The south - The Rough Guide to Belize - page 174

The Hummingbird Highway
Beyond the Blue Hole and Caves Branch (see p.123), the stunning Hummingbird
Highway traverses a makeshift bridge over the Sibun River (the original was washed
away in heavy rains) before undulating smoothly through increasingly hilly landscape,
eventually mounting a low pass. The downhill slope beyond is appropriately, if
unimaginatively, called Over the Top.
As the Hummingbird Highway descends from the mountains, it enters the flat Stann
Creek valley , the centre of the Belizean citrus industry. Bananas were grown here
initially, with half a million stems exported annually through Stann Creek (now
Dangriga) by 1891. However, the banana boom came to an abrupt end in 1906 due to
disease, and to foster the growing of citrus fruits , a small railway was built here in 1908 -
many highway bridges were originally rail bridges. Today, citrus comprises a major part
of agricultural exports and is heralded as one of the nation's great success stories -
though for the largely Guatemalan labour force, housed in rows of scruffy huts,
conditions are poor. The presence of tropical parasites like the leaf-cutter ant has forced
planters to use powerful insecticides, including DDT.

6

EATING THE HUMMINGBIRD HIGHWAY

Café Casita de Amor Mile 16, Hummingbird Hwy
T 660 2879. Whether you fancy an espresso coffee, a
smoothie, a Bz$10 burger or a Bz$14 daily special such as
spaghetti with meatballs, this cosy café, downstairs in the

central octagonal tower of a quirky gabled-roof house
across from the defunct Billy Barquedier National Park,
makes an ideal stop-off on a long car journey. Tues-Sun
7.30am-5pm.

Dangriga
DANGRIGA , the largest town in southern Belize, is the capital of Stann Creek District.
It's also the cultural centre of the Garifuna , a people of mixed indigenous Caribbean
and African descent who are estimated to make up around six percent of the country's
population (see p.181). Since the early 1980s Garifuna culture has undergone a
tremendous revival, as evidenced by the renaming of what was previously “Stann Creek
Town” to Dangriga, a Garifuna word meaning “sweet (or standing) waters”.
Sprawling along roughly two miles of shoreline, and home to fewer than ten
thousand people, Dangriga has the feel of a laidback Caribbean town where little ever
happens. The sandy tracks that line both banks of the North Stann Creek , as it flows out
into the ocean, lend the central area an immediate appeal. Most of Dangriga's shops,
restaurants and other facilities lie either on, or just off, the long north-south
thoroughfare that's known as St Vincent Street to the south of the river bridge, and

THE MYSTERY OF THE DISAPPEARING LAKE
Sadly, Five Blues Lake National Park , which you may well see signposted off the
Hummingbird Highway near St Margaret's Village at Mile 32, is no longer worth visiting. The
park used to centre on a beautiful lake, set amid luxuriantly forested karst scenery, and
constantly fluctuating in colour between shimmering shades of blue.
Only the intriguing name now survives; the lake itself has gone . Abruptly, in July 2006, it
simply drained away like a sink, with local fishermen reporting a noise like “the lake was crying”.
Ba ed scientists eventually determined that the blockage responsible for creating the lake
must have dissolved, allowing the water to exit through the limestone below. Since then the
lake has repeatedly reappeared and disappeared, presumably as its natural “plug” re-forms only
to dissolve once more. Meanwhile, with visitor numbers dwindling to nothing, the rough,
six-mile dirt road to the lakebed deteriorated to become all but impassable, and there are no
longer any rangers or facilities on site.