Belize

December 4, 2016 by nichtrips 1 Comment

David and I recently celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary.  Spending 25 years together without strangling each other seemed like a cool milestone, so we started thinking about how we could celebrate.  Even though our anniversary was in October, we knew that there was a week in November where the kids would be away for a week – their high school marching band had the very cool opportunity to play in Hawaii during the 75th year commemoration of the Pearl Harbor attack.

For about 3 nano-seconds we thought about going to Hawaii with them for the week and celebrating our anniversary in Hawaii, but we quickly realized that nothing would suck the romance out of a wedding anniversary celebration faster than chaperoning 100 teenagers.  So, instead, we decided to book flights that were bracketed by their flights, and we spent our week of parenting freedom in Belize (we dropped the kids off at the airport to put them into the care of the lovely parents/suckers who did sign up to chaperone the marching band, and our child-free-flight to Belize was scheduled to leave an hour after theirs to Hawaii, the logistics worked like a charm!).

Belize is just a 3 hour flight and a 1 hour time-zone difference, so easy travel.  We were staying in a small resort called Blancaneaux Lodge, in the Cayo region, about 30 mins from San Ignacio.  It was about a 2.5 hour drive from the airport, about 1 hour of which was on a 2 lane paved road that runs through Belize and connects it to neighboring countries. The other 1.5 hours was on a beat-t0-crap dirt road that led further West and got us to the resort.  This is not a non-4WD friendly area.

The resort was lovely.  It’s owned by the Coppola Family (as in Francis, Sofia, and other talented people), it had been a private residence for them for a while but now it’s open to the public.  There are about 26 little buildings for guests, so it definitely wasn’t crowded.  Many of the other guests were honeymooning.  When they found out that we were celebrating our 25th anniversary they asked us to share the secret to a long marriage and we quickly said “alcohol…er, no, wait….. communication”.  The difference between 1 week of marriage and 25 years of marriage seemed apparent at breakfast because the newlyweds would hold hands over the breakfast table and gaze lovingly at each other, while David and I leaned back in our respective chairs and worked crossword puzzles – totally comfortable and loving, but with less “I want to know everything about you (because at this point we pretty much do); let’s speculate endlessly on what the rest of our lives will be like” intensity.

Seeing as how it was an anniversary trip, we splurged on a nice cottage called “The Enchanted Cottage”.  It was in a very private area and was lovely and quiet and romantic. When we checked-in, we were informed that this cottage came with a personal attendant named Edmon.  We are self-sufficient and low-maintenance, and definitely not personal-attendant-using people when at home, so the information that we would have Edmon at our beck & call during our stay made me feel more like rolling my eyes, vs rubbing my hands in glee.  Apparently he would wait exclusively on us during meals, be our personal concierge for any excursions we wanted, and be at the ready for anything else we might need.  He was very nice but I suspect that he was very, very bored all week.  We thought about inventing things that we might need, just to give him something to do…”Edmon, can you please come to the cottage and pour me some more wine?”, but just ended up pouring our own wine and enjoying the lovely, private surroundings.

The staff seemed to genuinely like and appreciate the Coppola family.  Edmon kept saying “Mr. Coppola really takes good care of the gardens here”, as though he personally was out there each day with hedge clippers, instead of a team of about 20 gardeners.  Everybody we met in Belize seemed welcoming of tourists, and cognizant of the fact that tourists represent the #1 economic input in this sparsely populated country of only 350,000 residents.

The food was good, though we didn’t get to try Gibnut.  The story we heard a couple of times was that when Queen Elizabeth visited Belize (which is in the Commonwealth), she was served Gibnut, a nocturnal rodent.  When she found out afterwards what it was she’d eaten she said something diplomatic like “oh, I say, it tastes like chicken” and people then started referring to the Gibnut as The Royal Rat.

We took a couple of excursions – we drove to the Mayan ruins of Caracol one day, and to Barton Creek Caves on another day.  When we were about an hour from Caracol we had to stop and wait with about 5 other cars that contained tourists bound for Caracol, and rendezvous with a military escort that took us the rest of the way.  The border between Belize and Guatemala is very porous and it’s common for people from Guatemala, which is very close to Caracol, to walk over and poach exotic birds and other animals/plants.  I think that the Belizean government would dearly like to avoid a situation where a car of tourists surprise some poachers who happen to be armed, given how important tourism is to the economy. So, although there haven’t been any issues, they proactively require a military escort.  Apparently Jamaican and Canadian soldiers were in the area doing jungle exercises, and it’s common for other countries to also send special forces members over to do the same thing in the area.  As we drove to Caracol we crossed a river where about 40 Jamacian soldiers were bathing and doing laundry.  They were in underwear only and our driver said that if we’d crossed when the English soldiers were bathing and doing laundry it would have been more shocking b/c they like to do it while completely naked.

Caracol was amazing.  We’ve been to Mayan ruins in Mexico before but they were easily accessible by road and lots of tour buses were parked out front, which made the ruins heavily cordoned off and the paths crowded with tourists.  At Caracol, the road to get there was rough (apparently the government has a long-term project to pave it, which will change the experience in the future) and there were only about 20 tourists there the entire day that we visited, spread across miles worth of ruins.  They encourage everybody to go anywhere, so we were able to climb the steep temple steps and look in all of the rooms.  The views from the top of the temple steps were amazing. Climbing back down was pretty treacherous in the rain, as I tried to safely navigate the steep, slick steps, I was thinking there was a decent chance that I’d end up accidentally re-enacting the Mayan practice of human sacrifice.

Barton Creek Cave was also a good excursion.  We took a canoe trip about 900 meters into a cave that was used by the Mayans for ceremonies.  There were ceramics and a couple of skulls embedded in the cave formations, it was a bit eerie but very interesting.

David was pleased to hear that the ceiling fans in the bar area at the resort were from the film set of Apocalypse Now.  He talked about re-enacting the drunken, bare-chested Martin Sheen scene underneath it, but luckily that didn’t happen.  It was a really lovely week.  When we got back we picked the kids up and they’d had a good week too (the trip chaperones looked tired).