Hopkins, Belize

Day 2 and 3, January 9-10, 2025

Hopkins is a small village on the Belize mainland. It’s a quiet place that one local ex-pat described as “a drinking village with a fishing problem”.

The village runs long and narrow along the shoreline… at most it’s maybe 5 blocks wide. The homes are colorful, really bright yellows, blues, oranges and lavenders. Most of the homes in the center are smaller shack-type homes… some of them built close to the ground and most of them raised several feet high for flooding.

It’s suppose to be the end of the rainy season and there are puddles in many places. The Main Street splits into two one way streets in the heart of town with a large walking/biking lane on the right. These are the only two paved streets, the rest being hard packed dirt roads.

Breakfast this morning was a short beach walk just next door from last night’s dinner. The Queen Bean…Gaspar was our host and his mother was the cook. I had a local food…Fry Jack stuffed with eggs and ham and Jim had creole eggs with fry jacks on the side and coffee of course. Both were delicious! Fry jacks are puffy light fried bread.

At our cabana our host had two cruiser rusty chained bicycles we could use. One of them had a slow leaking tire, so she gave us a pump to carry along in the basket. They were perfect for us to ride along and checkout the village from north to south and beyond to where the “resorts” and high end vacation homes have been developed. They run about 1-3 miles north and south of Hopkins.

Our first destination was to find a grocery store to get a little breakfast food for the next two mornings. We found 3 grocery stores… all of them owned by the Chinese. Joseph the “taxi” man had told us how the Chinese had developed businesses in Belize. The stores have groceries, liquor and hardware supplies. One stop shops. We didn’t find the kind of breads I was looking for at any store but as luck would have it a little bakery cart was stopped by the store and we bought a few sweet breads from his cart.

We spent the day exploring a bit on bicycles and then lounging at our cabana. It was a bit windy and overcast all day. Not cold but not hot either. Not exactly the “beach day” we were hoping to have.

We set out about 5:30 for dinner…walking. We were thinking we were going to bicycle to the south side of Hopkins to a restaurant we heard was popular. We had our headlamps for the ride home. Just as we were headed to the bicycle shed we met a friendly man walking the same direction. He was Sergeant Benjamin (from Chicago) with family all over the town of Hopkins. I’m not sure if everything he said was true but he has a wife, brothers, cousins, nieces, nephews and friends all over Hopkins. He was a retired city of Chicago firefighter. So now we were under his wing… he was determined to find us a different place to eat in walking distance. We ended up at a little beach shack hut (similar to the Queen Bean) but smaller. Mel cooked us fish tacos. They were very good and satisfying. We ate while Benjamin entertained us with stories of riding his Harley in the USA and all his Belizean relatives. He thought he might know where Montana was… not exactly sure.

The only drawback to the beach hut restaurants is those nasty sandflies or No-See-Ums! They love Jim! He woke up the next morning and his legs and arms had red welts where he’d been bitten. He has experienced this is Florida. He bought a special oily spray for them. It didn’t seem to stop the bites but seems to relieve the itch. More to come as we have many beach days ahead!

Day 3……Hopkins Belize

Woke up to a beautiful, calm sunny day! Yeah! That is what we were hoping for…

We have a little kitchenette so we made coffee and had our sweet buns toasted for breakfast. Took a nice walk north along the beach. Came across this little tiny cafe and accommodations in the palms trees literally at the shoreline. (Please note that the beach here is in a bay and the water is very shallow a long way out. So it might have very, very small shoreline wave action.).

We visited with the Kismet Cafe owner… she’s been here 30 years. She has at least 6 separate private sleeping “spaces”. She also cooks for her guests. This place was really funky, hippie vibe. There seems to be various pockets of this vibe in Hopkins. Her guests were varied from two remote working women, a young Asian couple and then 2 local hippy guys that look like they’ve weathered in Belize since 1990…age 70+, tall, sinewy, tanned body types with long unkempt hair styles and smoking joints. Honestly I don’t know their story but they fit right in.

We were back on the beach bicycles to find Caitlin’s Bakery. Yesterday we circled around the neighborhood and for the life of us could not find the bakery. Today we found it! We failed to look deeper into the palm trees for this little bakery shack! Caitlin was there and didn’t have much left. We bought a couple chocolate zucchini muffins for breakfast tomorrow. We got the short synopsis of her life and how she ended up in Hopkins. She graduated from Evergreen College in Bellingham WA. She was a botanist-environmentalist-dreaming of working for National Geographic that came to Belize out of college for an internship project. There was a mixup and Hopkins thought they were getting teachers… so she was a teacher! Never left! Eventually became a baker to make money and raise her children. 30 years! So many crazy stories like this.

There are lots of dogs in Hopkins. If they have a collar…they aren’t homeless. Many don’t have collars. They roam the streets and the restaurants… looking for snacks of course. Our cabanas have a few neighborhood dogs and one fella I named “Buster” has befriended me. He followed me all the way to our cabana and then just parked himself on the steps for about 15 minutes yesterday. Today he hung out right beside me on the beach as I was reading in the hammock. I hope to have my camera and get a picture of him before I leave. He has a collar, not super skinny, part pit bull, grey colored and really mellow. He likes the Sandpiper Cabanas anyway.

Dinner tonight was at the Driftwood Beach restaurant. They have good pizza and spicy margaritas (my favorite😊). We discovered that there is a local Tequila made in Hopkins. The locals next to us bought us a shot. They have been in Hopkins for 11 and 15 years respectively. The first from South Carolina and the latter from East Germany. They were pretty knowledgeable about Belize.

Tomorrow we transfer to the Mayan rainforest for one day. We’ll be picked up in the morning by our Island Expeditions crew. We have just one day at Bocawina Rain Forest Resort.