Beach time: Placencia, Belize
Remember the town of Boquete in Panama? It was that top five retirement towns in the AARP magazine. Well, Placencia is the beach side version of the same thing.
After a nice bus ride through the country side in another retired American school bus picking up and dropping off mainly school children, we pulled into the tiny village of Independance. Even though my target was Placencia, the main access point from the south involved getting off at this village, walking about five minutes to the little mangrove port and taking a water taxi through the mangroves and to the docks on Placencia. Placencia I should add is a Caye, or in mainland terms a sand or shell bits island. Placencia was this but also really a isthmus as it was connected to the mainland which a road had been built connecting Placencia to the mainland. Placencia is known in Belize as the Caye you can drive to. Just cruising through the mangroves paralleling the island was a bit daunting as it looked like Key West or Red Hook in the Virgin Islands. There were modern fancy houses lining the water way with many new ones being built. All the shops and buildings were dollied up and the whole place had the manicured feel to it. The place looked very exensive. The amount of sail boats and yachts were very off putting. I started thinking that this place was going to take some money. I also started worrying that my time in Belize was going to amount to a bunch of one nights and out as it would be too cost prohibitive and not very interesting.
The island is a bit odd as the main thoroughfares consists of the road that dead ends in the bay and a main walkway which is a concrete path that cuts through the center of the narrow isthmus. Beyond that, everything is sand. To get anywhere you take one of the two concrete or tar road/path, and then you are trudging the rest through sand to the final destination. I found a nice little tourist office and she gave me a low down on the couple of backpackers. There were basically four places that were in the $30-40B range and after trudging around for a hour I found that three of the four were booked. Crap. The only place that had a room was in a kind of old original wood plank houses. They had tenants in the bottom floor and two main section one having rooms with bathroom and the other with shared. The good part about the place was that it had a kitchen which guests could use. Being such a retirement community, the Chinese owned grocery stores were packed with all the goods you could imagine. In fact, for the three days that I was there my meals consisted of grilled ham and cheese sandwiches and get this Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Four years ten months since I had those cheesy yummies. The Canadian couple that I was hanging out with thought it was hilarious that I would rather have that then go out for dinner, but there are not very many times when the planets line up and you have access to Mac and Cheese and a kitchen to make them. Wonderful.
The town itself is pretty preppy with a lot of retirees hanging about living their perfect life. It is done up enough that I guess you could consider it a vacation getaway in its own right although it did not share the barrier reef like in the north. For the reef you head to the north where unfortunately there really is no beaches and for beaches you head to Placencia. It is also a yachting and sailing ship port as quite a bit of money was floating around in the bay.
This was another stop where fishing became more apparent as in the evenings a few of the expats came out and were fishing the docks while during the day there were steady streams of tourists being taken out on the local boats. Still though, I held back and kept the fishing off of my primary attention. Instead I did a bit of swimming in the morning and evening filling up the rest of the time in the hammock or kitchen.
All in all, a nice place if you want a bit more of Americanism to your Central American stay as English is the predominant language, the facilities are geared toward the American expat, and the place is almost like staying in an all inclusive resort as the locals seemed pretty clean cut and accommodating as they knew where their money was coming from.
Tags: Belize