The best day of the year for traveling.
Trip Start
Dec 31, 2007
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2
12
Trip End
Jan 15, 2008
Corozal Town,
Corozal,
Belize
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
After getting packed at the crack of dawn and finding nowhere open for breakfast, we headed the half mile down the road to the bus stop to catch the bus going in what I thought was the right direction. My belief stemmed from the shuttle driver pointing out a road on the way in and saying "There's the road into Cancun." How easily misled I am. At any rate, we took the line almost to the end, then jumped off when I mistook a Pizza Hut sign for an ADO sign. (They're both red and black.) A closed Pizza Hut. Since we were already out past most of the shops and restaurants, we headed across the street to one of the enormous hotels. We assumed surely the hotel restaurants would be open, even on holidays. Instead, we found an grand continental breakfast where they fed us for free. I had French toast with sweetened condensed milk, which I'd never tried before. We stopped to talk to the hostess both on the way in and on the way out, and there was never any indication of wanting payment, so evidently even with our enormous backpacks, we resembled the guests in their bathing suits and sarongs closely enough to pass. Which is rather a sobering thought. Two bus rides later (Remember what I said about the right way? It wasn't.), we found ourselves in Cancun proper, where I surprised myself by actually recognizing stores on the way in, all of which but the large Chedraui supermarket were closed. They were still landmarks enough for us to find the ADO station with no trouble.
We caught the first bus to Chetumal, which showed an inexplicably bad American movie about people carrying adventure gear up and down the coast, playing a lot of paintball, and ending up in Alaska with no way of getting home. No wonder people think we're fools.
Chetumal came up four and a half hours later as a virtual ghost town, with not one shop open. A taxi dropped us off in a deserted square with a single old school bus jetting black smoke. This was evidently the bus across the border into Belize. It was while we were waiting in the darkening square with wisps of garbage and smoke blowing past that I tried to phone our hotel on Ambergris Caye to let them know we weren't going to make it before the ferries stopped running.
The ride across the border took about an hour, due to having to stop at the Mexican border station to pay the fee on our tourist cards and again at the Belize border station to go through customs with the bags. A pair of Chinese tourists got held up there due to lack of visas, which, in turn, held up the bus until they got out.
By the time we started rolling through the Belizean jungle proper, it was full night, so our first glimpse of Belize was the inside of a brightly-lit school bus playing garifuna music (kind of like reggae) while humid night air blew through the windows. There are worse introductions.
We reached Corozal shortly thereafter, whereupon we located an ATM and a hotel with no difficulty, thanks to Lonely Planet's excellently labeled maps. (This is a direct dig at our Rough Guide Italy from two years ago that did not believe in naming the streets on its maps and gave us the most peculiar and usually bad advice.) Our room in the Hokol Kin Guesthouse was quite reasonably priced and right across the street from the sea.
We went out to dinner at one of the many Chinese restaurants, the only places open. It was supposed to be the classiest one, and the food was, in fact, delicious. Our waitress looked to be all of eleven years old, and was in charge of busing and getting the drink orders in addition to waitressing, so the service was a little slow, but it was New Year's and she was doing the best she could. Sarah's sweet and sour chicken was my favorite. My garlic and butter fish was too buttery. Immediately after dinner we turned in, because we wanted to catch the seven am ferry to San Pedro, and neither one of is known for our early bird temperament.
