To get to Belize City, your ship with dock out in the water and you'll take a tender boat to get ashore. The tender boats are small, so be prepared to wait for a boat and not have a lot of room for your items. Our boat going to Belize stayed fairly dry, but on the way back to our ship the boat was hit with a lot of spray from the water and our shorts got wet.
I was really excited for my first trip to Belize, but I wasn't as prepared for their port as I should have been. I've been cruising for almost 20 years now, and this was the most under-developed port I've been to. While the water was beautiful, the port isn't as established as Cozumel or Grand Turks. I'd describe the shopping there as closer to a flea market than your typical cruise shopping, most of what we saw were bad designer knock-offs and Female Body Inspector-quality shirts. There also weren't a lot of restaurant options, maybe 2 small restaurants, and that was about it. There are no beaches near the port where you can play in the water, as they all are rocky shores.
I think Belize is a stop that's best if everyone in your group is 12 and older, and likes adventure. The most popular excursions are river tubing through the cruise, zip lining, off-roading, and snorkeling and scuba. I wanted to create a place listing what we've done at each stop here over the years. I'll update this as we come back here again and again.
Kukumba Beach
We hadn't heard of
Kukumba Beach before we got here, but luckily Ryan heard about it from a taxi driver when we were at the port trying to figure out what to do since we didn't have an excursion booked. Our driver was great and he took us to Kukumba Beach and figured out what time our ship left and planned to pick us up exactly an hour before it left so we wouldn't be rushing to make it to the ship on time, but he gave us his phone number so we could call him if we wanted to go back earlier.
Kukumba Beach actually worked out really well! There were high-top tables set up that had bar stools around them and were covered, and there were a lot of beach chairs. You could get a bucket of beer for like $12 and there were several food options which were pretty cheap. The place itself is sandy, but it's not on a beach. It has a man made salt-water and sand pool that has a huge slide and floating trampolines to play on. Our daughter really liked playing in the sand and in the water.
And it had free wi-fi! The one con was that the beach chairs were wooden, so they weren't exactly comfortable. I had packed a
sandproof beach blanket with us, so I just laid that down and then a camping towel on top of it on the sand for our daughter to have a softer place to nap.
We were talking to a family that showed up about an hour after us, and turns out that they were on one of those city tour excursions and that this was a stop on their tour. They were really jealous that we got to go straight here and back, because they felt that the tour was just meh and would rather spend more time at the adventure park than taking the tour to get there and then more of a tour to get back to the ship. We also paid significantly less than they did to get there.
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