Cayo
— Cayo is Belize's westernmost district and borders Guatemala. The district capital is San Ignacio: a great base for exploring Mayan sites and the rainforest.”
It’s already hot by mid-morning on Saturday in Cayo. I’m standing in the middle of the noisy, sweet-smelling weekly market in San Ignacio.
People come here from all over the District and it feels like most of them are indeed here right now! J and I hitched a lift from Theo and family at Parrot Nest Lodge in Bullet Tree Falls. It’s our last full day in Cayo and we’re thinking about hiking up to Cahal Pech above the town as we file through the market.
Most of the stallholders on the town side are selling fruit and vegetables: bananas, onions, cauliflower, cho-cho. Down the middle, they offer cooked food: tamales, burritos and hot corn tortillas in black plastic bags.
At one end of this middle section, a young man is chanting Bible passages and Christian admonishments in a breathless Spanish monotone. He holds a microphone in one hand and his other one is flailing about in a strangely angled, witchdoctor dance.
On the Mahal River side of the market, many of the stalls seem more like jumble or garage sales in their lack of a common theme. Old toys, books full of brown pages, sandals, second-hand clothes, used lipsticks, towels and pirated DVDs.
Cayo
We stayed near San Ignacio, capital town of Belize's wild western district bordering Guatemala.
While not without its problems (what city in Europe or the United States does not have any problems?) San Ignacio is a good base from which to visit Mayan ruins and organise rainforest activities but like at the Saturday morning market, it’s also a funny old place to browse around and find a surprise.
This is more or less how we ended up spending the rest of the day – despite our best laid plans – in the home of British ex-pat Paul. He and his family had all of that warm, welcoming, disarming friendliness to which it’s very difficult to become accustomed as a rush-rush European.
The sheer sincerity of Belizeans and many of the fascinating ex-pats living in Cayo takes a good while to click, to the extent that I think it took us until our morning of departure to finally get it.
See also:
Caye Caulker
Island life: Caye Caulker’s motto is ‘go slow’ and here visitors learn to take the rough with the smooth.
- Originally published: 29 Dec 2011 in Belize
Stop ACTA!
A privately-negotiated international trade agreement that's anti-sharing, anti-privacy and anti-democratic.
Let's put a stop to ACTA.
Who you gonna call?
Hello, you. I'm Mike Padgett. I'm not a Princeton curator, Knoxville mayoral candidate, Kentuckian pastor or Arizona journalist, I just share the same name as those guys. I'm a user experience consultant, expatriate, traveller, writer and pro cycling enthusiast.
I'm originally from Yorkshire, England but nowadays I live in Belgium. My current favourite Belgian beer is Black Albert. I started my website in 2005 and I've been running it ever since.
Shameless self-promotion
Over a year in the making, Dopeology.org is my latest personal project: a topology of doping in thirty years of European pro road cycling.
I collected information from thousands of sources, then I modelled and published it via a lightweight user interface.
Comments
No responses yet to Cayo
Why not give me your comments?