Part 18 - "You better Belize it" - Belize City

"You better Belize it" is the slogan that the tourist board have adopted to entice people to the country. Belize City itself doesn't have a great deal going for it. To be fair, part of the reason it's not that nice is because it's on the coast and kept blowing away in hurricanes. So much so that they moved the capital to Belmopan in 1970, although there's hee-haw there either. There is a small museum that took about 15 minutes to power through, and a lot of enterprising gentleman trying to sell you "stuff". 

Caution. Ballerinas crossing.

And apparently this is the one of the only manually-operated swing bridges over an ocean in the world. But you'll be standing here for a month of Sundays waiting for it to actually be opened. 

A much better trip is to go somewhere on a chicken bus. The bus is an experience in itself. They're all converted school buses imported from the USA. They all play very loud reggae / Belizean music. There are no tickets but there is a conductor. You just flag them down and they stop, unless they're an express bus, or they're full, or they don't like the look of you. Sadly, I didn't see any chickens on the bus, but it did take me to Belize Zoo.

Belize Zoo only homes indigenous animals, either rescues, or from other zoos or homes who couldn't look after them. They even need to keep male and female animals of the same species apart, as they don't want them to be born into captivity. 

Can't remember what these guys were called and now I can't find any trace of them online

The national bird, "Runt" the keel-billed toucan 

An innocuous log. I'm wise to your game pal.

Jaguar

Paint me like one of your French girls

Tight-lipped White-lipped peccaries

Most of my photos and videos were crap and much better ones can be found online. Here's one I took - tapirs seem pretty chilled, and apparently have the biggest penis-to-body size ratio of any mammal.

Water taxis (a fancy word for boats) also leave Belize City for the Cayes (a fancy word for islands). There's hundreds of them dotted about, and great for diving, snorkelling, sunbathing, and getting a right good bevvy. I wasn't up for doing any of that, but I did visit one of the closer ones, Caye Caulker, which did have a friendly vibe and no vehicles (except golf cart taxis). 

Caye Caulker used to be a single island until a hurricane it and it was split into two, and now you can visit "The Split". 

Since I left my beach body back in Scotland, I didn't stay long, and instead headed further inland to San Ignacio.