Oranges, oranges everywhere

Hello from Belize. We left Flores this morning after breakfast. We had breakfast (Guatemala style) at 7 am in the same restaurant we had supper last night. The restaurant was funny because it reminded me of Nepal. They had some specials posted outside that drew us in because they were significantly cheaper than the other restaurants around. They also had a very friendly waiter who had tried to rope me in each time I went by. They had a quite extensive menu in addition to the specials but it turned out they actually had very little of what was offered on the menu. I tried to order guacamole, which they didn't have and later on it turned out that the only dessert they had from the 10 listed was fruit salad. I just remember when we were trekking in Nepal how every restaurant showed you a menu and it almost always came down the the fact that they had only ramen noodles available.

The "typico" breakfast in most of the countries we have been in is eggs (sometimes with salsa), tortillas (today a piece of toast instead), refried beans, queso (a fresh cheese...sometimes fried so it really resembles the greek saganaki cheese), fried bananas and a sort of yogurty cream. This costs around $2-$3. After breakfast we walked to the bus station which was our only exercise today. It was about 1.5km probably. We found a minivan for the Belize border then had to get a taxi to a local bus. It took two "chicken buses" (I think I have mentioned before these are old american schoolbuses) to get where we are now. We are in Dangriga, Belize. Charles was shocked at the price of the room. It has two beds, private bathroom, cable TV, an ocean view with a balcony and free internet for $38 US. Horrific! Until now the most we have paid for a room is $28. The least was $9. All have had two beds and about half of them have had private bathroom and cable TV.

Some things we saw from the road today: unbelievable numbers of orange trees...I think we drove for at least an hour here in Belize when were rarely out of site of orange trees...a team of about 10 road workers clearing the vegetation beside the road with machetes...a dead horse...an accident where instead of flares, they had ingeniously hacked down brush and put several piles of it on the road before the curve that the accident was around, forcing the vehicles to slow down...a group of four police/soldiers with machine guns (they actually stopped the bus and one came aboard and looked everyone over) ...several loose pigs and innumerable dogs (the dogs here are quite varied in appearance...as opposed to Asia where they are all the same). That's about it for today. I will let you know how the Carribean swimming turns out to be next time...