Wednesday 27^th June 2018 Caye Caulker to Punta Gorda to Livingston (Travel Day)

Big day of travel today. Caught the 7am shuttle from Caye Caulker to Belize City and made it just in time for the local bus heading to Punta Gorda in the south of the country. The bus journey was 6.5 hours on an old US school bus. They don’t do them up all nice here in Belize – still the old yellow paintwork which is not as cool in my opinion! We made 4 stops along the way – every two hours or so. One section was along a road which is called the Hummingbird Highway. It was a beautiful stretch of road – winding through the jungle and surrounded by greenery. It was raining a little bit though this section too which made everything seem even more verdant. I was talking to two young American guys on the bus. They were on an adventure! They had left Cancun in Mexico the night before and headed south to Belize on an overnight bus and now were heading even further south to Roatan in Honduras to go to what looked like a horrible tiger zoo – where you could swim with captive tigers and leopards in the ocean. They still had a very long way to go and clearly hadn’t calculated just how long the journey would be! I wonder if they ever made it. We made it to Punta Gorda at around 3pm – as luck again would have it, just in time for a bite of lunch and the 4pm ferry from Punta Gorda in Belize to Livingstone -back in Guatemala! The boys were continuing on to Puerto Barrios – and from there they still had to take another overnight bus and a ferry out to Roatan! A guy was waiting at the dock in Livingston to guide me through immigration and took me to my accommodation for the night – very helpful, although of course he asked for a tip later! Silly me had thought he was helping out of the goodness of his heart! I was staying in a very quiet place by the beach called Los Flamingos. When I signed in it seemed that I was the only guest who had visited in the past week! This suited me fine though – I was ready to relax and to practice my Spanish again with some local people after 8 days in English speaking Belize! I walked back into town for some dinner and got hustled again! This time by a lady who wanted to braid my hair (I didn’t let her) and then afterwards continued to walk with me, then sit with me at my restaurant, request a soda and then demand that I pay her the equivalent of $4 for her “services”. I refused of course but she was a little bit scary and I was starting to get a bad vibe for this town.