Placencia and Hopkins

I noticed the Blogsy interface is now truncating the right side of every photo I post.   So to catch full wide-screen splendor of my hackneyed photography, you might want to click them. You might be surprised with what Tig was doing over there to the right...

As I go throught and update older posts with the benfit of actual, useable PC-based "Programs", not attractive but ineffective Apple "Apps", most of the photos should work better. Still, click on them to get widescreen goodness.

We were woken this morning by our room fan stopping. It became apparent that we had no electricity, and no water pressure. The national power system of Belize is run by a company called Fortis, and there have been some disputes between the government and Fortis: the government complaining that Belize has the highest electricity rates in the Americas, Fortis complaining that by forcing rates down, the government is taking away Fortis' ability to maintain the system. Long and short of it, there was an announcement this morning that there would be no electricity in the southern half of Belize until 2:00 this afternoon.

So we drive down to Placencia, a slightly more high-brow beach area than Hopkins, in that the streets have asphalt. They seem to take care of their beaches a little better down here as well. Placencia has the kinds of thing that Hopkins is missing, like a bank, a gas station, and opportunities to buy "my parents went to Belize and all I got was this stupid T-shirt" T-shirts.

 

We had a great lunch at Omar's Creole Grille. Omar makes fresh fish. Fresh is guaranteed, as he is the fisherman who catches it. He also has the customer service skills of a fisherman - service ranges from indifferent to nonexistent - but we are finding this usual in tourist Belize. Nayer, our passenger on the drive from Lower Dover, reported having a great lunch in Hopkins, it just took two hours to get fed.

That said, Placencia also lacks the laid-back vibe of Hopkins. The former is a Tourist Town, where The latter is a Garifuna Village where some tourists showed up. So picking up trash is not part of the Hopkins Lifestyle, but chickens in the front yard is. 

Our guest house in Hopkins is great. our room - the Jungle Room - is a little small and tucked away, so it is not like we have a view of the beach, but the hostess, a Dutch/German, is the exception to the rule I talked about earlier. She is there when you need here, always accommodating, and clearly runs a pretty tight (and clean) ship.

One of our hosts was even kind enough to remove one of his shoes and use it to dispatch a rather chunky scorpion we found in our room.

New Years Eve was spent in Hopkins, bouncing between the Driftwood Beach Bar, where they had live music and good food, and the Windchief, with it's DJ and traditional (for Germans) showing of "Dinner for One", and hanging with a young semi-couple from Winnipeg. It seemed that most of the Ex-Pat population of Hopkins was there. For the first time in a few years, Tig and I both made it to Midnight.