Quite a lot of stuff packed into such a teeny country. Belize has a lot going for it. It’s quite different to all the other teeny nations of the region. We’d go so far as to say that you haven’t really ‘done’ Central America unless you’ve at least had a brief look at Belize. Its British heritage and English language, for a start, set it apart from its neighbours. After our last blog where we scouted around the inland Cayo region, we now check-out the bit that it’s famous for… the Belize coast and Cayes. Is it, as the locals like to say, un-Belize-able?

The Rains and Red Tide

We first hit the south Caribbean coast for a few days in the chilled-out resorts of Hopkins and Placencia. Pleasant enough places, but truth is, at the moment we feel no urge to linger. It’s very quiet, not many people around, some businesses are closed altogether… and there’s a good reason for that. It’s called ‘hurricane season’. Not that there have actually been any hurricanes here so far this year. But it rains a lot and the humidity is stifling. The sea is perpetually choppy (not so great for our new hobby, kayaking) and the coastline is suffering from the curse of ‘red tide’. This is a thick, bushy, red-ish floating seaweed that has drifted in from the oceans. It hugs parts of the shores in swathes and brings with it, a less than delicate fragrance.

Travelling full time, it’s harder than you might think to avoid the less desirable seasons in each continent. It’s simply not possible to always be in the right place in the right season. Long-term Cuthbert followers might recall that last year we endured the Amazon rainy-season in Brazil and the ‘three Guyanas’. For this year’s rainy season, we are better prepared with a new roof-fan and a super-dooper new lithium battery power system. We had neither of these last year. Might sound trivial to a house-dweller, but we can’t tell you how much these two little bits of technology have made our life more comfortable in these extreme seasons. Not that we’re asking you to get the violins out or anything 😊 It’s just explaining why we’re turning-up, seeing what catches our eye, then moving swiftly along.

The Great Manatee Hunt – Belize coast and cayes

Just north of Dangriga is a large and, by Belizean standards, rather remote spot known as Gales Point. There lives, we are assured, one of the largest colony of manatees in Belize (manatee? Or ‘dugong’… it’s the same thing). They apparently hang-out at a particular spot in the lake by a warm underwater spring. But where???

A local boat guy agrees to take us out manatee spotting, so we climb aboard and wait for him to start the engine. Then we wait a bit more. The poor guy tries desperately for ages, but after a couple of hours he still can’t kick it into life. He’s clearly gutted as he can see his rare opportunity of a tour fee flowing rapidly down the Swanny.

Next morning, another guy comes to get us in a (working) boat and cruises us out to the manatee hot-spot. The water is murky and they apparently only come up for air every 20 mins, so patience is required. But after about 90 minutes we finally catch a shadow of a large adult with a baby alongside. They come closer and we watch them swim past us, then suddenly right in front of us, two little noses pop out the surface and take a human-like gasp of air. It all happened so fast that we had no time for photos, but it’s so fascinating. Soon we spot a couple more shadows in the water. The water is just too murky to see any detail, but we’re thrilled to have seen them and we go back to Cuthbert as happy-bunnies. What a fab experience… or so we thought at the time.

Shattered

We noticed something curious when we first arrived in Belize – quite a few cars seemed to have badly cracked windscreens. Maybe it was fluke, but on our first day we must have seen at least 9 or 10 badly damaged windscreens. Hmmm… we pondered (briefly) why this might be: bad roads maybe, or crime? Strange… But then we thought no more about it… until today. Today, Cuthbert joined that select little troupe, sporting a nasty gash across his windscreen ☹.

There we were, tootling along the main highway to Belize City when suddenly… ‘CRACK!’. Hole-in-one. Bugger. We knew instantly what a serious problem this was. Only a few days before, we had been discussing what a disaster it would be for Cuthbert to get a window crack as bad as all the others we’d seen! Cuthbert windscreens aren’t easy to come by in these parts.

We checked the dash-cam and saw that a large stone had been flicked-up by the back wheel of a lorry passing in the opposite direction.  Over 161,000km (100,000 miles) blasting down rough roads, with stones flying… no damage. But here on a smooth tarmac road, mini-disaster happens. It’s pretty rare for a windscreen so high off the road to get this and frankly it wasn’t really a risk we had really much considered. If there is a small piece of good fortune in the palaver, it’s that the crack although large, is slap-bang in the middle. It doesn’t restrict the driver’s view at all. In an attempt to stop it spreading, we put some clear tape over it and drive on to Belize City.

In Belize City we were assured by a specialist windscreen repair guy that: (a) the damage is too deep to attempt a repair (bugger); and (b) there is no way we could import a new one into Belize (bugger, again). Our best hope, he suggests, is to go on to Mexico but we have our doubts. As far as we are aware, the Iveco Daily has a unique windscreen, not shared with many (if any) other vehicles and certainly none that are commonly driven in Mexico or North America. There are no Iveco outlets or suppliers anywhere in these parts, so why would any auto-glass place stock one? Our nearest Iveco dealer is some 1,500 km away back in Costa Rica.

In such cases, we usually find that a beer or a glass or two of wine assists us to ponder our options. We email a national chain of windscreen repair specialists in Mexico who are seeing what they can do for us. Locals in Belize and other travellers reassure us… “don’t worry… they can get you anything in Mexico…”. We don’t really share their optimism, but we our choices are limited at the moment. We decide we’ll give it a try and see what the Mexican Windscreen Fairy can do for us, but not before we’ve seen what we came to Belize to see: the Cayes.

Caye Caulker

The Belize Cayes (pronounced Keys) are the string of islands running down the coast along the second largest reef in the world. The tiny Cayes have exclusive, luxury resorts; Caye Caulker is one of the larger, ‘poor mans’ options for seeing the reef. We tucked poorly Cuthbert up in secure parking at Belize City, packed Boaty McBoatface into his carry-bag, and took the ferry out to a hotel for three nights.

So how is Caye Caulker? Well, we can’t say we fell in love with the island. It’s an okay, chilled-out kind of place, but it’s starting to get a little over-developed. We enjoyed kayaking around the area in Boaty, but the main attraction is snorkelling on the reef. The reef is too far out to swim to (and for us, too far to kayak in the conditions), so we took a boat-trip excursion.

Now… we’re lucky enough to have done a fair bit of snorkelling around the world in our time: Borneo, Thailand, Indonesia, various Caribbean islands, the Red Sea… we’ve seen some amazing underwater life. But here, we can honestly say, is the best we’ve done in terms of wildlife. We saw turtles, sting rays, manta rays, reef sharks, nurse sharks over two metres long (eeek!!), octopus, moray eels, lots of fish (obvs! 😊) and even sea-horses!! But the star of the show… drumroll please… remember those manatees we mentioned above? Those shadows in murky water seen from a boat in a lake? Well here in Caye Caulker we snorkelled with two manatees, close-up! They were fearlessly swimming around us for at least 5 minutes.

For us, seeing wildlife in its natural environment is one of the main aims of our travel. The mountain gorillas in Rwanda, whales and penguins in Antarctica, blue-footed boobies in Galapagos, enormous leatherback turtles in French Guiana, rhinos in Botswana, red-eyed tree frogs in Costa Rica, pink river dolphins of the Amazon have been some of the many experiences of nature we treasure from our travels. To that list we can now add the manatees of Belize. It’s a great privilege to see these strange and rare creatures, up so close in their natural environment. Top marks to Caveman Tours on Caye Caulker – they lived up to the un-Belize-able mantra.

Off to find a fix

So, over a little more than two weeks, we’ve seen the best of Belize and really enjoyed it. For anyone planning a PanAm route and thinking of skipping Belize: think again amigo! Belize is expensive by regional standards, but it’s worth a few days (particularly if, unlike us, you get the right season!) and really adds something to whole the Central American overlanding thing.

It’s only 150km from Belize City to the Mexican border, so we do it in a single hop, skipping the ubiquitous Mayan ruins en-route (remember? We don’t want to get Mayan’d Out!) Watch this space to see whether the Mexican Windscreen Fairy is smiling on us when we get there 😊