A 'buggy' day!
Trip Start
Jul 04, 2006
1
10
42
Trip End
??? ??, 2007
Sittee river,
Belize
Sunday, September 3, 2006
The local buses are converted school buses (so the leg room isn't the best.) I found them to be very cheap and efficient. So efficient in fact that you should be there early since they might leave 30 minutes before the scheduled departure!!! Mine left 20 mins before it should, but it didn't bother me much since I was already on it. I guess most people know that the schedules are tentative, but for a visitor that can be frustrating as there might be only one bus going in your direction that day, or in my case, one connecting bus from Dangriga.
The ride to Dangriga took about 3 hours and the scenery was beautiful, with lush jungles, mountains and small villages to look at on the way
1. Green stuff
. The highway we followed is called Hummingbird highway. I didn't see any of course (since they are tiny), but I think it's a beautiful name for a road. The Belizean people must be the friendliest people around. They were all very helpful with information and they are genuinely interested in you as a person. You have to be prepared for a few marriage proposals along the way of course, being a solo female traveler but they won't be too offended when you politely decline...
In Dangriga I connected with another bus to Sittee river where Glover's guest house, my accommodation for the night, was located. It was the same chaos on that bus, people and children everywhere, the only thing missing was chickens.
The bus stopped suddenly in the middle of nowhere and I thought we might have had a flat tire or something, but the conductor pulled my backpack out of the luggage compartment with a concerned look on his face. I didn't ask what was going on, but he looked stressed for a while, moved my backpack to the back of the bus, got some paper and started wiping off the lid of my backpack and sprayed it with a can of something after. I assumed the worst, and I was right, a bucket of rotting fish had spilt over in the trunk where my backpack was - and now it was soaked in fishy substance... The smell was HORRIBLE!!! It spread to the whole bus, and the odorizer the conductor used to get rid of the smell only made it worse. It was the worst timing possible since I was going to an island with no fresh water or electricity (so no real possibility to clean my stuff.) And I was a bit worried about my diving equipment, but after having aired it out for a few days it was actually fine
2. Tropical flower
. Who the he.. transports buckets of rotting fish on a bus anyway???? :-(I arrived mid day at Glover's guest house. It was very very basic and very small and the heat and humidity made it feel kind of claustrophobic. I had the whole place to myself. There were apparently no other visitors in the area. I thought I was going to the island by myself and I wasn't really looking forward to it as part of the purpose of my vacation was to meet other travelers and socialise a bit.
I made the best of my day in the jungle and went for a short walk to the guesthouse next door. They had a lovely garden with great photo ops for taking pics of flowers, so I did. I had lunch and dinner there, the food was really great. I saw fire flies on my way back to my guesthouse, I've never seen them before. It was kind of cool to stare into pitch black darkness and then see small circles of light hover over the bush, just to disappear again.
I was kind of tired after the long bus ride, so I slept most of the day and night. It was so hot and humid there I thought I was going to pass out at times. And there were bugs everywhere, crawling on you and buzzing around you. I was really looking forward to going to an island to dive for a week the next day...
