Belize Road Trip: San Ignacio

Together with its sister city Santa Elena, San Ignacio is the second largest metropolis in Belize and the only major city in the western part of the country. The city was fairly busy when we drove in, perhaps because it was midweek. We went straight to the market which had a more upbeat feel than the Michael Finnegan market in Belize City. We had lunch at the food stalls which served mostly Latino dishes like quesadillas and pupusas as well as some barbecue.

I wanted to get to work on our list of activities in town right away since we only had that afternoon and the next day. I expected everything to be shut down for Good Friday and we had to get a fairly early start on the road Saturday morning. I hadn't had any luck reaching the Marie Sharp showroom by phone but I had hopes that I'd be able to set Mei Ling up with one of their cooking classes if we walked in. Marie Sharp is the best known hot sauce brand in Belize, producing thirteen different habanero sauces and a variety of other condiments. The factory is in Dangriga but there's a showroom in San Ignacio which has a reputation for offering excellent classes on Belizean cuisine. We found the location and a banner advertising the showroom but there was no door to be found. Eventually someone yelled at us from a balcony that the showroom and the hotel housing it had closed because of the epidemic.

Fortunately we were close by Ajaw Chocolate and Crafts which proved to be open, although once again the person minding the desk seemed rather nonplussed to have visitors. She was even more surprised when we knew the correct spelling of Ajaw (a-how), although we had just learned it a few minutes earlier from asking directions. She took us through a brief presentation of how chocolate was derived from cacao beans following which the kids were able to make their own rather bitter chocolate paste from the ground up beans. It took a surprising amount of sugar to make a palatable drink out of the paste. Across the street from Ajaw was a majestic four story yellow house that was probably the most beautiful residence we had seen in the country. Afterwards we walked down to Burns Avenue, the main pedestrian street downtown. Here the effects of the pandemic were most visible with many shuttered shops and restaurants. Hopefully they were just in dormancy waiting for the travelers to return and not out of business for good.

Our new accommodation at Table Rock Jungle Lodge was on the main road from San Ignacio south to San Antonio. There was a lot of road work and we had to detour through a colorful little village called Cristo Rey. The frequent buses had to do the same and there was one little side lane on the detour where I had to look carefully to make sure we had a clear path until the next turn because there wouldn't be enough room if a bus came from the other direction. At the lodge there was actually another car in the parking area, our first time sharing an accommodation with other tourists. The owners had done a good job of maintaining a forested environment but of course there wasn't the same sense of remoteness from civilization that we had in Chan Chich. The most beautiful spot was the infinity pool built on a slope with nothing but jungle on the other side.

We drove back to San Ignacio for dinner at The Guava Limb, one of the best reviewed restaurants in the city. The food was better than the other restaurants we'd tried in Belize and the setting was very pretty. As usual we were the only customers when we arrived although another couple had arrived by the time we left.

In the morning we headed back to the market for breakfast. Unlike the previous afternoon the parking spots outside were full and we had to park in a dirt lot a block away. We put together a solid meal and explored the stalls at their busiest time. Although it was more lively than the Belize City market it wasn't very large and we had seen everything after a few minutes. There was no comparison with the markets we had been to in Nicaragua or Mexico.

Afterwards we drove to the San Ignacio Resort Hotel to experience the Green Iguana Conservation Project. The project was initiated in response to a dramatic decline in the green iguana population in Belize due to overhunting. We were lucky a guide was available that morning as we were the only ones visiting and it seemed that as with everywhere else the tourists hadn't returned yet. The guide took us to the enclosure and briefed us about the life cycle of the iguanas as well as numerous interesting facts about their biology. He advised us that iguana hunting was strictly prohibited during the breeding season from February to June, which left us scratching our heads about the trussed up iguanas we had been offered for dinner at the Michael Finnegan market. Large adult iguanas lazed in the sun within the enclosure while another specimen noisily crawled around on the plexiglass roof. The guide told us they had released him to the wild but he kept returning to the project to be fed.

The juvenile iguanas were kept in a separate enclosure and the guide allowed us to gently pick them up and place them on our arms and shoulders. They instinctively crawled to the highest place to seek the sun which eventually led them to the top of Mei Ling's head. The bright green color of the juveniles exactly matched the foliage in their enclosure.

We had wrapped up our activities in town a little more efficiently than expected so we headed back to the lodge for a swim. Table Rock was built above the Macal River upstream of where it divided San Ignacio from Santa Elena. We grabbed a few inner tubes and walked along the path down the hillside to the river where we eventually found a little beach where we could put our tubes in the water. For some reason I drifted downstream much more quickly than the kids and I got rather nervous even though they were wearing life jackets and can swim. To make things worse I heard a loud splash coming from the area of a submerged tree at the river bank. It seemed quite unlikely the lodge would be promoting tubing in an alligator-infested river but in the moment it seemed like the set-up of a horror movie. I kicked furiously at the water to get back upstream to the kids who were already bored and wading to the beach.

Our last full day in Belize was Good Friday, a major holiday with mandated closures of most stores and restaurants. We'd already seen everything of interest to us in San Ignacio anyway. The lodge staff thought that the Belize Botanic Gardens would be open so we decided we would go for it. Although the gardens were quite close to the lodge as the crow flies, the only bridge to the other side of the Macal River was at San Ignacio. We had to drive back to San Ignacio and then another half hour on the Western Highway and a dirt road to the gardens. It would have been quite a disappointment if the gardens had been closed but fortunately they were open. Of course we were the only visitors and we had the expansive gardens entirely to ourselves. The gardens were so large it wasn't possible to see everything but I think we acquitted ourselves well. Some of the highlights were an orchard of tropical fruits, a grove of the thickest and tallest bamboo I've ever seen, and a wooden tower with a viewing platform. Mei Ling took some amazing pictures of flowers and insects with her Huawei phone.

The only other activity I could find for the afternoon was an hour and a half away, but it was either that or laze around at the lodge for the rest of the day. I didn't want to waste any opportunities so we piled back into the car and retraced our path on the Western Highway past San Ignacio to the road that led to Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve. Once again I was glad we had the four wheel drive as each successive turn off led to a rougher road. The last stretch would have been close to unnavigable in a regular car, with huge pits and ruts in the dirt that tossed us from side to side as we slowly crept towards our destination.

The end of this fraught journey was a little anticlimactic, a small clearing with a couple of other SUV's already parked. We took a series of steep wooden staircases down to the creek. Some of the steps were broken or missing so I stayed in front of the kids in case one of them tripped. At the bottom was a series of pools of murky water separated from each other by piles of boulders and rocky outcrops. Once we were close to the bottom we could see a thirty foot waterfall in the background. The kids wanted to swim but the cloudiness of the water made me worried that one of them might get their leg trapped in the rocks under the surface, so I only let them dip in the shallow pools right at the edge. Afterwards we found a relatively flat area of the rocks and ate the barbecued chicken and flatbread we had bought on our last pass through San Ignacio.

The next morning we didn't need to rush because we had an afternoon flight. We made one final stop in the market for breakfast and bought a hand-carved wooden plate as a souvenir. The two hour drive back to the airport was uneventful except that we did not pass a single gas station in the last thirty minutes. We were prepared to accept the penalty for the half-empty tank but the clerk at the rental office looked so perturbed that I agreed to follow her directions to the nearest station. With a full tank I was finally allowed to return our car to the clerk who didn't bat an eye at the thick layer of road dust that encrusted it.

Our short trip to Belize had felt like it lasted much longer than a week. We returned home confident that we had captured the essence of a new and unique country, a diverse and oft-forgotten outpost of English colonial culture in Central America.