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We’re staying in the small Belizean town of San Ignacio just north of the Belize border with Guatemala. It’s a strange town in an intriguing country. Once a British colony, Belize is an English speaking nation surrounded by Spanish ones, and the late Queen Elizabeth’s portrait is on the currency. It’s poor and neglected; the infrastructure, the roads and buildings, residential and civic, are makeshift and crumbling. 

San Ignatio is a border town on the banks of the wide slow flowing river Macal. It’s overcast and humid today so the town’s looking less attractive than it might in the sunshine. Some of the better houses are pleasant clapper board affairs on stilts, but they’re mostly wooden shacks topped with corrugated iron. Barely functional ancient, rusty pickups and old gas guzzling 1970s American sedans move slowly over the rutted roads. The prevailing smells are of diesel fumes, deep fat fryers and marijuana.

The inhabitants are a mix of ethnicities: white gringo tourists and residents, Hispanics, black descendants of slaves, mestizos (people of mixed Hispanic and Amerindian origin), Garifuna (descendants of West and Central Africa, Island Carib and Arawak people), Chinese, Indian and Middle Eastern. I’ve read that there are Mennonites and Amish living here, and even descendants of confederates who fled the American Civil War in the 1860s. It looks like a refuge for the dispossessed. Over my egg and bacon sandwich in the Shack Café on Main Street I overhear conversations in English and Pidgin, which to my ear is incomprehensible, but peppered with the occasional recognisable English word.  I like San Ignacio. Jo doesn’t, ‘It’s sleazy. Full of doped up Caribbean types.’ she says. 

In the middle of the town is an attractive campsite with all the facilities and lots of tree shade. We stroll in to take a look. I spot a VW campervan with NL plates. There’s a young Dutchman called Jim tinkering with some wiring and we stop to chat. ‘I noticed your NL plates, How did you get here?’ ‘We shipped the van from Holland to Halifax, Nova Scotia and drove from there, through the USA and Mexico. Our destination is San Paulo in Brazil from where we’ll ship the van back home. We used a brilliant shipping agent run by an English couple. The shipping cost was only $2,000.’ That’s cheap! We talk campervanning for an hour and meet Jim’s partner. In the campsite are a couple of German registered campervans. These vehicles are ludicrously enormous 4X4s – the Leopard tanks of the campervan world. We enjoy a good laugh at the Germans’ expense. We’ve seen similar macho vehicles in Europe, invariably German owned. With these tanks, it’s impossible to negotiate smaller roads that lead to remote destinations – they don’t enhance access, they restrict it.     

Jo is caving in the Actun Tunichil Muknal caves east of here and I’m buying provisions from the market and local Chinese store where the oriental shop assistant seems to be bored and a bit patronising, but it’s difficult to judge what his temperament might be. Belize is more expensive than Guatemala and every day we exceed our budget. This will become more of an issue in Mexico.

Enroute to Mexico, our shuttle bus passes through the capital, Belize City. We weave through a dilapidated residential district near the port. I’ve seen slums in Africa and India but nothing quite as grim as this. The houses are thrown together with what look like discarded materials, the best of which is brown rusty corrugated iron, the worst, strips of wood and cardboard, definitely no glass or concrete. I see little life, it appears thoroughly mean, depressing and threatening, but I’m just passing through on a bus. I’ve read that Belize City has elusive hidden charms – travel bloggers will say anything for a few bucks.

We stop at the harbour to allow a couple of impatient, self regarding young French dudes to disembark. They’ve been tutting and complaining to the driver about our slight delay departing San Ignacio. They’ll be heading to the Cayes islands, famous for their coral reefs, but the weather is overcast and windy, so good luck to them.

The journey from Belize City to the Mexican border at Chetumal is flat and uninteresting and once across the border the difference in outlook is stark – decent illuminated freeways, shopping malls, hotel complexes, 21st century vehicles. We change shuttle buses in Chetumal where there’s free beer. Don’t get too excited, it’s not a sign of things to come. Nothing is free in Mexico and very little is cheap.

We’re at our next aquatic destination, Bacalar, a town astride a beautiful long lagoon, which is actually a lake fed by underground rivers. We’re staying in a very comfortable hotel with a big, clean, well equipped kitchen. As I’ve mentioned, the food isn’t great, and in Mexico it’s relatively expensive, so the self catering facility has become a key feature of this Central American trip. Jo’s not thrilled about this and talks ruefully about never having to prepare a single meal during many months travelling in South East Asia and India.

The lagoon is a calm shallow expanse of water with a white limestone bottom giving the water many different hues of blue; seven according to the local tourist boat guides. We go out on one of these boats which is a waste of money – the guide spoke no English and seemed to talk about little else than the colour of the water. The following day we hire a couple of bikes and cycle halfway to a beach when Jo’s back tyre pops. So we walk to the beach, hire a kayak and paddle to a river which feeds the lake. Here we see examples of the lake’s huge population of the oldest life on the planet, the cauliflower-like stromatolites, calcareous underwater mounds built up of layers of lime-secreting cyanobacteria and trapped sediment, found only in a few locations globally.

In Bacalar we encounter the first of several ripoffs in Mexico. At a coffee shop in the town square, the owner short changes us 100 pesos (about £5). Jo always checks these things, calls him back, and explains without complaining. He feigns confusion, so she explains again, he still looks at her with some confusion, then he says, ‘I don’t check the change, I just take what the cashier gives me. He goes and returns with the right money but no apology.’ I have one of those escalier moments and say nothing. But later, reflecting on it, I know that he knew he was short changing us – the playing dumb was just a charade. I want to return and challenge him about it but it’s too late. But not too late to put up a one star google review about this crook. His response to this was, ‘I don’t think this incident deserves a one star review.’  So I’ve learnt a couple of things, Mexicans, in this intensely touristic region of Mexico think nothing of cheating gringos, to them it is not something to be ashamed of, not theft, it is a game. Once a victim is irritating, and as we’ll discover, twice is tedious, three times and more infuriating.

For the next stage of our Central American trip please visit Tulum and Playa Del Carmen, The Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.  

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