Veggie Vacations

From Chaa Creek, we were able to take a canoe into town (San Ignacio) – it was 7 miles downstream, which doesn’t sound too difficult, but I guess my arms are weak! We were TIRED!! We got to see some beautiful birds, and also Belize’s one and only suspension bridge:

We walked around San Ignacio – some tourist-aimed shops with postcards and magnets, and some tour operators, but otherwise people just going about their business.  Plenty of produce sold right on the street too!  This was a nice little park right in the middle of town:

We had an amazing lunch in San Ignacio at a Sri Lankan restaurant called Serendib, where I had a good vegetable curry for a ridiculously low price.  Potatoes and rice, yeah a bit too much starch, but I got my veggies and our bill for 3 people was about $14 US.  Yeah.

We then embarked on a long car trip to Placencia, a small town on a peninsula on the Caribbean coast of Belize…

As we traveled onto the peninsula, we were horrified by the destruction of the jungle that was going on… making way for the construction of oversized vacation homes and resorts.  After visiting Placencia, we would choose in the future to stay at one of the hotels right in town to support the locals rather than support one of the ‘big’ resorts that are mowing down nature…Also, the little restaurants in town did a much better job at feeding me vegan than the hotel did.

Our big hotel, Chabil Mar Villas, did at least give us a couple of bars of organic Belizean chocolate (we switched out milk for dark, which was vegan!), and a lovely villa with a full kitchen and a juicer.  We could have fit 15 of our closest friends in it with us!

I can’t say enough good things about Placencia!  We walked into town that day – what a cool place! Bustling with activity.  We bought some bananas and papayas, and some Belizean wine to have with dinner (Note – the Blackberry wine is REALLY sweet! Yikes!).  Produce was plentiful, but you won’t find any health food store type goods in Placencia (i.e. no soymilk!).

There are two streets in Placencia:  1- the street, 2-the boardwalk.  And you can drive a golf cart through town.  We walked through, making mental notes of places we wanted to visit on our next trip into town.  After a good night’s sleep…

…and then we were ready for a day at the beach!

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I just took a trip through two beautiful areas of Belize, and I’d like to share my experiences…

The background info:
There are no direct flights from NYC area to Belize, so we flew out of Newark and connected in Miami.  Once landing in Belize city, it was a long (and bumpy) drive to Chaa Creek (our ‘jungle’ resort).  Much of Belize has paved roads, but the last half hour or so of the ride was on rocky dirt roads.  So beautiful though – lots of unadulterated nature.  We passed by a couple of cattle farms on the way, which is always upsetting.  But I guess anywhere you go, you’re surrounded by the omnivorous masses.

Breakfast:  I had an apple and a banana at 4am before leaving the house…not sure why because I was probably too sleepy to be hungry.  Plane left at 6…FYI – Miami airport is not vegan-friendly.  Bring a snack.  You can get apples, oranges, bananas, etc. and some nuts and trail mix at the book stores.  That’s about it folks.  It was breakfast time (9am) when we got to Miami, so a banana and some nuts was fine.   I was of course packing Larabars in case of emergency…I ended up eating one on the plane from Miami to Belize City.

Lunch:  I continued eating my gigantic bag of cashews from the Miami airport in the van on the way to the resort.  I also ate the bag of carrots and snowpeas that I forgot to declare when going through customs.  oops   Our driver offered to stop somewhere to get lunch, but we really just wanted to get to the resort and settle in.

When we pulled up to Chaa Creek, I got the feeling of being in the middle of nowhere – right smack in the middle of the jungle.  Very exciting (and unfamiliar) for a girl from suburban NJ!

Here are a few quick fun facts about Belize, some of which we learned from our driver on the way…
-Belize was formerly called British Honduras, and achieved independence in 1981
-The official language is English
-Despite being a former British colony, they drive on the right side of the road.
-Belize has the highest literacy rate of all the Central American countries
-Belize has only 3 traffic lights and no stop signs, but TONS of speed bumps!  As you pass through each village, there is a large speed bump, and each village has a school.
-Driving through this area of Belize (from Belize City to San Ignacio), homes were pretty spread out – lots of green in between.  Lots of roadside fruit and veggie stands too!
-The Belize national tree is Mahogany, exports of which used to be a large contributor to Belize’s economy.
- The Belize national animal is called the Tapir, and looks like a cross between a horse and a pig.

The activities:

First was a trip to the little Belize Natural History Museum right on the grounds of Chaa Creek.  Our walk there was studded with signs pointing out resident birds and medicinal (or poisonous!) trees lining the hiking trail.  We took a look around the little museum, which contained some good geographical and historical information about Belize as well as some of their indiginous species.

Right next to the museum building was the butterfly sanctuary.  The gorgeous blue morpho butterfly lives in Belize and Chaa Creek has a screened-in mini-blue morpho sanctuary.  Our guide told us about the life cycle of the butterflies, and some other fun facts… for example, these markings on the butterfly wings that look like eyes – they’re actually like a camouflage – they look like owl’s eyes and are there to scare off predators.  Cool, right?

After seeing the butterflies and taking a walk around the Chaa Creek grounds, we headed into our cottage for showers and then to dinner.  No phones, cell service, clocks, or televisions btw.  (There was a little internet ‘hut’ with two computers where you could send e-mails if you really needed to.)

We were completely disconnected – and in the process, we were allowed to reconnect with life and nature.

Dinner:  This was our first meal at Chaa Creek.  Their menu is structured such that there are 4 courses and choices for each course – there was always one vegetarian option, and they accomodated me very well as a vegan.  Actually, I think the main chef was off that day, so they told me that I could order anything from the lunch menu for dinner if the dinner menu wasn’t cutting it.  The veg option was vegetable lasagna, which was definitely not cutting it!  They brought me corn tortillas instead of parmesean bread, and then a cantaloupe and cho-cho salad – my first day in Belize and I got to try a vegetable I had never heard of before! Score!  Chayote (apparently also called cho-cho) is a squash.  This salad was so good, it made me forget the fact that I hate cantaloupe.  Delicious!

Then I ordered a soy-ginger vegetable stir-fry with chopped peanuts for dinner.  And a nice bowl of fruit for dessert.  It was a good start, and the food got even better the next day!

At 8:00 we took the Creatures of the Night tour, which was pretty fun – we went out on the hiking trails with a guide wearing headlamps (and lots of bug spray) to check out the nocturnal creatures milling about the jungle around the resort.  We saw TONS of gigantic spiders (yikes!), a couple of scorpions, an armadillo, a gecko, a frog, some cool leaf-cutter ants… got a nice shot of a scorpion:

We thought it strange that after dinner was finished being served (9pm), the resort was so quiet – no one at the bar or walking around.  After two days there, we figured out that it was because everyone was exhausted from their supercool excursions and ready to get some rest in anticipation for the next day’s trip….

I slept like a rock that night.  I’ve never been anywhere so beautifully quiet.

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