What a difference a border makes...... (3 January 2010)

A 7.15 am start, and it was cloudy as we started our longest day journey yet – from the far north tip of the Yucatan peninsula down across the border and into Belize City. Well, we made it 13.5 hours, to cover 325 miles! If someone asked us to do this in the UK, we would think them mad

Leaving on the ferry from Isla Mujeres, we were not sorry to leave, as I think we have both done with Mexico especially this mini American version on the coast. Jumped in a taxi to Cancun bus station and then we then took our 5.5 hours ADO bus from Cancun to Chetumal on the Mexican border. A long straight road, surrounded by uniform green bush.

Chetumal is a major border town, but the border is actually out of town. But we had found the ‘Luxury’ bus that would take us over the border and on to Belize City. We knew it was a bit of a luxury, but decided to spoil ourselves. However, an indication of just how different things were across the border in Belize came when said luxury bus drove up. Well it had wheels so I suppose that could be called luxury….. It was the most dilapidated bus ever, looked like an old American bus from the 1950s. The luxury aircon was keeping the windows open…. But when we later saw an ordinary bus plying the same route, ours really did look luxurious! We also met up again with the two Kiwis Emma and Elliot and they came along too.



So”pin alert” we now both picked up our latest ones for Belize. We breezed through the border, no queue, but the queue back into Mexico must have been a good half mile of cars – was there something we didn’t know? Suddenly everyone was speaking English or Creole and not Spanish as this was the British commonwealth ( ex British Honduras), black African Caribbean faces, rather than Mayan, and a very young Queen Liz on the notes and coins.


We saw an interesting sight in the Belize customs hall, a group of four young men from 4 to 14 all almost identical and dressed in check shirts and old fashioned denim overalls, with pale faces scrubbed clean. They were actually Amish, there are a few areas here where they live in Belize - all rather like “Witness” so we didn’t venture into the restrooms! But back to the journey, in clouds of diesel fumes the bus took the main road to Belize City at a pace neither of us knew it would be capable of. The main road was reminiscent of a Kent country lane and the driver passed everything going – bear in mind it was pitch dark – Gill began to long for those ordinary Mexican highways!

Finally, we approached the suburbs of Belize City. The guide books hate this place – violent, dirty, to be avoided at all costs, do not walk, do not leave your hotel, do not visit at night are all typical quotes. We pulled off the road onto a patch of dirt ground and were disembarked, menacing guys hassling us for taxis, trying to carry our bags etc, but we are British and refused to bow to their nonsense, so in our best ‘British’ we sought out the most trustworthy looking one and asked for the Belcove hotel. We got there piled into the back of an old minibus, sitting on the packs, with a load of other homeless travellers.

We knew the place we were staying, the Belcove, at Belize City was budget, clean and safe, but in a bit of a dodgy area. But nothing could quite prepare us as we stopped on an unmade , unlit potholed road….. It looked nothing like the photo on the web. It was a ramshackle old house and for the 3rd time on this trip they didn’t have the rooms we had booked – i.e. their best with private bathrooms, so we had to settle for ground floor budget with shared bath. It was only one night! The hotel backed onto the Haulover Creek, and that was what we were hoping wouldn’t happen to us! It was near Belize’s famous swing bridge. There were a group of unsavoury rasta's hanging outside the front of the hotel, the smell of dope hanging heavily in the air.

We checked in to our ‘simple’ gloss painted rooms and we were at reception chatting to the other travellers when in came what we thought was an old drunk selling dead roses and clutching 3 empty beer bottles. He promptly dropped a bottle on the floor which shattered – long story short he was nothing so simple as an alchy but a crack addict – where the hell have we come to? The guy at reception, Dulio, luckily was a big local guy who gave him short shrift and the addict cleaned up the broken glass and moved on…. But Dulio then told us the tales of the gang wars and murders just one block along. Don’t go out at night, don’t t turn right out of the hotel into the really dodgy area (like one of our guidebooks coming to life) – we didn’t and so sat and ate cheese triangles on the bed.   We had brought some rum over the border in our packs, so we had a nightcap outside on the creek, frightened for our lives!