Belize City announced itself before Malini Angelica even reached the city center: a hand-cranked river ferry, an iguana slow-walking across the road, and a wooden colonial streetscape where Creole, Spanish, Mandarin, and Mayan all float through the same market air. For a traveler used to well-worn tourist trails, this small country tucked just south of Mexico offered something harder to find: lush rainforest, ancient Maya ruins, cave systems the Mayans once considered entrances to the underworld, and one of the largest coral reefs on the planet, all inside a single road trip.
Meat pies, howler monkeys, and a hand-cranked ferry
The journey started at Dario’s Meat Pies in Belize City, a family institution since 1976. Dario’s son explained that his father was the first person to miniaturize the pie and make the gravy more liquid, which is what turned it into the distinctly Belizean street food it is today. The British colonial root is obvious to anyone who has eaten a steak and kidney pie in England, but the spiced, liquidy filling is entirely its own thing. From there, the road west led toward the Guatemalan border and the Xunantunich Maya ruins, reachable only by crossing a river on a hand-powered ferry. At the top of El Castillo, a pyramid nearly 130 feet tall, the treetop canopy stretches to the horizon and the mountains of Guatemala sit just across the border. Freezes on either side of the pyramid depict creation gods and the rulers of the ancient city. The local name, Xunantunich, translates to ‘stone woman,’ and legend has it that a ghostly figure in white has been spotted near the summit.
West of San Ignacio, the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve replaced tropical jungle with cool air, dry pine forest, and granite terrain. The Rio Frio Caves arrived like a scene from another world: a sandy floor, stalactite formations that look like frozen waterfalls, and the kind of stillness that makes it easy to understand why the Maya treated these spaces as sacred ground. Nearby, a series of natural granite swimming holes cascaded into each other in small waterfalls, and Big Rock Falls, the final stop in the reserve, turned out to be far larger than expected. Then came the Hummingbird Highway south, one of the most scenic stretches of road in the country, with stops at the Blue Hole, a turquoise sinkhole that mirrors the cenotes of Mexico’s Yucatan, and a hidden waterfall inside Billy Barquedier National Park, reached by wading along a rocky stream through 1,500 acres of protected rainforest.
Hopkins, conch, and a drumming lesson on the beach
The coast changed everything. Hopkins, a quiet Garifuna village on the southern shore, announced itself with the sound of drums and a sea breeze that slowed the pace down immediately. A local drummer offered a trade on the spot: he plays, she dances. Over the rhythm, he laid out the Garifuna story, a history of exile from St. Vincent by the British, a crossing at sea in which many did not survive, and a resettlement across Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Nicaragua. ‘We’re still here,’ he said. ‘We’re still beating the drum.’
Lunch at a beachside spot introduced conch for the first time. Gasper, who runs the place with his family, walked Angelica into the kitchen where his sister had the conch softening in boiled water before sliding it into a pan of butter and garlic. The verdict on the finished dish: ‘it doesn’t even really taste fishy, it’s got more of a meaty flavor.’ Then the fried chicken arrived, and she was unequivocal: ‘This is the most delicious fried chicken I have ever had in my entire life. And I am not exaggerating.’
The final leg reached the Placencia Peninsula and the offshore cayes of the Belize Barrier Reef. From a boat anchored near Laughing Bird Caye, a snorkel into the surrounding water revealed giant southern stingrays resting on the seabed and a nurse shark moving through the shallows. The far south, the Toledo district, is the least visited part of the country, a place of dense rainforest, the Rio Grande, and a funicular that descends through layered jungle canopy to the river below. Howler monkeys stayed hidden in the forest, but their sound carried the whole way.
The ferry operator who never stopped pulling
At the hand-cranked crossing to Xunantunich, the ferry operator worked the rope by hand, the only mechanism available, moving the whole raft across the river on manpower alone. There was no engine, no motor, nothing mechanical beyond the rope and the current.
A week after that first meat pie in Belize City, the road trip ended in the Toledo rainforest with howler monkeys calling somewhere deep in the trees, the same sound that had woken Angelica on her first night in San Ignacio, when a coati climbed a palm tree outside the cabin door for the coconuts.
