We find Paradise in Placencia

          On Monday January 21st we were driven to the Belize municipal airport in the hotel's Isuzu. Belize has an international airport, with a full sized runway and jets from the USA and so on. The municipal airport is a narrow strip of macadam next to the bay, barely long enough for the single engine Cessna turboprops constantly coming and going. The two domestic airlines fly up and down the coast, connecting five cities and two islands with scheduled flights, and stopping to drop off and pick up passengers at numerous other strips on request. Belize has three 'highways' radiating from the capital. Two of them are paved. The one to the south is not. So we flew down to Placencia.

          Most of the 'surf' offerings of Belize center around their Cayes, islands along and surrounded by the barrier reef. I chose instead a small town at the end of the world. At the end of 20 miles of sand peninsula, without much of a road, actually. Long favored by backpackers, the village of Placencia is growing fast. Probably they will pave the road in a few years and there goes the neighborhood! For now it is just right. The main street is a cement sidewalk. The biggest hotels in the village have 10 or a dozen rooms. (there are larger places, but they are our of town, north of the airport) We had a second floor room right on the beach. The room was pretty basic, but full time electricity and hot water seemed deluxe to us. We spent five days. We relaxed and had a wonderful time.

          There is also a potholed road down through town, where the supermarket and the hardware store and the banks are. Most of the restaurants and hotels and dive operators etc. were located off the three foot wide main 'street.' In fact when the taxi brought us from the airport, he drove off the single road into an unpaved lot and advised us that our hotel could be found by walking around the house and across the sidewalk. Which it could. And we did. Everything was within walking distance -- even the airport was only about a mile away. Except for the main street (sidewalk) and the road (slightly paved but very potholed) everything was deep white beach sand. We walked up and down the beach and across the peninsula. We ate and swam (a little) and sunned (even less) and read in our hammocks under the palapa.

          When I was a boy I spent a week on a small Bahamian island. The feeling here took me back to that simpler time. There are about a thousand residents in Placencia, and while we were there seemed to be only one or two hundred tourists. Children run free, time stands still (nearly so) and everybody seems happy. The climate was balmy: days in the low 80s and nights in the high 70s, always with a sea breeze. We wore sandals and shorts pretty much the whole time. It was a perfect 'mellow' destination.

          We actually did try to get out and do something besides relax. One morning we joined another couple and a guide who took us by boat to the nearest reef for a morning of snorkeling. The coral was varied and colorful and the fish were out of Dr. Seuss. Mark, our guide, knew just where to take us to stay in the lee of the small islands and find the best underwater scenery. Another day I rented an overgrown golf cart and we drove up the peninsula to the nearest town, Siene Bight.

          Seine Bight is larger than Placencia, and much less touristy. Its population of about 2500 is mostly Garafuna. Perhaps it is time to say more about Belize's richly diverse population. The oldest non-native segment of the population (25%) is Creole (Kriol), descended from intermarriages between English and Scottish loggers and Africans brought to the Caribbean as slaves. The largest (50%) is made up of self identified Mestizos , Spanish speakers who emigrated from Mexico and Guatemala, mostly of mixed Spanish and Amerind descent. Mayans still constitute 11%. Mennonites are more visible than one might expect from their 3%. Racial tension appears to be rare. There is a lot of mixing, and many people identify themselves as simply 'Belizian.'

          In Seine Bight we visited the studio of a local artist then stopped at a roadside bar where some construction workers were having beers with a truck driver at 11am. We asked around, and were directed to a dilapidated restaurant for lunch. There we found plain but excellent food (chicken, rice, and beans again) in the most unassuming surroundings. I know I put too many links to other web pages in these travelogs, but HERE is one that really captures what we found in Seine Bight.

          We had hoped to kayak in the lagoon protected by the Placencia peninsula, but the ever present trade winds kicked up whitecaps for our last two days, making that impossible. We also had a bit of rain, tropical and short lasting. There is a weekly passenger ferry to Honduras which was turned back by what one passenger reported as "ten foot seas." Admittedly the ferry boat was probably less that 40 feet long, powered by twin outboards, but . . . .

          Saturday, January 26th, came too fast. After five days we had thoroughly adapted to the slow pace of the town, and were reluctant to get back on the road. But that will be a story for the next email.