San Ignacio, May 22-June 4

Main street of downtown San Ignacio. Eva's on the right and Mayawalk on the left - fistfights has been known to happen between them right here!

Wow, looking at those dates, there has been quite some time that I’ve spent here now, certainly far more than I had expected too!

San Ignacio is a lovely little mountain town, around 16.000 people lives here and in it’s twin town, Santa Elena, on the other side of the river. The competitive spirit between the twin towns is quite strong, although there are no tanks on the streets like there was in Mostar, there are rumors about fights between street gangs. It’s sort of cute though, since everyone here is still so friendly to everyone.

I guess that the start of the rivalry might be that for some reason San Ignacio gets all the tourist trade, and Santa Elena none. It seems like the tourist industry started a long time, with this restaurant called Eva’s working as the contact point between tourists and guides. Well, 15 years later, Eva’s is still around, but the guides have opened their own businesses all over town now.

Downtown San Ignacio is very much dominated by backpackers, or at least I guess it is in high season. Right now, when the rainy season is supposed to start any day now, the number of tourists is VERY small. Walking around town I very seldom see any of them, except at Eva’s that is.

There’s not much to do in San Ignacio itself except hanging out, but people come here for the excursions. The following is just an excerpt of some of the excursions on offer, and as far as I can tell they all seem to be of a high quality.

• General caving
• Repelling
• Caving in Mayan caves – like a museum at the end of a one-hour caving excursion
• Mayan ruins of all sorts and sizes
• Tubing (floating on innertubes) in caves and/or rivers
• Canoeing
• Botanical Gardens and medicine trails
• Belize Zoo
• Waterfalls and cascades to go swimming in
• Horseback riding

I’ll get into more details of a few of those in later blog entries.

But somehow surprisingly, I haven’t done too many excursions. Partly it is a question of the cost (a full day excursion can run up to 80 US$), but mostly it is because I have so much enjoyed just hanging around and getting to know people. I’ll give you a more detailed presentation of Esteban the insurance agent / jewelry designer and Kristina the Swedish restaurant owner in later blog entries, but there’s more to it than that.

It’s more about almost living in town, like when people you’ve met before greets you in the street and so on. And there’s never a dull moment, if I ever feel lonely I just need to walk a block or two and I am sure to find someone to chat to for a while. Except at night time – there’s another crowd out at night time that I don’t really want to get to know...

It was somewhat like that already when Raquel was still here, but since she left a few days ago, it has really dawned on my how easy it is to make contacts with Belizeans – they are a genuinely friendly people!