Belize Snorkeling
Travel Tips

If you are planning a Belize snorkeling trip then hopefully our Belize travel tips on this page will help you out. These are just general travel tips. If you are looking for specific snorkel locations then check out our main page for Belize snorkeling here.

Being from the U.S.A., for us Belize is particularly easy to travel to, and within. We enjoyed traveling in Belize very much, and found the people to be friendly and kind. If you plan well, and avoid the parts of Belize that are known to be a problem for tourists, then you should have a great trip. It is a beautiful country.

Currency:
The Belize dollar is directly connected to the U.S. dollar, so currency exchange could not be easier. One U.S. dollar equals two Belizean dollars. And the use of U.S. dollars is so widespread that in most cases you don't even need to exchange your funds into Belizean. Everybody takes U.S. dollars.

Language:
The official language of Belize is English. And pretty much everyone speaks it. But nearly all the locals speak at least one, if not two, other languages, including spanish, Mayan, Garifuna, and Creole. Belize is the first place where I heard someone say "Ya Mon" seriously, and mean it.

Flying To Belize:
One thing we wanted to mention is there are no night flights in Belize. So when you start looking for flights, keep that in mind. Once it is dark, they don't fly.

Costs:
Belize is a poor country, but it is not really inexpensive to travel there. It costs more than Mexico and Guatemala in general. Although you can find a huge range of values for lodging and meals. Tourist activities like snorkel boat trips, are all fairly costly, but not too bad. But unless you want to stay in some very rundown hotels, plan on spending at least $70-$150 US a night for a room.

When to go for snorkeling:
For the purpose of snorkeling, you want to go during the non-rainy season. The wet season starts around May in the south and June in the north, and lasts until November. There is also a high and low season in terms of prices for lodging. There are a couple of reasons that you want to go during the high and dry season. First, when it gets wet the mosquitoes come out. Not fun and potentially dangerous (see below). The second important reason to go during the high season is because unless the snorkel boat companies get enough people for their trips, they won't run them.

We went during April. The weather was perfect, and the prices were not as high as a few months earlier, and it was not as crowded. The down side was that we tried for days and days to get a boat trip to Bacalar Chico, but never managed, because there was not enough people signing up for the trip.

Oh, the third reason not to go during the wet season, hurricanes.

Avoid Belize City:
We read so many bad things about Belize City that we managed to stay only two nights of our seventeen days near Belize City, and even then we stayed on the outskirts of the city in a nice little bed and breakfast.

But we did drive through Belize City. It is culturally very interesting, but very poor. We did not experience any problems, but that is most likely because we avoided problem areas. We did read about many petty crime problems associated with tourist areas, and so we can easily recommend you never stay in Belize City. If you do need to stay in Belize City for travel reasons, then we can highly recommend this little bed and breakfast on the outskirts - De Nest Inn.

Water:
Plan on buying bottled water. It is readily available at all the local stores. It is not recommended that you drink any of the local water. We just bought several gallons at a time and refilled our smaller water bottles.

Nightlife:
We do so much during the days that we tend to crash at night. But if you like nightlife just be aware that Belize will offer you the full gambit of whatever you may or may not be looking for, legal or not.

You can learn everything else you need to plan your trip from good guidebooks. We bought the Lonely Planet book and the Frommer's and found them both very useful before and during the trip. The website www.ambergriscaye.com is also very useful.