Saturday: Carnival

The Belize City carnival took place today.  K and I were invited up to watch it from Luiz and Andrea’s balcony as they live along the route.  Luiz works for the Organisation of American States and he and Andrea are from Rio de Janeiro. They readily conceded that Belize City’s carnival didn’t really compare to Rio’s.

Still, it was a lovely day.  Lunch was great as was the company.  Even the fact that the carnival started three hours late didn’t bother us.

Unfortunately, K and I couldn’t stay until the end as we had to get back on the road to Belmopan before it got too late.  As it happens, it took us four hours (rather than the one and a half it should have) to get back due to an accident.  We sat in standstill traffic for two hours - most people got out the car and turned the side of the road into a party, carrying on the carnival atmosphere.

There is only one road that connects from Belize City down to Belmopan so we were a bit trapped.  We worked out that, if we wanted to take an alternative, we could have driven up to Mexico, across to Guatemala, down to Belize and entered from the south.  It would have only taken 22 hours.