The Belize Blog

Well, here I go:

The trip didn't go as planned on the way there or back, but here I am, living to write about it, so it ended up just dandy. So left Xela for Antigua early Thursday by chicken bus, got to our hostel in Antigua, which was blaring with American music, filled with drunks on hammocks...no wonder we couldn't find the place to check in right away cause the bar was the lobby. Got checked in and put our stuff in our bunks, we stayed in a 6 bed room, with the bathroom down the hall. Right when we walked into our room Jill and I almost died seeing the hottest guy we've seen yet in this country without good looking men. Yum. Anyway, as soon as he left the room Jill and I looked at eachother with equally firey eyes, this guy was delicious. Anyway, the other roommates came in, hammered, and immediatley jumped into bed with Jill! No holds barred. It was actually pretty funny. Anyway, they were annoying afterall and all we wanted to do was stare and take pictures of Max, from German, or maybe he's from Austria, we never really found out. So, we left and had a great dinner, took a stroll and found max on the street, then to a bar for a couple drinks...that was it for the night, until we came back to the hostel, sober, and ended up having a massage line of 10 people! AND they were great at massaging! It was pretty funny, Americans, Germans, Israelis, others, just sitting in a line massaging eachother in the hallway of a hostel, pretty random but great. Jill and I went to bed shortly after. We had planned on climbing the volcano Pacaya the next morning but when we went to sign up they said it was too late...so there went that idea, first thing we wanted to do, shot cause we got to Antigua too late. The next day we had to get up to catch the 1130 bus to Rio Dulce but the front desk lady said the bus would be there at 1230...so we had an hour to shop. Shuttle came and got us, we left for Guatemala City and got dropped off at the other bus station to catch a charter bus thing like grayhound, which come to find, the bus to Rio Dulce had already left, which we would've made if the bus came at 1130 like we signed up and paid for...so we had to take it to Puerto Barrios instead. This completely screwed up our Rio Dulce/Livingston trip...plan was to go from Rio Dulce to Livingston by boat and see the jungle and waterfalls and birds and stuff...nope. This bus ride to Puerto Barrios was hell. 6 hours sitting in the very back next to the bathroom on top of the engine so hot air was blowing on us the whole time. I'm sure people were wondering why these white girls kept stripping off their clothes and were sweating to all hell. It was kind odd to be the only foreigners on this bus...like, what are THEY doing here. It was a long bus ride. Saw a lot of the countryside though. Anyway after some of the people got off the bus we switched seats, and that's when we realized we looked really weird sweating so much in our seats cause just the seats next to us were almost cold...so we got to puerto barrios, sweating from the bus, stepping out into the ever more humid heat to what looked pretty sketchy. Like, not a tourist place. So we opened the good ol' travel guide for Puerto Barrios and found the only hotel with air conditioning. Took a taxi there, fine. Got there, no one around really but the front desk guy and the waitress for the hotel, asked for a room with a/c, none, he said there werent any, all full. Like, wtf, there was no one around and it wasn't that late in the evening. So we went to the room they gave us with 2 fans...come to find a giant fucking infestation of ants or something that looked like ants, crawling from one corner of the room all along the bathroom wall, to the outside world...great! Jill in the meantime couldn't even function because it was so hot...it was miserable there. I took a cold shower and immediatley after I got out of the shower I was sweating again. It was weird hot. We decided that it wasn't going to work out. Also, every now and then people would walk by our window and knock on it and say shit...sketchville. I decided to go tell them we were leaving, right when someone knocked on the window, and I left and went to the lobby just as a man walked in...I'm pretty sure it was the man who knocked on our window, so creepy! Anyway, I told the guy it was too hot and we were going to leave, and he was like, oh we have a room with a/c! SO we moved rooms but we kept trying to ask why he lied and why he said in the first place that there weren't any rooms but he would answer in spanish so fast that he knew we wouldn't be able to understand, so it worked and we quit asking. Lived through the night and walked to the dock to catch the ferry to Livingston...which we ended up chartering our own boat for 250Q cause otherwise we'd waste half the day waiting for the other ferry to fill up and we wanted to get to Livingston to do something we wanted to do. Got to Livingston, dieing of heat, checked out a few hotels, without a/c, once again, not possible to sleep here without a/c, so some garifuna took us to a new "resort" with a/c. Paid 432Q for that one, the hotels on this trip ended up being more expensive than we wanted, didn't realize the coast would be unbearably hot and sketchy. Finally got to relax a little after we decided to get online and book a flight from Punta Gorda to San Pedro cause we were not going to do busses again and we realized that we couldn't get to Belize in time if we took a bus. Bought that, ahh relief. Walked around a bit, and decided to get some lunch. During lunch this old garifuna man comes up to our table and starts talking to us about Austin and Boulder and how he went on tour in the states with his band...ended up sitting down with us, kinda weird at first, but he was really nice. He mentioned that he had a boat, and we mentioned we needed a ride back to Puerto Barrios in the morning to catch the ferry to Punta Gorda...and he said he could pick us up and take us for 250Q if we wanted...GREAT DEAL...but then he said he needed gas so we'd have to pay him ahead of time 50Q cause he couldn't get gas the next morning...do we put our faith in humanity? or do we put it in being fucked over cause we're pretty little blonde foreigners? We put our faith in humanity, and at 7am the next morning, he pulled up in his boat to our hotel's dock, as promised. It was a great feeling. If he wouldn't have been there I probably would never do that again. So anyway, that day in Livingston we walked down the main street to the ocean and held a parrot, talked to this weird little girl, I tried to convince Jill to swim to this island statue with me and that didn't work...had some beers on our hotel's dock, bought some stuff, took a nap on the beach, swam in the neighboring hotel's pool...then dinner at this restaurant that was recommended in the travel guide...got a whole fish on my plate that night, eyes and bones and all. It was good but just weird. While we were waiting for our food this guy comes up to us and says he say us earlier in the day and that we need to remember peoples faces more, just in case, and got mad when we laughed cause he said he remembers faces cause he was in the army...just didn't make sense to us, he totally freaked us out, like telling us we need to memorize peoples faces just in case and he replayed how we walked and where we went and that I looked at him and wtf, so Jill and I didn't go out that night...we stayed at home, decorating the wrapping paper for Em's gift. Actually we went to the neighboring hotel who had live garifuna music and listened to that and had the local popular drink, Coco Loco, which was delicious. Read and bed time. Got up, took a beautiful peaceful ride to Puerto Barrios, and waiting for a 1.5 hours for the ferry to leave for Punta Gorda. During this 1.5 hours we had 15 people come up to us and ask to take a picture with us! Eventually Jill got annoyed of it so I just stood there with Guatemalans taking random pictures...so funny! I think this is about when we started feeling like celebrities. Slept on the ferry to punta gorda..with my head propped on my life vest...very uncomfortable. Got there and walked to the airport...hahahaha, what a joke. It was a building, they didn't ask for our names, and I climbed into the co-pilot seat, soooo excited. It's a weird feeling that comes over me when I get up there. I instantly want to take off, fly, and especially land that bitch. Ha. The pilot was great, good ol' Jerald from San Pedro. He put the intercom on so I could hear the traffic. But in all reality I couldn't hear shit cause it was too loud. He said he would've let me fly if there weren't passengers...sad. We did a stop in Placencia then on to Belize City and then finally San Pedro!!! Landed in San Pedro and got into the taxi which would take us to the dock where we were to catch our boat to the resort. We were sooo excited to see Em and Michelle cause they were supposed to already have been there for 2 days, but the taxi was like, are you Michelle, we're like no, they're already there and he said no they weren't!!! We were soooo sad! Turns out because of Ike, they couldn't leave Saturday or Sunday and didn't get there until Monday afternoon! So we had another day to kill before seeing our girlies. Hoped on the ferry, got to our what seemed abandoned resort (low season for tourists), and went to our kick ass condo. 2 big rooms and huge windows, 2 bathrooms, big kitchen and bar, the best view of all the condos at the resort! Once we got off the boat they immediately brought us 2 fruity beverages! It was heaven at last. Though we didn't do much that day but had lunch and a few cocktails, made a huge happy birthday sign for Em and blew up and hung balloons and hung out in the condo and went to bed early...not too eventful, we were sad. Next day figured they're be there around 5 or 7, so we hung out by the pool and read, got some rays, had some drinks, showered and got pretty for their arrival! Hung around the dock taking silly pics until finally, bliss, they arrived! Costa Maya staff was awesome too, and bored I'm sure, cause they printed happy birthday signs, 10 of them, and colored them and blew up balloons and hung them everywhere, Em was in for such a surprise! They left the balloons up the whole time too! We were all so excited to see eachother we all teared up, it was great! (I'm so bored of blogging and I'm sure I've gone into too much detail)