Last weekend we headed south to Punta Gorda, which is the
southernmost “major” town in Belize.
(Quotation marks are necessary because the population of the town is
probably around 3,000 max.) Belize is
broken up into six districts, and Punta Gorda is in the southernmost one - the
Toledo district. Toledo is the least
developed region in the country and has diverse cultures, including the Q’eqchi
and Mopan Maya and the Garifuna. A local
non-profit called TIDE (Toledo Institute for Development and Environment) was
having their annual Fish Fest fundraiser last Saturday and Sunday, so we took
advantage of the long holiday weekend to head down and check out the area.
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| Views on the drive south. |
We broke up the 3½ hour drive with a few little stops along
the way, including a tour of the Marie Sharp’s hot sauce factory. Marie Sharp’s is big here in Belize. They make lots of varieties of hot sauces,
jams and jellies, and most assuredly there is a bottle of their signature
habanero sauce on every restaurant table in the country. The factory was actually quite impressive,
complete with huge storage vats and assembly lines.
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| Photo op with a cut-out of Marie Sharp herself, complete with keepsake hairnets. But we ended up seeing the REAL Marie Sharp when she walked through the factory later. |
Punta Gorda is on the Gulf of Honduras. The water is pretty much completely flat and there is no actual beach, per se. It was incredibly hot while we were there
(and is probably incredibly hot all the time), so we got in the water briefly
to try to cool off. But the water was
like a bathtub… and I was a little creeped out about what may be in the water
with us (bays gross me out), so we didn’t stay long.
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| The Punta Gorda waterfront. |
Instead, we got in the air conditioned Pathfinder and headed
west toward the Guatemala border to check out the jungle scenery and the Q’eqchi
villages with their thatched roof houses along the way. It is definitely
a very remote and untouched part of the country, and the scenery along the drive was a bit
like a step back in time.
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| A pretty waterfall on the drive through the Toledo district. |
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| We stopped at a little roadside "fast food shop" for some fresh watermelon juice. |
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| The scenery is pretty spectacular. |
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| We passed by several little Q'eqchi settlements on the west of Punta Gorda. |
We also stopped at another archeological site, the Lubaantun
ruins. The ruins there have not been as “restored”
and recreated as some of the other sites we’ve seen, and so it was interesting
to see Mayan ruins in that less manicured state.
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| The ruins at Lubaantun. |
And the Fish Fest itself is definitely a major event in
Punta Gorda. We went to a well-attended
dinner on Saturday night and then went to the festival the next day. There was also a fishing tournament on Sunday that was part of the festival. There were easily 1,000 people at
the festival, if not more. A bunch of
local restaurants set up stands to sell food, and I had some delicious
snapper. But it was crowded – and did I
mention it was HOT??? – so we didn’t stick
around too long. But the festival did
serve as an excellent incentive for us to head south and see a less-explored part of this country.
