La Petit Cafe Archives

For the next three days I stayed in Belize City. I was planning on going for a ride into the countryside and explore the Belize capital of Belmopan and the town of San Ignacio. It was just so freakin hot though. I just couldn’t put on my riding suit and head out into the heat. Even the locals said it was hot.

La Petit Cafe

The La Petit Cafe was my refuge in the heat. Each morning I would head out to the cafe to do some work and enjoy the air conditioning. One of the main projects to do was updating my GPS.

GPS Travel Maps gave me a coupon code for a free update for my Central America maps. I was sure hoping this would fix my Belize maps.

There were a few problems doing it. First, my SD port didn’t work. A coin had gotten stuck in there and after I took it out the port was “read only.” I tried everything to change it but I am guessing the coin set something off. The Device Manager said it was working fine though. Oh well.

So next I hooked up my GPS directly to my computer to update it. It wouldn’t read! After a lot of experimenting it turned out to be a bad cable. It took hours but my GPS updated. I just hoped the map for Belize was fixed.

Restaurants

As the evening approached the temperature cooled off to go out exploring the City. This exploring mostly consisted of walking to different restaurants recommended by Tripadvisor and seeing the sights along the way. First it was Riverside Tavern for a much needed salad. Then to Celebrity where I had a really nice chicken curry.

But what I was looking for was a “home” where everyone knew my name, to quote the song from Cheers. The next restaurant on my list was the Wet Lizard. Come to find out it was only available for cruise ship passengers!! I walked around a bit and stumbled upon Spoonaz. It had a patio along the river. I ordered Salbutes.

And enjoyed the wonderful views.

The server was a bit sassy, as was the outdoor cook right behind me. I like that. I found my home.

Exploring Belize City

As I mentioned in a previous post, Belize City is not that big. Especially the downtown area. One evening I walked through downtown to Bird Island. The downtown is run down. It always seems to be filled with school kids in the uniforms.

I passed the Belize Supreme Court.

The Channel 7 News station.

I stopped at the St John Anglican Cathedral. Not really much of a cathedral but an historical building in the city. It was built using slave labour from 1812 to 1820 with bricks that had been used as ballast aboard ships and was the first church to be built in the colony of British Honduras.

There is a small residential area on the island.

One of the reasons for going to Birds Island was to check out a restaurant. It turned out to be closed. But I loved their sign.

Evenings

When it got dark I headed back to my guest house passing by a candy store.

I really didn’t want to be out too much after dark here. All the closed stores have those metal blind on their windows. And the stores that are open, have metal bars between the clerk and customer. So to order something you look through the bars and say what you want. The transaction is completed by a small hole in the bars. That was my hint that it may be dangerous after dark 🙂

The one awesome thing about Belize is English ha ha. That meant English TV stations. Not good for me learning Spanish, but nice to relax to in the evenings. Especially since the Final Four NCAA basketball tournament was on.

My Location from March 30 to April 1, 2017

GPS

The maps on the BMW Navigator IV GPS I purchased with the bike are only for Canada, US and Mexico. So before leaving on my trip I purchased Central American maps from GPS Travel Maps.

The night before leaving for Belize I installed the micro card for Central America. However, as I rode to Belize City, it showed I was off road lots of times when I wasn’t. And the directions it gave were for roads that didn’t even exist. Luckily, there is only one paved road to Belize City. However, I did get twisted around in a border town. I just headed south and eventually got back on the Northern Hwy to Belize City. My GPS wasn’t useless but not that useful either. I needed to see if there were updates. Otherwise, I would need to buy new maps.

Belize City

Once I was on the right road again the ride was really relaxing. It was sugar cane field after sugar cane field. And on the road sugar cane truck upon sugar cane truck. There were also a few add villages to pass through, but that was it until Belize City.

Belize City is the largest city in Belize. Well … large is relative. The population of Belize City is only about 60,000 people. So now you can understand how small the towns I went through were. The entire population of Belize is approximately 350,000 people.

Looking for Money

I arrived in Belize without any Belizean dollars. It was no problem going through the border and paying all the fees in pesos or US dollars but I would need Belizean dollars for my stay here. I went to the ATM at the credit union down the street. It rejected my debit card. Then to the Atlantic Bank. My card was rejected again. On my ride in I saw the Belize Bank and walked that way. It accepted my card but said it couldn’t complete my transaction. I was beginning to wonder if I could get money here. After some dinner at a nicer place that accepted my Visa credit card, I headed back into town as I saw on my Maps.me app that there was a Bank of Nova Scotia downtown. I was in luck. Money in hand I went back to my hotel ready for more exploring tomorrow.

Coffee

The next day the priority was to find a coffee shop for breakfast and to hang out in the mornings while I was in Belize City. I checked out a couple but they were pretty run down. As I walked around I discovered that pretty much the whole city is run down. It reminded me of cities in sub-saharan Africa I had been to.

Tripadvisor had La Petit Cafe as the number one coffee shop. It was connected to a Ramada. It was already hot when I started looking and now even hotter. I located the cafe in the “tourist zone” of Belize City.