Belize

Nov 21st
Belize city

After a fun day in Cozumel, I was really excited to get off the ship in Belize. I eventually made it off mid day with Brandon (tenor player) and we started our walk around the city. We’d both been warned by various people to be careful in town as Belize isn’t the safest place in the world, but I can’t say we really heeded that at all. After taking the tender into the port, we walked through the tourist area, which is this really small, separated from the city, mall like sort of area, selling jewelry and alcohol. But as soon as you get outside the gate that keeps the area separate, you walk into a completely different world. I wouldn’t call it scary quite yet, but it certainly wasn’t welcoming. So Brandon and I started to walk along the waterfront for a ways until the path ended and we were forced to turn more into the city. The waterfront walk was nice, and the temperature was really hot, and we hadn’t yet felt threatened, so we thought we were doing fairly well. Then we turned inland and started walking, hoping we could cross through the city to make it back to the water front on the other side. But that was when it got slightly more sketchy. We still felt fairly safe, but the area certainly wasn’t as nice as Cozumel. We were getting a few odd looks here and there, as I’m sure very few tourists venture as far out as we did, and then a strange thing happened as we were walking along side the road. We always tried to stay on busy roads, both for the fact of the safety of being in a more visible area and that they wouldn’t lead us into some really bad corner of town, but there was this strange bus that pulled up next to us as we were walking. It was like a usual tour bus, slightly run down, but it looked like it had people in it. So we’re just walking along side the street, and out of no where, the bus pulls up along side us and drives at our walking pace. It never stops, the door never opens, and we’re on a fairly busy road with nothing of any real interest around. After a minute or two, the bus finally speeds up and joins up with traffic again. We were kindof confused just because it had no real reason that we could see to slow down, never let anyone in or out, never tried to talk to us, and as randomly as it appeared, it eventually sped up and left us to continue walking down the street. So yeah, kind odd, but whatever, just another dumb story from a foreign country.
We eventually veered off the road in the direction of where we thought the port would be and slowly found our selves venturing into busier parts of the city, something we thought was a good sign, and it was. We stopped at one of the many tiny shacks along side the street to buy some water bottles, of which were $3 in Belize currency, or $1.50 US. Then we got to a river, which I figured would take us back to the dock where the tender left us, and fortunately, after journeying down a side street for a while, did return us to where I thought it would. We stopped in a music store along the way to check out some CDs they were selling. Funny enough, they had all the walls filled with illegal copies of music that they were selling. The CD cases were the cheap things you could buy at any office store, they had printed out paper inserts for the cover art and listing of tunes, and I’m sure all the music was just burnt on to blank disks. So there’s an example of something you’ll see in Belize that you won’t see anywhere else.
Right when we were really close to that main area where the tourist hang out, we ran across a stand selling coconuts, and a guy telling people (including myself) to “put the rum in the coconut and shake it all up”. So I figured, with the change I had left over from the water bottles, why not do the local thing of getting a coconut? There was a different guy there with some kind of machete (knife) cutting apart the coconuts in a way that there would be a small whole in the top for the straw/rum. So after buying two coconuts with my change from earlier, we first got the coconut and had to drink some of the water out of it before the rum could go in. The water, let me say, was really really good, and I was actually upset when he topped it off with rum as the only thing I could taste from there on out was the alcohol. It was still good though, and it was funny sitting on the curb with my coconut drinking out of it. They called the drink “rock the boat”, probably because they put so much rum in it that it’d make anything feel like it’s rocking.
Following that, we went back into the tourist area, looked around the shops, Brandon bought a shirt, and we eventually made it back aboard a tender and then the ship in time for a tech run of All Access, one of the two production shows we still play. But we had a great day, didn’t get killed, and I’m looking forward to going back soon to explore a couple different areas, and maybe get another coconut! Thanks for reading!