San Pedro, Belize
Here in New England, it happens in November: The sky slams shut, a gray curtain descends, and the trees turn into scraggly brown sticks. (In the interest of accuracy, I should report that there are two white pines and at least a half dozen paper birches in view outside my window; the overall effect is, nonetheless, brown sticks.) Snow hasn’t yet started to cover and soften the edges of the landscape; the ski area is quiet and waiting. Whose mind wouldn’t wander to brighter, warmer climes?
So my mind has wandered to Belize, where I spent a few days diving this past year. It’s an easy trip from the U.S.: At least five gateways (Atlanta, Dallas, Charlotte, Houston, and Miami) currently have connecting flights to Belize City, and the average flying time from the southern U.S. is in the neighborhood of two-and- a-half to three-and-a-half hours. (This isn’t quite as convenient as it sounds: If you have to change planes in any of these gateways, remember you’ll be clearing customs on the way back, so add at least an hour’s travel time).
My destination was Ambergris Caye, an island with a laid back culture and a lot of dive sites. Traveling from Belize City to Ambergris Caye is no big deal; it takes about 15 minutes on a puddle jumper. (There’s a 75-minute water taxi, too). Local flights run about once an hour; if you arrive early, you can hop on an earlier flight if they have room.
The main town on Ambergris Caye is San Pedro, and the airport — such as it is — is pretty much a long strip and a small waiting room on the edge of downtown: If you were so inclined, you could pick up your baggage and walk to virtually any hotel in town. When you fly in, what you mostly notice is that the houses on the outskirts of town don’t seem to be all that much above sea-level. Indeed, on parts of the island, they are built on stilts stuck into terrain that seems as much liquid as solid; in a hurricane, it would quickly become more water than marsh. And they DO have hurricanes here.
San Pedro is basically a fishing village turned tourist town, its three main streets are made of cobblestone alternating with mud and sand. This isn’t high-rise tourism, though — the tallest buildings top out at about three stories, the height of a respectably-sized palm tree. Mostly, people get around by driving golf carts, not cars. That includes tourists, who can generally be identified as the ones driving the wrong way on a one-way street or gawking at the colorful combination of local markets, restaurants, souvenir shops, and hotels of varying levels of comfort and types of clientele (fancier toward the beachfront). In the summer low season, San Pedro doesn’t have the immediate feel of a tourist city — unless, that is, you ask the local people why they all swim under the bridge in the estuary rather than in the ocean: It turns out that most of the oceanfront beaches are reserved for tourists and hotel guests, not locals. (Not good.) In high season, though, the town wakes up to commerce, with a bustling trade in selling sea-shell jewelry, paintings of coral reefs, and coconut husk souvenirs.
You can stay in San Pedro in anything from a small bungalow to an all-out luxury villa. Mostly, though, it’s an unpretentious place where people go to relax or enjoy watersports: Fishing is big here, as is scuba diving, snorkeling, sailing, kayaking, and simply sitting on the beach. The laid back, informal atmosphere is front and center in the Caye’s long-standing unofficial motto: “No shoes, no shirt, no problem” and while I didn’t see a procession of half-naked, shoeless people, I didn’t feel much in the way of stress, either.
If life is slow in San Pedro, it almost stops farther up the coast, as I learned when I got on the water taxi that would whisk me past hotels and time-shares to Tranquility Bay, a small resort at the tail end of nowhere. It’s the place I’m thinking about now as the sky is gloaming and the wind is howling. I’ll take you there tomorrow.
Next up: Tranquility Bay and Scuba Diving Ambergris Caye, Hol Chan, and Shark-Ray Alley.
