Canoe races: San Ignacio, Belize
Sunday, March 7th, 2010
It was time to leave the island and Belize, but instead of making one long day of travel I decided to stop at the town of San Ignacio. San Ignacio is another pretty basic town except that it is a hub for adventure tours. There are a lot of rivers, caves, ruins, and villages in the surrounding hillsides so it becomes a very popular base for foreigners. There are also a fairly large contingent of expats living there as well as communities of Mennonites.
I would have liked to stay a few days, but I had it budgetted perfectly so that I would leave with just enough money after one night to pay the $40B departure fee and have $5B left over to pay for a minibus to my next Guatemalan town. Belizean money is not quite useful outside the country and locals prefer to keep the American dollars for when they travel or buy things from other countries.
I found a nice guest house with a sweet little balcony, met up with Mara, and the following morning checked out the very popular canoe races which start in San Ignacio and end in Belize City. It is made up of almost a hundred boats varying from guys who have practiced all year and are out to win it along with guys who just want a reason to get drunk and party. There are four stages and lasts for four days. The shotgun start was at 7am so I had to get up early. Luckily I was still on island time so got up in plenty of time. After the race started, which was pretty chaotic as there was a bottle neck to get past the low bridge as well as a few groups who had no reason to be in a boat. It was all over in a couple of minutes but it was an exciting start. I went back and got Mara who over slept, grabbed some breakfast at the famous Pops and headed off on the bus to the border. I unfortunately didn´t factor in on the cost to take a shared taxi to the border which was three miles from the bus station, but it was an okay stroll. Paid my money to “leave?”, and I was back in Guatemala. Officially now, I am one country away from being home, but I only visited the Caribbean coast side of Guatemala so I still have to cut back through it visiting some of the sites before heading straight up the Pacific coast back to the US.