours on the first day.

The US has very stringent regulations about the foodstuffs you can import: bread rolls are OK, but fruit, or ham sandwiches, definitely not. ("You eat that sandwich NOW") We thought we’d have trouble with the insulin pen-syringe and so on, but they were unconcerned.

The hotel (one of the dozens that are a 5-minute courtesy-coach-ride from the airport) served us a 6.30 am early breakfast ...by which time we’d been up for two and a half hours. We watched from our balcony the dawn chorus of service pick-up trucks and pool-cleaning personnel choreographing around the car park. When they’d all gone, one of them had left an industrial glove near an oil patch. This my son identified from the 11th floor as a severed hand in a pool of blood. We inspected the scene of the crime before breakfast.

It’s a two-hour flight - and one hour time difference - to Belize City. From there, we were met at the airport, and driven up the main highway to San Ignacio. Eight miles further on, by a gradually deteriorating dirt road, is Chaa Creek. Seventeen stone-built thatched cottages overlook - well, they would overlook it, if it weren’t for the forest - the Macal River valley.

Chaa Creek is an idyllic place to unwind. I was a little sceptical beforehand of their claim to be mosquito free, and maybe we were just lucky at the very end of the dry season. But there were no insects to speak of.

The cottages are spartan but spotless and tasteful, with hot showers. Rather than electricity, most of them have hurricane lamps which are turned on for you at dusk by the staff. All the cabins look out over the valley, and all have a small verandah. Each one is slightly different from its neighbour. December to April is their high season, and you usually need to book up long in advance; May to November is low season, and availability is better, though prices are not significantly lower.

The meticulously-tended sub-tropical gardens, the rustic-signposted pathways through the forest, the trees with little identifying labels, all made it like being in a mini Kew Gardens. At dawn, we’d be woken by the ululations of chacalacas across the valley (look like small turkeys, sound like strangled geese). In the early morning a pair of small toucans had breakfast in the tree behind our cottage. Parakeets wheeled and swooped along the crest of the hills.

There are howler monkeys, though we didn’t see (or hear) any. Late one afternoon, as we arrived at the river for a swim, we disturbed a lone iguana thirty metres away, drinking from the opposite bank. We had no difficulty seeing it as it scuttled away - the size of a Labrador and the colour of bright catarrh.

You can choose how active you want to be. The options are: relaxing on the terrace with a beer, swimming in the river (no predators), canoeing downstream (no rapids) to lunch in San Ignacio, a morning on horseback (no previous experience necessary, as my son Tom proved) through the forest to a Mayan temple, a drive to nearby limestone caves, or a mountain bike (well-maintained) ride to the spectacular Mayan pyramid at Xunantunich. These activities all cost extra, except relaxing on the terrace (just the cost of a beer).

We did all these (though I did the mountain bike alone, and should have taken much more water along, since I got pretty dehydrated). Xunantunich commands a strategic hill-top site visible from miles around.

The trip to the Vaca limestone caves meant a fairly demanding uphill trek, and some subterranean scrambling. Three Californians who accompanied us decided that the depths of the cave were an appropriate venue for some mantric omming. Tom wasn’t impressed.

After four days at Chaa Creek, we were driven south (paved road for all but the last hour) to Jaguar Reef Lodge. This small kraal of semi-detached cottages, with air-conditioning, hot showers, and verandah look out on the Caribbean.

Again, you can relax or take part in the various excursions on offer. We had time for only one, a boat trip to the mangroves on the Sittee River combined with snorkelling on the barrier reef.

The mangrove trip was enlivened by a young American marine biologist who thought nothing of leaping into the primeval slime and plunging her arm up to the shoulder down riverbank holes in search of blue crabs. You see manatees in the river here too, but we didn’t.

The snorkelling was magical, like swimming in a tropical aquarium. You flit between multicoloured corals, and shoals of multicoloured fish flit past you. The parrot fish, enamel-green and yellow and electric-blue stripes was a family favourite. Later we moved to an area of deeper water over a sandy ‘alleyway’, and saw huge manta rays and barracuda (more friendly than threatening).

That evening, as the moon rose over the cayes, and the sea chafed on the sand, I sat with a handful of Jaguar Reef’s cosmopolitan assortment of guests and put the world to rights over a few dozen beers.

The return journey by air to Belize was like catching a bus. We turned up 15 minutes early at the allotment potting shed that is the terminal for Dangriga airstrip. On the strip, there was a twin engined plane from one of the three (not the one we’d booked on) domestic air-services, and we were on it and in the air in five minutes. We mangrovehopped up the coastline, and landed at Belize City half an hour later, to connect straight through to London, via Miami.

When I asked my son what had been the best bit of his holiday, he paused only briefly before declaring ‘the severed hand in the pool of blood’ the most memorable incident.

Television has a lot to answer for.

[Written September 1997]