OT: A week in Belize

An off-topic post here! My family spent a week in Belize over New Year’s, and since a) I’m a frustrated travel writer, and b) I struggle to remember the details of a trip several years later, I try to write a blog post about all of our major trips (you can read about last year’s family trip to Sayulita, Mexico here, and my trip to Iceland last summer here).

The basics of the trip

This was our first time in Belize, which we settled on because we wanted to go to a place with really good snorkeling. I (the family trip planner) first researched the Cayman Islands (because of the inexpensive, nonstop flight from Denver on Cayman Air), but ended up ruling it out due to cost, lack of things to do other than go to the beach, and the fact that it seemed hard to do without a car. My unscientific strategy is usually to check where you can fly nonstop or with an easy connection from Denver. This eliminated the Virgin Islands, because most of the flights leave from Atlanta in the morning, so we’d have to either take a red-eye or spend the night in Atlanta. It turns out that Belize is a pretty short (~three and a half hours) flight from Denver on United, and it ticked all the boxes in terms of reasonable cost, things to do in addition to the beach, and ability to get around without a rental car. Tickets on United were actually cheaper than Southwest; I have a Southwest Rapid Rewards credit card so I’m always looking for ways to use it, but for this trip, United won out.

Belize, which had really never been on my travel radar screen, turned out to be an amazing destination for what we wanted to do, and it’s one of my new favorite places!

Belize logistics in general

Belize is, in my opinion, a really easy place to travel. It’s a former British colony so everyone speaks English, and you can spend US dollars anywhere, you just get the change in Belize dollars, which are pegged to the US dollar at 2 Belize dollars per 1 US dollar. The majority of places also take credit cards, and I used my US credit card with no problems (if you do this, just make sure your card has no foreign transaction fees; my Southwest Rapid Rewards card does not). We didn’t spend any time in Belize City, but everywhere we went felt very safe, no visible drug activity other than marijuana (which is legal in Colorado so we’re used to it), and I felt like the party scene for our twentysomething daughter and her girlfriend was fun and safe. They went to the New Year’s Eve beach rave on Caye Caulker and reported that it was lively but not out of control, and that they never felt uncomfortable; they didn’t encounter any anti-LGBTQ sentiment anywhere we went. We used van shuttles to get around and the driving was what I’d consider typical for Central America. Even the major roads are one lane each way, so there’s a lot of illegal passing, but it didn’t feel like India where most car trips involve taking your life into your hands.

Phase one: Caye Caulker

After doing some preliminary research on destinations (Belize has a ton going on for a pretty small country), I decided to book half of the week on an island and half on the mainland. The two main island destinations are Ambergris Caye (home of Belize’s most popular tourist destination, the town of San Pedro), and Caye Caulker. Of the two, Caye Caulker is much smaller and less developed. The whole island is about five miles long, but a hurricane in the 1960s split the island in half, and the northern half (accessed by a very small ferry) is very undeveloped. Caye Caulker has no cars (there’s one fire truck and one garbage truck and that’s it). The only motorized transportation is a few golf carts, and mostly everyone walks or rides beach bikes. The streets are packed sand (no paved roads). This sounded like our kind of place!

Caye Caulker didn’t disappoint! We flew from Denver to Belize City, then took a seven-minute flight on a tiny Tropic Air plane (like a flying minivan) to Caye Caulker, where we took a golf cart taxi to our AirBnB. We rented this house, which was perfect for our group (myself, my husband, our daughter (21), and her girlfriend (22) ). It was right on the water on the “lagoon” (non-ocean) side, it came with sit-on-top kayaks that we could launch right in front of the house, and the sunsets from the rooftop hammock deck were amazing. Inside, it was immaculately clean, had two nice bedrooms and two full bathrooms, plus a full kitchen and a nice living room with a Netflix-equipped TV. The host lives in another house on the same property, and she was amazingly helpful with whatever we needed, plus restaurant and activity recommendations. Caye Caulker is a really small place, so you want to book your lodging early; I started researching places in July (for a December trip) and some were already booked! The owner of our AirBnB runs a sunset tiki boat cruise which we took and really enjoyed (see sunset photo below!)

Caye Caulker’s motto is “Go Slow,” and it is a place where you really need to slooooooow down and enjoy the beauty and being there. We typically waited an hour for food in restaurants, and coffee/breakfast was only moderately faster (maybe 40 minutes!). But then again, where did we need to be? Nowhere but there! So after the initial adjustment, we just slowed down and really enjoyed it. Highlights included coffee and breakfast in the waterfront palm tree garden at Ice N’ Beans, an incredible dinner at Hibisca, (the “fancy” restaurant on the main drag), plus lots of really good ice cream from the local ice cream shops. There are a number of well-stocked grocery stores, so we also cooked at the AirBnB a couple of times.

Caye Caulker is surrounded by mangroves, and there are no long beaches; don’t go there expecting white sand stretching to infinity. The only beaches are human-made, by pulling out some mangroves and replacing them with trucked-in sand.

The highlight of our stay on Caye Caulker was the all-day “bucket list” snorkeling tour with Salt Life Eco Tours. We didn’t really know what to expect, but Belize has the world’s second-largest barrier reef, so we were hopeful to see some cool stuff. This trip (in a small boat with a group of 10 people) exceeded our expectations and was honestly like swimming in a Jacques Cousteau special. I am really not much of a water person, and I loved it. At one point, I was floating on the surface of the water watching two massive nurse sharks on the bottom (nurse sharks don’t even have real teeth and are totally unconcerned with humans), while a school of probably 500 sparkly blue fish hovered a few feet away, and a massive spotted eagle ray (with probably a six-foot wingspan) “flew” majestically about a foot below me. It was totally amazing; a must-do experience! Plus the Salt Life guides captured all of this in pictures and videos that they sent to us afterward on Dropbox. If we had stayed longer, I honestly would have done this trip more than once.

Phase two: San Ignacio jungle lodge

After a glorious three days on Caye Caulker, we took the San Pedro Belize Express water taxi back to Belize City, where the van shuttle driver from our next destination, Vanilla Hills Lodge, was waiting for us. San Ignacio, Belize’s second-largest city (inland, very close to the Guatemalan border) has emerged as a major eco-travel destination, along the lines of the Monteverde and Arenal areas in Costa Rica. We decided to rent two glass treehouses at Vanilla Hills (photo above) and it was honestly one of the neatest places we’ve ever stayed. You’re totally immersed in the jungle, while being totally comfortable (air conditioning which we didn’t really need, huge infinity pool looking out over the jungle, indoor/outdoor shower…it was so amazing). One of my favorite moments of this trip was lying on our bed during sunset/golden hour, watching the glow fill the jungle through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Truly one of those “peak” moments of a travel experience!

The food scene in Belize is generally good but pretty basic: we’re vegetarians so we didn’t eat the seafood, which did look amazing, but in general, Belizean food is a lot of rice and beans and barbecued chicken, and Belizeans do not seem to eat a ton of fruit or vegetables, despite the fact that a lot of produce is grown there. As our AirBnB host on Caye Caulker told us, “Don’t get too excited about Belizean salads, they’re generally iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing and nothing else.” Vanilla Hills Lodge’s restaurant is the exception: it was some of the best food we’ve eaten, anywhere, plus they were totally accommodating of vegetarians. I just can’t say enough good things about this lodge!

The owner, Claudia, arranged two amazing days of tours for us, first to the nearby Xunantanich Mayan ruins (carving photo above), followed by an afternoon on a pontoon boat with waterfall exploration (Jungle Splash tours), and an entire day in the ATM Caves, about an hour away from San Ignacio. As long as you’re not seriously claustrophobic, this tour is a true must-do, where you swim through a series of caves into a large dry chamber where there are crystallized human sacrifice remains and Mayan artifacts. As a bonus, our guide was a PhD archeologist, so we got to pester him with all of our questions about the local Mayan civilizations in general. If we had had one to two more days in this area, I really would have liked to visit Tikal, the huge Mayan site in Guatemala, which is two to three hours by driving from San Ignacio.

The end!

On our last day, we had one more incredible breakfast at Vanilla Hills (while watching toucans and coatis frolicking!) and then the van shuttle driver dropped us at the Belize City airport, about a two hour drive from the lodge. We connected in Houston on the way back and that went fine. If you fly out of Belize City, be prepared for major crowds and chaos and allow a lot of extra time. The airport was clearly not built for the volume of traffic it’s currently getting, and it was hard to find a place where four of us could stand together, much less sit down. On the day we flew out, the loudspeaker system at our gate was not working, so the poor gate agents had to shout (into a room full of hundreds of cranky travelers) to board the planes (no jetways, you just walk out onto the tarmac). Especially if you have small kids or older people in your group, prepare yourselves for a somewhat uncomfortable few hours at the airport!

Aside from that, this trip was pretty much perfect. We’re pretty frequent travelers, and Belize is at the top of my new favorite destinations. To me, it was less expensive and less built-up than Costa Rica, and felt safer than Mexico. We’ve also repeatedly had issues getting sick (g/i issues; nothing requiring medical treatment but also not a lot of fun when you’re on vacation) in Mexico despite not drinking the tap water and being careful about food, and none of us got sick in any way in Belize, which was also a plus. We loved every second and are already thinking about a return trip!