All posts by Craig

Belize

Fried Jacks

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Two recipes for fried jacks that I found on the internets. Seems really simple:

INGREDIENTS

1 1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup milk
1/8 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking powder
METHOD:

1. Mix together flour, salt and baking powder.
2. Add milk and stir in.
3. Knead dough for 3 minutes until smooth. Cover and set aside for at least a half hour (1/2 hour)
4. Separate into balls (about 8) and roll out thinly into a round tortilla shape. (The thinner you roll them, the puffier they will be.) Cut in half.
5. Deep fry in hot fat, turning once until golden brown on both sides.
Ingredients:
1 lb flour
1 tb baking powder
1 tb shortening
1 cup water
Instructions:
Put ingredients in a bowl and mix well.
Knead for about 5 minutes until smooth.
Roll into pieces the size of golf balls.
Rest for 1/2 hour.
Roll it out and fry in oil.
Turn over once. When it floats, it finished.
Drain.
Belize

Day 2 – Food

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Day 2 started at 5 Sisters with tea. Dilmah is a brand you can’t get in Canada and which one of my tea-drinking friends raves about. I took this photo to show that I had it in Belize :P.

A Belizean breakfast – refried beans, eggs with veges, a few fruits (watermelon seemed popular in the area, the white thing is a crisp and relatively taste-free fruit, papaya) and a wedge of a hard, slightly sour cheese in the back. A solid breakfast improved only by…

Fried jacks!! (or fry jacks)

These things are one of the two “tastes of Belize”. They are a slightly thick puff pastry served at breakfast. Usually found with honey, as here, but at the end of the trip I had one with a jam and it was similarly delicious. I ate 6 at this meal. >.> They are like…pancake sized. 6 is a lot. I was in love. <3

Lunch was in a little hole-in-the-road road-side burrito place in San Ignacio. The others weren’t impressed with their food, but I think they got unlucky in ordering. My burrito was a beef+bean+cheese and it was excellent. The things on the left are pamades – “something”, in this case fish, but beef/chicken/beans were also available, deep fried in a batter with sliced cabbage on top. I wasn’t in the mood for deep fried at this point, so they were a little disappointing. And the fish was little than exciting.

The lime juice in the background, however, was delicious. It caused me to attempt to order lime juice in other restaurants as well.

As you can see here with another glass of lime juice…

This was a great meal at some place called Benny’s Kitchen or similar in Benque Viejo Del Carmen (someone confirm my locations?). It was hidden amongst houses, with many signs pointing towards it.

This meal is called “Pibil” – it’s pork cooked “underground”, by which I’m told it’s slow cooked with hot rocks. There is a salsa and an avocado and I wrapped it all up in the tortillas on the left. Very tasty!

You can see a jar of “salsa” on the right. This is effectively a jar of onions and spicy peppers. BLAAAH.

A good day of eating and a good day of posting. I’ll probably get to parts of day 3 tomorrow – Tikal has a lot of photos and not a lot of writing. I’m taking off for the weekend again on Friday, so I want to try to get a bunch of stuff out before then.

Thanks for reading!

Belize

Day 2 – La Casa De Mayos

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We stayed at a place called La Casa De Mayos. The front desk staff didn’t speak english. Whee! Apparently there was some booking issues with not having enough rooms written down as we’d asked for, but it worked out somehow. $20US a night, an extra $4US/night for AC – well worth it. Hot place.

A cute little place. We went for a walk around Flores after we settled in. Nice little island – beautifully pristine seawall, small one-way cobblestone roads, buildings built close together.

After a long day of sitting in the sun and swimming, we passed out pretty quick.

Tomorrow…Tikal!

Belize

Day 2 – Daytime

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We left the 5 Sisters lodge just before noon and drove down the long dirt road towards Santa Elena/San Ignacio. These two cities are literally separated only by a river and two bridges – both of which are one-way.

We stopped in San Ignacio briefly. Walked out into the blazing sun and found a place to get some lunch. Found a bathroom as well and paid an entire BZ$ (about 50 cents) to use it. Looked for iced cream, but no one was impressed by the available fare and so we hopped back into the car and traveled on.

Our destination for the afternoon was Flores, Guatemala. We had a planned “nothing day”, where in we were going to travel, check into our hotel and then check out the very local sites for the rest of the evening and afternoon.

We arrived at the Belize/Guatemalan border and opened our window to a gentleman wearing a laminated lanyard. He informed us that the border was closed because of bridge work on the other side. He said some other things as well, which caused our party leaders to believe that he was lying, but I can’t quite remember all of it. They went inside and got the full story – 12-7 every day the bridge was closed. It was about 3:30pm, so we had some time to wait around.

Waiting by the border…

Our first plan was to go to a local tourist spot.

This is a hand-drawn raft that takes about 30 seconds to cross the river. Sean looks pleased that the truck hasn’t sunk into the river yet :P. Unfortunately the place closed at 4:30pm, and we were there at 4pm. We traveled across anyway, hoping to find something to distract us, or maybe to get a discounted rate for the last half hour. No luck, so we wandered around the forest for a few minutes before taking the ferry back. Lots of “native artisans” on the other side of the dock, something I remember from Mexico but hadn’t seen around Belize yet.

We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting by a local river. Some folks read, some pulled out their DS (it wasn’t me!) others went swimming.

Really sweet place to hang out for an afternoon.

Got dry and dressed and went for dinner. Found a local place, had a great little meal, the girls got ice cream and we took off just before 7pm so we could make our bridge opening.

Unlike the Canadian/US border, where both countries trust each other…in Belize/Guatemala border you have to talk to both countries border control to get through. Belize was a-ok, no problem. Guatemala was slightly harder. English is not an official language, so that presented an issue. And the rented car apparently had some quirks.

I think the story was that there was a fee for the car to enter, which had to be paid and deposited to the bank immediately? The bank was closed, sooo….no car. But if you paid this guy, he’d give you a sticker for the car and take your money to the bank in the morning…which sounds pretty sketchy. Buuut…we had little choice if we were going to enter the country, so that’s what we did.

There’s also a fee to get some sort of spray for the car before entering. Costs $3. Probably as sketchy as it sounds :P.

Lastly we needed Guatemalan money – they don’t take US or Belizean dollars in Guatemala. Sean and/or Kerry had the forethought to ask at the 5 Sisters what a good rate was for buying money. That happened without a hitch – lots of people waiting around the border to sell money to you.

It also turns out that the border closes at 8pm. So we had exactly an hour to make this all happen. We were told this just as we had finished all of the necessities and were sitting in the car thanking our stars we’d made it. Dude taps on the window and suggests that since we have only 5 minutes before the border closes, we might want to hoof it :).

We drove for a long while after that. Came into another town called Santa Elena and then on the island of Flores. Which we’ll talk about later 🙂

Belize

Day 1 – Food

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I think I’m going to write about the days food after I’ve done each day. I had originally planned to write about it all after I was done all of the days, but I think that will end up much to disjointed.

My first meal of the trip I didn’t get a photo of – it was a burrito in the Houston airport at about 6-6:30am Houston time. I hadn’t slept at all, and I wanted something easy to eat. I walked up to a BBQ place and ordered the exact same thing as the guy in front of me (a trend which Sean will recognize :P). This thing would have been laughed out of burrito school in Vancouver, but it was pretty tasty. Spicy sausage, egg, cheese and a tortilla. That’s it. Who does that?

Lunch happened shortly after I landed in Belize. I had a feeling that the folks would be hungry when I landed, so I didn’t bother with a big meal in Houston, and I was glad to be right. We stopped at some random side of the road tent somewhere between Belmopan and Belize City. They had a truck with a BBQ and a man hanging out near it, and a tent with what I assume was a mother and daughter team serving food. Jerk pork, rice with vegetables, an avocado, potato salad and a lettuce salad. I didn’t know it at the time, but this meal is almost the quintessential Belizean meal – meat and rice, just needed beans to be added and it was right there. The pork was spiced, but not hot, and was delicious. This was a great meal, and I didn’t get food poisoning :P.

Just before dinner, we had a couple drinks. They served us a rum punch thing that was delicious upon us first arriving, but when we got to the bar it turned out they were expensive so we ordered other things instead :P. A “Belizean Cocaine” – Kahlua, Bailies, …something else…and cream. Woah, potent.

Dinner was at the 5 Sisters, served at that great table set up I photographed the other day. I ordered the shrimp – it came with roasted vegetables, garlic potatoes and cheese on the shrimp. As well as a little butterfly thing on the side (Rebecca says it looks like an owl :P). This was a great meal, and at the time I was really impressed. Unfortunately, it was overshadowed by meals to come – we ate at some really fantastic places.

Dessert looks like it was some sort of cakey-nutty thing with a chocolate sauce on top. But I’ll be honest, I can’t for the life of me remember what this thing tasted like. Maybe someone can remind me in the comments? 🙂

Having written that, I wish I’d taken notes on the food! I’m making the assumption that these potatoes are garlic…and I wish I remembered what sort of sauce was on the shrimp. Ah well…maybe a travel journal next time?

Belize

Day 2 – 5 Sisters Lodge

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We woke up the next morning to actually be able to see the gorgeous place we were staying in.

The view from the table :).

Breakfast was had.

We went on the “Nature Walk”. It’s about a 30 minute walk that starts at the lodge and ends up at the waterfall/lagoon we visited the night before. There were lots of other neat things to do – horse riding, cycling to 1000ft Falls – but at this point we thought we only had a couple hours before we had other plans.

This tree has spikes!

Random vines wrapped around a tree.

Dayl and a river.

A nicely framed photo of the hut and waterfall.

Some sort of tropical lizard decided the outside of the window was a rad place to hang out.

We left around noon and drove back down the lengthy dirt road to San Ignacio.

Belize

Day 1 – Cave Tubing Video

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I woke up at 5:30am this morning and decided not to try to go back to sleep. Went through my usual morning routine and clipped together this video of our cave tubing adventure!

Unfortunately, the Go Pro Hero, despite it’s awesomeness, does not adjust for low-light very well. So all of the actual “cave” part of the video had to be clipped out. Still, there was enough left over to give you a sense of what this activity was about.

Enjoy!

(we have a “professional” scuba video, and people have noticed the lack of this particular song in that video…I decided to use it here. :P)

Belize

Day 1 – 5 Sisters Lodge

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5 Sisters was the best lodging we had while traveling, I would highly recommend this place to anyone traveling through the interior of Belize. The downside of our trip – we didn’t have time to experience much more than the most basic parts of their experience, but it was more than enough to allow me to make this recommendation.

This was the room that Sean and I shared. I have other photos of the girls place and the outside, but they are in day 2 :).

The glass on the left contained a punch/rum drink, which was presented to us when we arrived and consumed minutes later. I’m a big fan of any place that gives you rum when you show up at the door :P.

The dinner table that was set for the 6 of us. A beautiful setup – unfortunately because of the dark the view behind isn’t visible yet. We’ll see it again in day 2. The food was great – but I’ll write about that in a food specific post later. For now, we can marvel that my photo turned out as amazing as it did! This sort of photo makes me really glad I bought a new camera a few months ago.

After dinner (and a few more drinks…) we took the walk down 300 stairs from the lodge to a waterfall/lagoon at the base of the cliff.

More camera geekery – these two photos were taken in full-dark, by the light of the full moon. 🙂 We went swimming. I made the brilliant decision to use the waterfall as a water slide. In hindsight, this was a bad idea – the next morning I found that my tailbone had swollen up and it reminded me of the last time I had hit it on something – I almost ended up in emergency because of an infection >.>. (3 days later and a lot of Motrin the swelling had subsided and no one was the wiser…:D) Sliding down was lots of fun though…the waterfall had made the rocks completely smooth.

300 stairs back up later, Sean and I had a game of Carcassonne in our room and then fell asleep.

Day 2 will probably be split up as well, with some more 5 Sisters love at the beginning and then the rest of the day. But we’ll deal with that tomorrow. Later!

Belize

Day 1 – Seattle, Houston, Road-side Food

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Day 1 started around noon on the 18th of January. I left my house and took the skytrain to Main St. I got on a bus from there down to Seattle – saved about $300 with this plan.

I’m on a bus.

I got off the bus in Seattle and was pleased to notice that I actually knew where I was, and where I was going. All of those years going to PAX have paid off! A quick walk over to the Link Light Rail and I was good to go.

The Link Light Rail shares the same road with bus’s for about half of it’s route – very strange if you’re used to the Skytrain and it’s very separate track.

A half hour trip later and I’m in the Seatac airport. My plane leaves around midnight. My plan was to sleep on that plane for 4 hours and then again for 3 hours on the Houston-Belize leg of the trip. Unfortunately…my body had other plans and I completely failed to sleep on the Seattle flight. Bad news, since I’m landing around noon Belize-time and we have plans to hit the ground running! I managed to catch some sleep in the Houston airport, and then again on the second flight, so I wasn’t actually much of a sleep-dep zombie when I landed. It was pretty close though. >.<

Some people changed into shorts and t-shirt on the plane. They were smart. I hadn’t thought of that and had to wear jeans when I landed in Belize. Bad call. It was hot and humid the instant I left the airplane.

The pack picked me up in front of the airport and we were off.

The folks in the truck:

  • Sean, driving.
  • Kerry, his wife.
  • Diane, Kerry’s mom.
  • Sandra, Kerry’s aunt.
  • Dayl, Kerry’s best friend.
  • Me

They had rented a Super-Duty (I think) truck with a huge bed and a cab that comfortably fit 6. This truck was worth every penny since most of the roads in Belize that we traveled on were dirt and not paved.

My first Belize experience was lunch:

Delicious road-side pork, rice and salad. Good times :). From left to right: Kerry, Sean, Sandra, Diane, Dayl.

The plan for the afternoon was cave tubing. It sounded like it would be an adrenaline sport, but it was pretty low-key. My only photos of this are videos and I don’t want to post any videos yet, so you’ll have to wait for a couple days :). But essentially you sit in a yellow inner tube for about 45-60 minutes and slowly drift down a gentle river through some caves. Very interesting, even if it wasn’t exactly what I thought it was going to be.

After that we drove for about an hour and a half along a dirt road to the 5 Sisters Lodge. Sean and Kerry had been there before, but the rest of us were worried – the road was crap, it was the middle of the night and I was pretty certain we were driving into a dirty, middle of no-where place. It turned out well though…I’ll cut this post in half and leave this here for now.

Belize

Welcome!

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Hello friends,

I came back from a significant vacation through Belize and Guatemala with a large number of photos and stories to share. Facebook is good for photos, but it’s pretty miserable for stories, and I really like typing. A bare-bones WordPress installation is exactly what I needed!

My plan looks something like this:

  • Several posts of day by day commentary.
  • Several posts of food specific talk.
  • Probably at most one post of board games played throughout the trip.
  • Probably one or two posts showing off scenery. Scenery is pretty, but it doesn’t need much typing to go along with it.

If you can read this, and were there and want to get posting access to this blog, drop me a line – I’d love it if others were interested in sharing their points of view. If you can read this and weren’t there, feel free to add a comment if you feel the desire.

And with that….I’m going to get some lunch! woot! 😛