The green rolling hills of Cayo District offer welcome visual relief coming from the lowlands around Belize City, but its administative capital, the town of San Ignacio, doesn't trade in scenic beauty.
Five narrow crooked roads converge at a messy, no-nonsense center of sidewalk commerce and market stalls. (By nonsense, I mean urban grace notes like trees, grass, benches...) There's no bus station; you get dropped in the middle of traffic. Fortunately, most of the town's hotels are less than a block away in various directions.
Don't expect to find anything but a dark, musty chamber of a hotel room if you're budget-conscious. I settled for the best of the worst, convinced now that a dollar doesn't go far in Belize. This is the current conventional wisdom among travelers I'm meeting.
Still, San Ignacio, for all its roughness, is a lively place, the locals ever ready to engage in conversation. The surrounding countryside is the area's main attraction, with several tours to Mayan ruins, waterfalls, scenic rivers and the incomparable Actun Tunichil Muknal caves. H/T to my friends, Laura and Barry Moore, of Calgary, who will probably be disappointed that I didn't take the tour.
Instead, I went to Cahal Pech, a small ruin just up a steep hill, outside of town (a report will soon follow this one). The next morning I crossed into Guatemala, to the lake town of Flores. I plan to make Tikal this week's big ticket adventure.
Above, a heavily cropped detail of a river scene near Benque, Belize.