An Afternoon Day in San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, Belize - January 1, 2008

Photo of one of the maps of San Pedro that are found all over town, with different art. It would be hard to get lost in this three-street town (Front Street, Middle Street and Back Street).

Photo of Front Street in San Pedro, Ambergris Caye, Belize.

(All photos are by Alan A. Lew and are released under a Creative Commons copyright, non-commercial, attribution, share-alike.)

Tuesday, January 1st, was a down day for us. We were pretty wiped out by the manatee tour and slept in and rested in the morning. One of our issues was our departure flight on Saturday, which leaves at 8am from San Pedro. We had booked a water taxi for Saturday at 7am (no regular ferries run early enough for us), but another option that we thought of was to spend Friday night in San Pedro in a hotel near the airport. To check out this option, we decided to go to San Pedro yesterday afternoon.

There are three options to go to San Pedro from the Costa Maya Resort. The most frequent is the Island Ferry that runs every two hours from 7:45am to 2:45am. That costs US$25/round trip. The second option is a Costa Maya Resort boat that goes to San Pedro at 1pm and returns at 4pm for US$10/round trip. The third option is to order a water taxi that would cost about $50 one way. We took the resort boat (cheapest) and spent 2.5 hours walking around town.

Being New Year’s Day, San Pedro was a bit slower than it was the first day we arrived, which was nice. Some, but not all, of the gift shops and food places were closed, and there were a lot fewer golf carts to dodge on the roads.

The main objective was to see if there was a hotel near the airport that we could spend Friday night at. But first I went to find a golf cart rental near the pier where we will be dropped off on Friday. I found Polo’s rentals, as well as Polo’s gift shop, both of which were located at the dead end of Front Street. (The street’s real name is something else, but everyone calls it Front Street.)

The gift shop was really good and we bought several items there, including a hat for me and a large bag for Mable’s taekwando supplies. The one thing that did not have was bottles of different kinds of Belizean hot sauces, which we wanted to take back with us. We found those at another store.

We also went to the Searious Tours to pick up some t-shirts. The American Jerk that I mentioned yesterday kept saying that he wanted his free t-shirt, and telling everyone else that the one of the local brochures said that we were supposed to get free t-shirts. At the end of our manatee tour he went into the tour shop while we were temporarily docked there and came back with a t-shirt.

Well the night before I was looking at a booklet for hotels in San Pedro and I saw the advertisement he was talking about. Except that is said to bring the coupon to get a free t-shirt with a booking. This particular booklet was given to us by Tropic Air (four copies, one for each of us), so we had four coupons, and they happily gave us four t-shirts.

Searious was near the airport so we next checked out the hotels. There were actually five of them near the airport, two just north of the airport, on across the street, and two just south of the airport (but still within easy walking distance). Starting north, the first place (the Holiday Hotel) had a room available for US$161. The second place (Ruby’s) was full. The Sea Breeze was across the street from the airport, but they required that we take two rooms (2 persons in each) at about US$160+ per room.

The fourth hotel was Steve and Becky’s Cute Little Hotel. It was a very nice, but we could not find a front desk. Son we went across the street to Ramon’s Village, which we found out also owned Steve and Becky’s. Ramon’s was quite pricey, but we both likes Steve and Beckie’s where we could get a bungalow house for the four of us for under US$200 including tax. So we decided to do that.

We then made our way back north through town. We stopped for some ice cream and at a grocery store near the pier. The boat left on time at 4pm for the 15+ minute ride back to our resort.

On the boat ride back we talked to a young couple from Tucson, Arizona who were on their honeymoon and an older couple from Walnut Creek, California. For dinner we had rice, canned corn beef, and cabbage. It tasted good.