Waiting for the storm

The mainland towns in Belize are more like country towns - dusty/sandy roads, old tumbledown wooden houses with not a straight wall or floor in sight and people slowly going about their business.

Dangriga is the largest town in the south of Belize with a population of about 10,000 - but there is nowhere to go out at night. The streets are full of locals hanging around or walking about but no-one actually goes anywhere in particular for entertainment. It's kind of strange. Sam and I ended up at a little restaurant type place for a couple of beers after wandering around for a good hour trying to find somewhere to go.

With not much to do here, i figured I'd head out to Tobacco Caye the following day. To get there you head to the Riverside Cafe in the morning and the boat captains wait for enough people to make the trip worth their while. The day before I was having lunch in a restaurant and they had the weather channel on. The Tropical Depression "Matthew" which was on its way had just been upgraded from a tropical depression to a tropical storm - not great news as it was heading directly for Belize. At the cafe in the morning they were studying the satellite images on the internet and it looked as though we might be okay, Matthew would hit Honduras sometime on Saturday night and hopefully dissipate once it was overland. Just before we were about to go the call came in that they were evacuating Tobacco Caye so I wasn't able to go after all. Given I was ready to go somewhere, Dog, the boat captain, suggested I head to Hopkins.

Hopkins is another Garifuna town and has a population of about 1,000 and I can confidently say that I was the only tourist there. It is a long dirt road that runs along a spit for several miles so everything is very spaced out making quite long distances to walk from one place to another. Most of the restaurants were closed and there wasn't really anything else going on so it was probably quite good timing to pick this place to get sick and wait out the storm.

Matthew finally arrived on Saturday night and while it downgraded again to a Tropical Depression, it packed a huge punch - the wind and rain was unbelievable. It was about midday on Sunday when the weather finally settled down and everything had an eerie calmness to it. Dorothy who ran the place where I stayed suspected it was then the eye of the storm and we would get the other half soon but it turned out that last night's chaos was all there was - thankfully.