Tour guide books such as Frommer and Lonely Planet advise you not to go to Belize City without really telling you why. Luis, my dive guide back in Mexico told me it was because the people in Belize City will rob you blind. When I had told him I didn’t have anything worth stealing, he told me that had never stopped Belize City locals in the past.
In the end, I only spent about 5 minutes in Belize City, that was all the time it took to get off the boat from Caye Caulker and buy a bus ticket to Guatemala. Or rather, pay for a seat on a unoffical minivan for the four hour journey across the border.
As the minivan started the journey, I suddenly started to feel anxious. I hadn’t got a ticket or a receipt, and had basically paid the minivan driver the money at the side of his van in a car park. Perhaps the two women in the back of the minivan were not passengers. Perhaps they were his accomplices. Perhaps this minivan driver was not really a minivan driver, or at least not a minivan driver that was intending taking me to Guatemala. Perhaps his only intention was to drive me to the outskirts of Belize City, rob me blind and leave my lying in a ditch at the side of the road.
I relaxed somewhat fifteen minutes later, when the minivan driver put on his seatbelt as we approached a police checkpoint - this man was clearly someone that had respect for the law. I sighed with relief, realising I probably wasn't going to robbed of my eyesight today. The fact the minivan driver had been driving like a maniac without his seatbelt on for the last 15 minutes did not cross my mind, but this is probably because I was too busy staring at the large crack right the way along the minivan front windscreen, and quietly asking myself why the minivan driver kept overtaking other motorists at blind corners.
At the border to Guatemala, everybody started talking to me in Spanish again. A boy with a disfigured face wanted to sell me pipas. Several men contorted their faces when I told them I didn’t want to exchange unwanted currency at their exorbitant exchange rates. Belizean border control told me I needed to pay 15 pounds worth of Belizean currency to leave their country. A Guatemalan immigration woman whispered that I needed to pay some Guatemalan currency to enter theirs, but when I told them “No tengo dinero, necessito ir al banco”, she let me in all the same.
I will need to remember that tactic for future border crossings to see if it can save me being scammed. I will also need to remember to take my rucksack out the back of any unlicensed minivan I have been travelling in to walk across future border on foot. That way I don’t have several minutes of panicking that the unofficial minivan driver and his two female accomplices have done a runner with it back to Belize City, the city that didn't rob me blind today.
