Belize Travel Diary: Chocolate Tours, Street Food and Sunset Drinks in Placencia with a Celebrity
- The Anonymous Hungry Hippopotamus
- Mar 13, 2023
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
I woke up in Belize on Day 2 with one clear intention: Eat my way through Placencia.
Morning: A Hotel That Sounds Like the Jungle
Before anything else, I slowed down.
The hotel grounds were alive in a way you don’t really notice until you stop moving. Birds calling out from somewhere unseen. Waves brushing the shoreline just beyond the trees. The Caribbean wasn’t something I had to go find—it was just there, always in the background.
My hotel also had something I wasn’t expecting in Placencia: A massive pool with a swim-up and walk-up bar, and a swing set that felt slightly out of place and completely perfect. But the best part wasn’t the pool itself. It was the fact that you could sit in it and still see the Caribbean Sea.
Mid-Morning: Placencia Becomes a Food Tour
A few minutes later, I was in town for a food tour. Placencia doesn’t really announce itself as a “food destination,” but it probably should. We started with chocolate. Not the kind you grab at a checkout counter. This was cacao at its source.
Chocolate That Changes Your Standards
A local chocolate farmer walked us through the process—cacao pods, beans, and what happens before anything becomes familiar. Inside the beans are nibs: bitter, crunchy, intense. The raw beginning of everything we think of as chocolate.
Yes, I was learning, but I was also looking around for the chocolate. The guide must have sensed by distraction. He just smiled and said, “Pure chocolate melts at body temperature. It’s in the fridge.”
When it finally arrived, it came slowly—dark, milk, orange, coffee, cardamom, white. No packaging. No branding. No noise. Just flavor.
And he was right. It melted immediately at first touch. I didn’t think of myself as a chocolate person before that moment. I am now.
Carmen’s Kitchen: Where the Line Is Part of the Experience
Next stop: Carmen’s Kitchen. This was a small, one-room spot packed with locals and travelers who clearly already knew what I was about to learn. This is the kind of place you don’t stumble into by accident—you either hear about it or wait in line long enough to understand why people do.
We started with juice: Fresh orange, lime, and tamarind. Tamarind was the winner—bright, tangy, unforgettable.
Then came the food: Garnaches topped with beans, chicken, and goat cheese made from milk I later learned came from a goat I had actually seen. That detail changed everything.
Salbutes with fresh fish, pico de gallo, and hot sauce.
Chicken with rice, beans, and plantains that felt like they had been cooking this way forever.
This was not “tourist food.” This was just food. Great food!
The Tipsy Strip: Where Placencia Opens Up
From there, we moved to the Tipsy Strip. It’s exactly what it sounds like and also not.
A stretch of Placencia where restaurants, bars, galleries, and shops line the sidewalk beside the beach. You can wander it for hours without realizing time is passing.
We started at Barefoot Bar.
Barefoot Bar has great food, drinks, stunning views and live music at night.
Bitters, Smoke, and a Very Belizian Afternoon
Belizean Bitters
We kicked things off with a Belizean Bitters shot made from cedar bark and cats paw roots and infused with white rum. It sounds intense. It is.
Smoked Mackerel
Then came smoked mackerel dip, made from fish caught that morning. There’s a kind of confidence in food that fresh. You can taste it.
Gelato, Seaweed, and the Unexpected
We stopped just a few shops down the strip at Bomboyaz to cool off with a gelato.
I ordered the sweet corn flavor, a Belizean specialty that was surprisingly perfect.
Then came something I didn’t expect at all at a place called Brewed Awakenings.
Seaweed. I tried a shake made with Eucheuma isiforme, a local edible seaweed packed with minerals. It should have tasted like the ocean, but it didn’t.
Seaweed Shake
It tasted like vanilla and somehow, that made it more interesting.
A Coppola Sunset in Belize
Later that day, I ended up at Turtle Inn owned by Coppola. Yes—that Coppola.
Francis Ford Coppola’s resort sits quietly on the Placencia peninsula, blending into the coastline like it has always been there.
The bar faces the Caribbean Sea. And when the sun started to drop, everything slowed down again. I had a drink. Talked to the bartender. Watched the light change.
And then the night shifted into something I didn’t plan for.
Music, Boats, and New Friends
Someone nearby started singing Sinatra.
Then Spanish songs. Then “Despacito,” because of course it was.
I later learned he was a famous, local Belizean artist—Kylon Eiley—and what started as background music turned into something closer to a shared moment than a performance.
We ended up on a boat. That’s just how it works here. One minute you’re at a resort bar. The next, you’re moving across the water with people you met hours earlier. There was music. Dancing. A birthday somewhere in the mix. And no real sense that the night needed to go anywhere else. With that, I closed the books on my second day in Belize.
Belize doesn’t try to impress you. It just keeps unfolding. Chocolate becomes a story. Food becomes memory. Strangers become part of the day without effort. And somehow, the most surprising part isn’t what you do here. It’s how quickly it starts to feel normal.
More to come.
Comments