Every trip pairs water with jungle. Ambergris Caye and San Pedro are the reef base, half an hour from Hol Chan. Caye Caulker is the same water on a smaller budget. The Great Blue Hole on Lighthouse Reef is a long day out. Inland, San Ignacio is the base for Xunantunich, Caracol and Actun Tunichil Muknal. The south has Garifuna Hopkins and Dangriga and the beach at Placencia. Eight days covers one island and Cayo. Twelve adds the south.
1 Belize city guide
Fun fact
Cockscomb Basin, in the Maya Mountains, became the world's first jaguar preserve in 1986, after a study by Alan Rabinowitz found the highest jaguar density ever recorded there. Protected areas now cover 36.6 per cent of Belize's land and 19.8 per cent of its waters.
Stereotypes, sorted out
The realityIt is mainland Central America, between Mexico and Guatemala, and the only country in the region with no Pacific coast. The Caribbean feel comes from the water and the culture: the reef runs the length of the coast, hundreds of cayes sit inside it, and the Kriol and Garifuna south looks east.
The realityThe mainland shore is mostly mangrove and river mouth, and the real beaches are on the cayes and the Placencia peninsula. Belize sells what is under the water and under the trees: the reef, the atolls, the caves and the Maya cities. Plan around sand alone and you will run out of things to do.
The realityEnglish is official, and every sign and form is in it. People speak Belize Kriol to each other, an English-lexicon creole with its own grammar, and Spanish is the first language of a large share. Add three Maya languages, Garifuna and Mennonite Plautdietsch, and it is a multilingual small country.
The realityCaracol and Lamanai are ruins. Maya people are not. Q'eqchi' and Mopan communities across Toledo and Cayo farm cacao sold worldwide and guide many cave trips. The Punta Gorda cacao festival each May is theirs, and the Maya land rights cases at the Caribbean Court of Justice are recent politics.
How to fit in
- Greet before you ask. A good morning or good afternoon comes first, and skipping it to open with a question reads as rude in a way it does not in the United States.
- Belize time is real and it is not an insult. Boats, buses and tours keep their own rhythm, and the local advice is to build the slack into your own plans instead of into your temper.
- Ask before photographing people, and particularly before photographing Garifuna or Maya ceremony. Drummers at a Dangriga event are performing; a wake or a dugu is not.
- Sunday is family day. Boil up gets cooked, many businesses close, and the pace of a town on a Sunday is not the pace you saw on Friday.
- Do not haggle in shops. Prices are prices, and the bargaining culture of the markets further north does not apply here.
- Reef etiquette is enforced and worth taking seriously. Nothing is touched, nothing is stood on, nothing is taken home, and the marine reserves have wardens who will say so.
Famous Belizean faces
George Cadle Price
Andy Palacio
Sharon Matola
John Briceño
Philip Goldson
Zee Edgell
Pen Cayetano
Shyne
Leela Vernon
Dean Barrow
Said Musa
Sir Colville Young
Jaime Awe
Wilfred Peters
Kaina Martinez
Barry Bowen
Must-try Belizean food
Rice and beans
The national plate. Kidney beans and coconut rice cooked together, with stew chicken.
Chimole
Black dinna. A dark soup of recado negro, charred chilli paste, with chicken and an egg.
Boil up
The Kriol Sunday pot of cassava, plantain, eggs and fish or pigtail, with tomato sauce.
Spiny lobster
Grilled, frittered or in burritos. In season July to February, opened with festivals.
Belikin
The national beer, brewed since the late 1960s, with Altun Ha's temple on the label.
Marie Sharp's
Stann Creek habanero and carrot sauce on every table. The mild is hot enough for most.
Stew chicken
Chicken browned in recado rojo and burnt sugar until nearly black, then stewed slowly.
Fry jacks
Breakfast. Dough puffed in hot oil, split and filled with beans, cheese or eggs.
Escabeche
Onion soup sharp with vinegar and oregano, with shredded chicken and a corn tortilla.
Garnaches
Fried tortilla, refried beans, cheese and pickled cabbage, sold from a bucket at the door.
Salbutes and panades
Masa snacks. Soft salbutes topped with chicken, crisp panades filled with fish or beans.
Tamales and bollos
Corn masa steamed in plantain leaf. Bollos, the smaller local kind, often hold fish.
Johnny cakes
Flour and coconut milk biscuits stuffed with cheese, ham or beans. Breakfast on a bus.
Hudut
Fish in coconut broth with pounded plantain. The dish to order in Hopkins or Dangriga.
Sere
Coconut and fish soup thickened with okra, the base of hudut, served on its own.
Ereba
Cassava bread, grated and pressed to remove the poison, then baked flat on a comal.
Conch ceviche
Conch cured in lime with onion, tomato and habanero. In season October to the end of June.
Whole fried snapper
Scored, fried whole and served with rice and beans and lime. The beach-shack default.
Seaweed shake
Irish moss simmered with milk and nutmeg, sold cold from coolers on the cayes.
Cacao and chocolate
Toledo's Maya villages grow and process cacao, sold as bars or drunk hot and unsweetened.
