Sat. 10/13/12 Shopping in Dangriga
The development is located just south of Hopkins, a small fishing and tourist village near the Sittee River. That puts us about 40-to 45 minutes from Dangriga and 45-50 minutes from the Placencia Peninsular with its several villages. Since Hopkins is so small, we end up doing our grocery shopping in either Placencia to the south or Dangriga to the north. 45 minutes to an hour to go shopping seems like a long way, and it is for us in the US and Canada where we typically have the choice of several shopping centers and super markets within a 15 minute radius. But we lived in the bush in Uganda where it took us 2-3 hours to drive to Kampala to shop so we learned that it is OK to shop once a week or so for your groceries. And Patricia ia planting a vegitable garden to reduce our need to shop for vegitables.
The markets in Placencia are a little better and there are more places to stop and eat since it is primarily a tourist location. Dangriga has a better farmers market but it's defineitely a working town without a lot of amenities. However, all the government offices and major utility and phone companies have offices in Dangriga. We have been typically splitting our shopping trips between the two towns. We also discovered a nice large palapa restaurant (open air with a thatched roof of palm fronds) in the village of Silk Grass that is on the way to dangriga, that we like to stop for lunch on our way back from Dangriga.
Another plus for Dangriga is that the gas is cheaper there. Placencia's two gas stations have only premium gas, no regular, at $13.00 per gal., while Dangriga has regular gas at only $12.00 per gallon. Other than gas at the Hopkins marina, there are no other gas stations except in Dangriga or Placencia. Before you totally gag on the prices, these are Belizean dollar prices. The exchange rate is set between the Belizean dollar and the US dollar at 2:1. Thus for us Americans, the cost of gas is between $6.00 and $6.50 a gallon. Still pretty high. Where all the highway patrolmen in Texas or Oklahoma could not make me slow down, the Belizean's have found a way to make me do so. I use cruise controll all the time and watch the instant fuel flow gauge closer than than the speedometer. But that's OK since there really is no rush to get where I'm going anyway.
The larger grocery stores are all owned and operated by Chinese and Vietnamese. We haven't seen orientals running any other businesses but every larger store is run by what appears to be an oriental family. The largest stores are medium size by our standards. Prices appear to be pretty close from store to store but selections of some special items vary. Patricia likes to cook with non-fat powdered milk. She found it in one store once, but it hasn;t been there since and no other stores carry it. We also like the local Belizean honey, but only some stores carry it and not all the time. I love skim milk and can usually find one or two gallon containers in most stores. But today in Dangriga, none of the stores had skim milk. So tomorrow when we go to church in Placencia we will check out the local markets there. (That's one thing you learn fast, make sure that you can do two or things whenever you go to town.) So you begin to spot the items that you cannot count on each week and when a store has it, you buy in bulk. Like the case of tofu that Patricia found in one of the local stores.
We have found that many items are imported. That means that they are expensive because of the transport costs and import duty. So we have not found the food to be a lot less expensive than in the States. We generally spend $200 to $300 every week to week and a half for food for the two of us. And we do not buy beef. We will get chickens, but they are raised locally so thay are not as expensive. Today we bought a small frozen turkey (there was no weight listed on it but the bathroom scales confirms it's about 5 pounds). It's a Belizean product and cost $38.00 Bz. In reviewing the receipt, I noticed that most of the food items have the 12.5% GST (General Sales Tax) that Belize charges on almost everything. There were a few "basic" items that did not have any GST but those items were usually the lowest priced items on the list. Everything is rung up by hand, no scanners, and the receipt only lists "Tx" or "Basic", not what the item actually is.
Surprisingly, there is not any fresh or frozen fish in the stores. That's because the fresh fish can't be delivered from the local fishing docks to the markets and they don't have any freezing facilities for the fishermen. We think we have located the local "fisherman's wharf" at the end of Placencia. I'll let you know later if we have in fact found a good spot to get local fish. Other things that we can't find here are mushrooms. They are hard to find in any store and when we do they are always imported from Mexico. I've asked Cody, who is working with Morningstar Institute (www.Morningstarinstitute.org) in Nairobi to send me the business plan of one of his Morningstar students that has started a microenterprise business of growing mushrooms. I think it would be a good business for some young person here in Belize. Also, we haven't found any selection of nuts other than peanuts. Something for us to stock up on the next time we go to the States.
So it was a relaxing day driving to and around Dangriga shopping. We left at about 10:00 and returned home by about 4:00. But we had to stop in Hopkins to look at some of the cabinets that are being built for the house. Our favorite palapa restaurant didn't have any food left today other than chicken wings and french fries, which Patricia passed on before I could speak. She takes good care of me. So we discovered the Blue Sky restaurant down the road in Silk Grass and thus discovered a local chinese restaurant that had pretty good chow mein. There's always something else that you need to do when you go to town.
Tom
