What Nobody Told Me About Belize

Four days before my flight to Belize, my travel partner Ashley texted me two words: “BIG problem.” Her passport had expired. Not close to expiring — expired. The kind of thing you discover when you’re staring at it on the kitchen counter wondering why it looks different than you remembered. We had prepaid dive packages, resort deposits, and zero margin for error. So much for the easy Caribbean trip I thought this was going to be.

That’s the thing about Belize. Before I went, I had it filed somewhere between “relaxed beach holiday” and “solid reef diving.” Not too complicated. Not too demanding. Just sun, coral, rum punch. What I got was a trip that kept rewriting my assumptions from the moment we started packing — starting with a passport crisis that required a state representative, a Senate connection, and approximately four days of controlled panic to resolve.

(Ashley got her passport Thursday morning. We left Friday. I will never take a valid passport for granted again.)

I Thought Getting Into Belize Post-COVID Would Be a Nightmare

Wrong. Completely, embarrassingly wrong. After 14 months of pandemic travel horror stories, I was braced for the kind of customs experience that involves clipboards, holding rooms, and a man in a mask who clearly hates his job. What I got was: flash vaccination card, flash passport, proceed directly to baggage claim. The whole thing took maybe eight minutes. If anything, it was faster than a normal pre-COVID entry.

The SIM card situation right outside the airport was a different story. The shop across the parking lot from the international terminal sold me a Smart SIM for $20 USD, and I walked out thinking I had data, calls, and texts. What I actually had was data only. Texting was another $8. Calling was yet another separate purchase. Nobody told me any of this upfront. So I’m $40 in and I can WhatsApp people and check email. On Turneffe Atoll, where we spent the first chunk of the trip, there’s no cell signal anyway — only WiFi at the resort — so it didn’t matter much. But do not buy a SIM from that airport shop unless you want to discover the full menu of add-ons one frustrating purchase at a time.

Our ride from Belize Dive Haven was waiting when we finally found him. Fifteen minutes to the dock, four beers and a pizza at the waterside restaurant while we waited for the boat, and then James — our divemaster, this guy with the kind of enthusiasm that makes you feel behind on your excitement — met us at the boat and immediately made you want to get in the water the next morning.

I Thought “Dive Resort” Meant the Resort Part Would Be as Good as the Diving

At Belize Dive Haven on Turneffe Atoll, the diving is genuinely excellent. The staff and the dive crew — James running the dives, Deron (D-ron) at the helm, Oscar behind the bar — are all top-notch. Only nine other guests the whole week, which meant the boat felt like you were out with friends rather than strangers. Leo and his son Jeff, UPS guys from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, Barb and Blaine from wherever — by day two these people were joking with me like we’d been diving together for years.

Three dives the first full day. Partly cloudy, 15-knot breeze, 3-foot seas. Nurse sharks, moray eels, lionfish, angel fish, spotted grouper, cleaner shrimp. The Belize barrier reef is the second largest in the world and it shows — the soft coral formations alone are worth the trip. My problem on that first dive was that I hadn’t been underwater with my camera system in two years and I burned through my tank in 46 minutes trying to line up shots while the rest of the group stayed down another 15. I was the guy who sucks his air fastest on the boat. Not my proudest moment, but I got better by the end of the week.

The resort itself, though. The concept is right — small, dive-focused, atoll location. But the execution shows where they cut corners. Corroding stainless steel on the fixtures. Cracking grout in the pool. Mildew. The kind of maintenance that slips when you buy cheap the first time and never quite catch up. Every amenity was just slightly off. The room was clean and had a balcony, but the palm trees blocked what should have been a water view. It’s a place that wants to be better than it is. The dive operation deserves a better frame around it.

Hamanasi Dive and Adventure Resort in Hopkins, on the other hand, was the best-run property I’ve stayed at in forty-plus countries. Not hyperbole. You could mention casually at the bar that you were thinking about changing an excursion, and without you asking anyone directly, a member of the adventure staff would materialize at your pool lounger ready to make it happen. The food was excellent, the treehouse rooms were spacious with proper bathrooms and sitting rooms, and the dive operation was just as strong as the atoll. Five stars, no asterisk.

I Thought the Cave Tour Was Going to Be a Tourist Detour Between Resorts

Our transfer day from Turneffe to Hopkins included a stop at Actun Tunichil Muknal — the ATM cave — and I’ll be honest, I was treating it as a layover activity. Something to fill the hours between boat and check-in. Our guide Elias, who picked us up on the mainland (the boat ride in from the atoll through 6-foot seas had already rearranged several of my internal organs), turned out to be one of those rare humans who knows everything and loves explaining it. Ashley was firing questions at him like a deposition and he had answers for all of them.

The cave itself is not a tourist detour. You swim into the entrance through slate-blue calcium-rich water, helmets and headlamps on, no real sense of what you’re walking into. The first 15 minutes of stalactites and stalagmites — chandelier formations, striped walls, shapes that look like bullfrogs and the Virgin Mary and, I kid you not, Bart Simpson — are genuinely impressive. Then Elias mentioned “a bit of a tight squeeze ahead” and started removing his pack to push it through the gap first. When it was my turn I had to turn my head sideways, exhale, and slide my neck through a crevice that touched both my Adam’s apple and the back of my cervical vertebrae simultaneously. A bit of a tight squeeze, indeed.

We kept going — sometimes chest-deep in the stream, sometimes nearly dry riverbed — until Elias told us to look up at a domed chamber above us. We bouldered up the cave wall to a terrace where 1,300-year-old Mayan artifacts sat exactly where they’d been left since roughly 700 AD: pottery intentionally broken to release the spirits inside, offerings to sky gods and earth gods at the place where dripping mountain water meets the mirror water below. Then the bones. A seven-year-old boy, bound with his arms behind him. And further in, the Crystal Maiden — a skeleton fully encrusted in calcite crystals, lying in the deepest chamber of the cave. No cameras allowed since 2006, when one got dropped on a skull. We were the last tour of the day, and in the deepest room we shut our headlamps off and stood in absolute darkness. That’s not a metaphor. Complete and total black. You understand, standing there, how the Mayans induced visions.

We hiked 1.5 miles back out in the rain. By the time we reached the parking lot the sky was doing something biblical. But Elias had his wife’s chicken, rice, and vegetables waiting in a pavilion, so we ate in the downpour and changed into dry clothes and eventually made it to Hamanasi. I nearly had a coronary when I couldn’t find my passport at check-in. It was in my other bag, which was being brought to the room. Of course it was.

I Thought Ambergris Caye Was Just a Tacked-On Night Before the Flight Home

We missed the noon water taxi from Belize City — $50 BZD per person — because our driver made a stop at his house and took a long bathroom break and we pulled up 2 minutes after it left. A Cessna 208 Caravan flight to San Pedro ran $68 USD, so for $18 more we were there in 15 minutes. The plane seated about nine people and Ashley and I were directly behind the cockpit, separated from the pilots by a sheet of plastic with a sign that said “tear in case of emergency.” There was already a tear in it. We chose not to discuss this.

The Alaia hotel in San Pedro is a good-looking resort with immaculate whitewash and a beautiful pool. Getting checked in was a 40-minute ordeal and they gave me a second-floor room with a view into another building despite a high-floor ocean-view request that’s been in my Marriott profile for 20 years. The other window faced the mechanical equipment on the roof of the next building. For 75,000 points I expected more of a fight on my behalf. Marriott heard about it.

The island redeemed itself that evening. We rented a golf cart from Blue Hole Golf Cart Rentals — $35 USD delivered to the hotel, picked up after dinner — and drove the beach road south of the bridge, stopping at Wayo’s Beachside Beernet, a thatched roof on stilts over the water where we played Shut the Box for two hours and I beat Ashley something like 9-7. Dinner at The Blue Water Grille, right on the railing above the beach with a good breeze and a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The hawkers and wood-carvers outside were persistent but manageable — just keep moving and don’t make eye contact with the guy holding the parking spot with a bucket and a brush. San Pedro has more hustle than the rest of Belize we’d seen, but it’s not aggressive. It’s a last-night kind of place and it played the role well.

A few things worth knowing before you go: Belizeans are some of the friendliest people I’ve encountered anywhere, full stop. Tip generously — the wages are low and a few Belize dollars (the BZD runs 2:1 against USD) genuinely matters to the people taking care of you. The reef diving ranks behind the Red Sea and the Maldives in my experience but ahead of most of the Caribbean. Skip the Smart SIM at the airport. And if you have the chance to do the ATM cave tour with someone like Elias leading the way, don’t treat it like a layover. It’s the most serious thing on the itinerary, and it will earn that designation.

The whole trip cost me a nearly-cancelled passport, a dead waterproof camera (the housing developed a leak somewhere between the Maldives and Belize — $400 gone), and one bloody fingernail from getting launched off my seat in the bow of the boat in six-foot seas. Worth every bit of it.

Got questions about planning a Belize diving trip — which atoll resorts are worth the price, how to sequence the cave and the reef, or how to not get fleeced at the airport SIM shop? Drop them at Ask WildWilliam and I’ll give you the straight answer.