Writings By Date| Boats, Planes, and Chicken Buses: Getting Around in Belize | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Although I make the country seem like it's completely devoid of modern transportation, in fairness, things are little more different on the mainland. For instance, there are many more taxis and cars in Belize City. But to get outside of town, there are no trains or motor coaches; at this point, you invariably get to ride on everyone's favorite third-world nightmare-come-true, the chicken bus. These are almost always converted school buses, complete with yellow paint, rickety green seats, signs with instructions not to curse or bother the bus driver (or else serve detention), and, of course, no seatbelts. The "chicken" epithet may be unfair, since we never did see any caged animals on them, but they did get packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people from towns where I suspect they don't sell soap.
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| Walking to Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary |
And for more remote areas, where the buses don't frequent, you can always hitchhike, and hope to be picked up in the back of a pick-up truck, as we did on our journey to Crooked Tree. Granted, this technically doesn't count as a different form of transportation from a car, but I think riding in the flatbed does merit mentioning as "something different".
So, in the ten days we spent in Belize, we succeeded in shedding our all-American dependency on the automobile by relying on just about every other kind of transportation imaginable, except maybe for hot-air balloons and skateboards. We walked, swam, hitchhiked, and bounced along land, sea, and air in more ways than most people do in a lifetime. For a country where the only Mercedes emblems you'll see are on delivery trucks bound for Mexico, you have to hand it to them: at least they've got variety. It's just too bad they don't have seatbelts.
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