A week in Placencia, Belize

Elizabeth and I just got back from spending the week of Christmas in Placencia, Belize.
Overall, we had a great time. Much more relaxing downtime than our previous vacations, which is what we needed this trip.
Belize is very “accessible” for Americans. Everyone speaks English, the US dollar is accepted everywhere, and the food is familiar. It was actually a bit too American for our tastes.

Lodging

We stayed at Ranguana Lodge, specifically in the Trigger Fish cabin. Ranguana lodge is a handful of small cabins, literally right on the beach. One large room, two double beds, A/C (although we didn’t use it), a frig, coffee maker (including coffee and filters), microwave, a TV (which we never turned on), dining table & chairs, and a separate small bathroom. It has a porch with two chairs, a table, and a hammock. the beach area is scattered with Adirondack and Lounge chairs, just for the Lodge guests. And at $84/night, it’s a great deal. It’s two doors down from De Tatch restaurant, and two doors down from the Tipsy Tuna bar. The only downside is that on the nights that the Tuna had a live band, it can be very loud, so don’t plan on getting to sleep before the band stops playing (around 2 AM).
It was simply fantastic falling asleep to the sounds of the waves, and then waking up, and having coffee on our porch watching the sun come up over the ocean.  Joy at Ranguana was great to work with – she was helpful and very friendly.

One of the first things we did once we arrived was to make the short walk to the Everyday Market, to stock our frig with a quart of milk (for our morning coffee), and a dozen Belikins (the local Belizian beer).

Money

The Belizian dollar is pegged to the US Dollar, $1 US = $2 BZ. US and Belizian money is accepted everywhere interchangeably. Most places take MasterCard and Visa. See my other post on Use of Credit Cards and Illegal Credit Card Surcharges.

Restaurants

Overall, the restaurants are nothing to write home about. We also didn’t get a very good sense of what Belizian cuisine is, or even if there is one.

De Tatch is located right on the beach, and makes a good breakfast. Beware – you can be in there a while. Plan on an hour in there for breakfast. Egs, Potatoes, Waffles, etc. One breakfast treat is the fry jack. In Boston, fried dough is standard carnival food. A fry jack is essentially fried dough, but without the powdered  sugar & butter. For breakfast, you get tortillas, toast, or fry jacks.
We also had dinner there one night. Nothing special.

The Purple Space Monkey is a restaurant and bar. We had breakfast there once, lunch twice (the shrimp wrap is huge and delicious), and drinks a few times. They also have a bunch of plasma TVs for sports, so I was able to watch some Longhorns football while on vacation.

Tutti Frutti is a great little gelato joint across from the Purple Space Monkey. He makes his gelato fresh every morning. Fantastic! We stopped in there almost every night.

One of our better dinners was at Serenade. It seemed to be as close to local food as we could find. They have (Spanish, not French) creole food, mostly seafood and chicken. I had a combination platter with jerk snapper and lobster tail that was yum-o.

On Christmas, we went to The Turtle Inn, which is an upscale resort. It reminded us of Tahiti. It’s owned by Francis Ford Coppola, so at least I knew we would have some good wine, which we did. A bottle of Niebaum-Coppola Cask Cabernet that was delicious. However, the service left a lot to be desired. Our waiter seemed inexperienced, he didn’t know details about the dishes. and food was slow to arrive. Plus, it was overly expensive. We both started with simple salads, which turned out to be *very* simple – a bowl of greens and dressing – $11 US each. Ridiculous. I had the mixed seafood grill, which was actually good. We were annoyed and disappointed, so we skipped dessert (which included $12 gelato from Tutti Frutti), and went straight to Tutti Frutti, and had $4 gelato.

La Dolce Vita tunred out to be the big surprise of the week. It’s a small (8 table) Italian family restaurant. The chef is from Italy, and his daughters are the waitresses. We had the best service of the week from a 14 year old girl at La Dolce Vita. We asked about wine, and the chef/owner cam out himself, and we discussed wines, and went with his recommendation, a wonderful bottle of chianti from Zonin. The menu had a good mix of red and white wine sauce dishes, as well as fresh seafood, salads, and appetizers. All in an intimate dining room, with friendly, family service. Wonderful! We liked it so much we went back for our last dinner in Belize.

Habanero Mexican Restaurant : We did’t go to eat – just to have a few drinks and watch the sunset. The drinks were over priced, they didn’t know how to make a Mexican Martini (is this only a Texas thing?), and the sunset was weak. The only cool part was an alligator that decided to hang out right next to the dock.

Tours

We took one organized tour – to the Cockscomb Basin and Jaguar Preserve. We went with Doyle, whose company is DTourz, located on the sidewalk, in front of the Barefoot Beach Bar. Doyle was great. We started with a couple hour nature hike, where he pointed out and discussed lots of plants, trees, fruits, and their uses. We saw jaguar prints, but no jaguars. We then had lunch, and grabbed inner tubes for a relaxing float down the river. We then went “rock sliding”, which was sliding down moss covered rocks. Doesn’t sound like much, but it was really a lot of fun.

Car Rental

We rented a car through Jabiru Auto Rental, at the Belize airport, and the drove to Placencia. It took almost 4 hours. The last 23 miles are on a pretty rough dirt road. See my other post on Beware Jabiru Auto Rental : The car you reserved may not be the car you get.
You don’t need a car at all in Placencia, as long as you’re staying in the village itself. You can easily walk everywhere.
But having a car allowed us to take a few trips on our own, off on the peninsula.

Activities

We did go snorkeling one day, through Ocean Motion Tours. We spent some time snorkeling off of Laughing Bird Caye, had a BBQ lunch on the beach, and then boated over to another reef area and snorkeled some more. Tons of fish, beautiful coral, lots of starfish – beautiful.
One day we drove inland, up the 23 miles of dirt road, and then onto the scenic Hummingbird Highway through the mountains. We drove up to the Jaguar Paw resort to go ziplining through the jungle. It was our first time ziplining, and it was a whole lot of fun!

We then made a short drive up to the Belize Zoo. What a great zoo! It’s all outside, well kept, with tone of animals we’ve never seen in person before, including the Tapir (which is a mountain cow), cotimundi, howler monkeys, tons of birds, ocelots, a puma, a black panther, and of course, a jaguar. Well worth it – we were very glad we made the trek.

 

More pictures from our trip are available on flickr.