Placencia

Saturday, February 28, 2004

016-30.420 N
088-21.660 W

Ahoy from Placencia, Belize, a town which knows tourists and how to extract money from them!

Placencia is a mid-sized town (by Belizian standards) that clearly caters to tourists. They have a ton of little hotels and restaurants. It's also home to the Moorings and TMM charter boat fleet. On the plus side, you can get a lot of provisions here. On the down side they know that they have a captive market and can charge a premium. All of the charter boats need to provision before heading out and they've got them. Sue & I made the mistake of having lunch at the Pickled Parrot, which we later found out, was a gringo bar/restaurant. Our pizza, which was a medium by US standards, was $19 US. However, they did use very good ingredients and it was very tasty.

We went to dinner at a more local type place with Carol and Mark from Brandy. The prices were much more reasonable, but the food was much less interesting. Provisioning was very hit and miss with lots of empty spaces where products (especially meat) should have been. Saturday is market day and we were lucky to get some wonderful looking organic lettuce and vegies.

The trip from Monkey River Bay to here was unremarkable. The winds were, you guessed it, on the nose. The winds have been out of the N/NE for days now. Today we're headed to Rendezvous Cay, which is due east of here, and there's actually the chance that we'll sail!

-- Geoff & Sue
Log ID: 452