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Pros -

It’s the only way to get out to the Northern Cayes.

They’ve got a good (if expensive) water taxi system that goes very regularly out to said Cayes.  As in every half hour or so up until about 5.30pm.

It stops you from thinking that Belize is just a bountiful font of nature interspersed with lovely little villages and towns where everyone is friendly and genuine and sweet, and makes you realise that it has problems in its society.

Ummm… there are a few colonial buildings still standing…

You can get cheap stall food, although to be fair it probably has been sitting there for hours.

There are buses out of there.  Lots of them.

Aaaand I’m out.

Cons -

Dirty, polluted and run down.  And I feel a bit mean saying it, because Belize City is regularly hit by hurricanes and fires, and so if any city has a good excuse for looking a bit… trashed, it’s probably this one.  But the canals are filthy and smelly, and apparently they’ve only fairly recently been cleaned up.  You can only guess what they were like before.

People make weird noises at you as you walk down the street.  Seriously.  All kinds of squawking and grunting and shouting.  Apparently this is cultural, but to be fair, no one else in the rest of Belize does it.

People tail you as you walk down the street.  ”What you looking for?  Where you go?  You need somewhere to stay?  I help you!  My friend!  My friend!  Hey!  Hey!  Hey!” and so on until you want to rip your hair out.  Or theirs.  I tell you, you’d better know exactly where you’re going and what you’re doing, because the moment there is a fraction of hesitation on your face, they will swoop.

The accommodation is painful.  I mean really painful.  The best we found was Ma Ma Chen’s, which was 60 Belize Dollars for a double with private bathroom on the dodgy side of the city.  And I hate naming names, but we checked out the Sea Breeze because every guidebook says how good it is, and they wanted to charge 100 Belize Dollars for a tiny double room with a sunken, worn out and dirty mattress with a miniature bathroom.  I’m not exactly precious, but seriously.  They’re dreaming.  And the ridiculous thing was that they seemed genuinely astonished when I said we were looking for something cheaper.

The amount of completely strung out people on the pavements make the place look like an open grave.  Okay, that’s an exaggeration.  But there were a staggering amount of bodies strewn about the streets on the less desirable part of the city.  You occasionally have to pick your way over them.  Pleasant.  Get a free clinic or two.

It’s the biggest city in Belize – with all of 70,000 people – and yet there’s still almost nothing there.  Depressing stuff.