I have been thinking about moving to Belize for about 10 years. It all started with a trek through the country in a mini 4 wheel drive Suzuki in 2005. I had read somewhere that you can get a room on Caye Caulker for 20 dollars and eat a huge Belizeans lobster dinner for 10 dollars and thought it might be nice to check out. So for 2 weeks, me, my husband at the time, a dentist friend and his girlfriend stayed in 3 different hotels in three different districts in Belize. We rented a jeep in Belize City at the airport and drove down to the Toledo district to stay in Punta Gorda in a small INN run by an expat Tom and his Rottweiler named Magnum. We stayed with them for 5 days. We then drove back up into the Cayo district and stayed at Five Sisters Jungle Lodge for one night and finished the trip with a ferry ride to Caye Caulker where we stayed the remaining days.
The trip was an adventure, with the dentist constantly reminding us that we were “out of our element”. The highlights I can remember include a trip to a butterfly farm (completely spontaneous), an impromptu swim through a little-known cave with a man we had just met acting as our guide, driving past women and children washing laundry in a stream, staying in a thatched roof, but glamorous hut in the jungle where we went on a midnight jaguar hunt, getting harassed by “security guards” for fare for admission to a park that was free to travel about, renting an adorable room on a small island with no cars or paved roads, making friends with a “pot cake” dog who found us wandering the island each and every day to play and keep us company, because we fed him and helped him after he dropped to the ground with seizures, helping a woman get to the hospital with a bad leg infection after the bush Doctor failed to heal her (we were waved down by a man on the road as we had the only car in a 3 mile radius), going fishing on a boat with a captain who took us to snake island where there were literally thousands of snakes hanging from trees, and while there getting bitten up so badly by “no see-ums” that we had to stay in the water up to our necks which were hard boiled eggs held above the water that our host had packed for our trip, then coming back where our catch was prepared for dinner, walking in bare feet the entire time on Caye Caulker -even to the restaurants for dinner. I’m sure by now, I have forgotten some of the other things we did, but needless to say, we had an amazing time in a beautiful little country.
It is this experience that drives me to move there til this day. And although we are considering other places, Belize remains my top choice for our planned move out of the US in about a year. I’m planning a similar 2 week trip in FEBRUARY 2016 and I am sure to write all about it, here in my new blog. Stayed tuned for our thoughts, insights and experiences in our journey to become expats from the US.
gwennie147 