Building Ocean’s Edge in Belize

In December of 1998, Yim and I decided to visit Belize – specifically the Placencia peninsula in the southern part of the country – so we could go scuba diving and snorkelling together. It was our very first vacation together and I wanted to show Yim what a barrier reef looked like. She had listened to me talk about scuba diving and I thought this would be a great vacation to take together and share.

Once we decided on Placencia as the destination, Yim called me one day while I was at work and said, “How about Kittys Place as a hotel?”  She had found it ‘on the internet’ and we agreed.

The trip down was an adventure in itself. We landed in Belize City after connecting out of Miami and decided to take the local bus down to Placencia. It was advertised as a 3 hour trip. Little did we know that locals also used the bus for transportation and we sat beside a woman and her pig and another entrepreneurial women right behind us who had a small bunsen burner cooking up plantain fries for the people on the bus.

The bus ride took a few detours and we ended up in Dangriga for a rest stop. During the stop, Yim had to use the restrooms as there were none on the bus but there was a long queue and the bus driver wanted to leave before she had returned. I literally had to stand outside holding the door open so he would not leave until Yim returned. He was actually going to leave us there.

After Yim got back on the bus, we headed off to Placencia through Hopkins. It had rained the night before and at one point, the bus was in water over the wheel wells and Yim and I were wondering just what we had gotten ourselves into.

Six hours after leaving Belize City, and in pitch black, we ended up in Placencia and the driver stopped along the side of the road and told us we were at Kitty’s Place. It was very dark and we had no idea where we were but the driver opened the back of the bus and handed us our luggage, which was covered in red dust from the clay roads we had bounced along for the last two hours of the trip. Then he got back in the bus and left, and we headed off towards a small light shining on a coconut tree. Sure enough, Kitty was waiting for us and we checked in. Little did we know we would end up becoming quite good friends with Kitty or that Yim would one day manage her resort.

The next day we started exploring the local beach and village. We found a charming fishing village and the dive shop we were looking for, met Glenn and Martha, the owners and coordinated our dives with them before Yim did her Open Water Certification and aced it.

That afternoon after returning, we stopped to have a late lunch in a local bar to celebrate.

A fellow was sitting at the bar. He had local drawings of properties for sale out on the counter and was having a beer. I asked if he had anything for sale in a certain price range right on the water and he said, ‘Yup’.

Next day, we drove up to view the property. It was a jungle, literally. We could not walk from the road to the Caribbean only 200 feet away without machetes. But once we did get through and wandered down the beach a bit, I stood on the shores of the Caribbean with palm trees to the left and palm trees to the right and the ocean in front of me and was smitten….

It was perfect as far as I was concerned and I said, ‘I’ll buy it’. Yim said, ‘Are you nuts?’

There’s no question in my mind that this was the best experience of my life up until this point. Being able to purchase a piece of the Caribbean, build ourselves a house and live there for four years was a dream come true for me. Being able to earn a living while there by teaching scuba diving was the icing on the cake.

If there was a time in my life that I could write a book about, it would be this period of time we spent in Belize.

And of course, the stories would be good and bad because nothing is perfect and Belize is and was very very far from perfect, which is why we left a Caribbean beachfront home to move back to Canada but I loved this time in our lives.

After we had purchased the property, we began conceptualizing what the small property would look like. You can see my initial sketch above. We decided that the front would be two larger homes and a caretakers house and the back acre, eight smaller houses on stilts ranging from six to twelve feet high to catch the ocean breezes and for the view. The walkway would wind through the property with dense foliage planted on both sides with bananas, limes and plantain scattered through the property.

While developing the floor plan, Yim and I actually went to closed businesses on the weekend while living in Windsor with large enough parking lots and drew the entire layout on the parking lot in chalk so we could pretend to walk through it and see what it would feel like.

In 1999, we visited Belize for a second time and started to clear the property by ourselves. By that time, I had developed a logo (above) for the property.

We also decided that we wanted to find a local Mennonite builder to help us build the houses so we rented a VW Bug and drove up to San Ignacio. We didn’t know who we were looking for. We were simply trying to find someone who would help us and we stumbled across Allen Reimer. After a hour’s conversation, he agreed to help us and I agreed to start sending him sketches over e-mail of what we wanted built and over the next few months, we settled on a design and he started construction.

While we were clearing the land, Robert Frackman stopped by the property while I was in Belize without Yim and asked what we were doing. We had met him the previous year as we dove with his operation and I jokingly said to him at dinner one night that I would one day run his dive operation. I explained that we were building a small Eco Resort and Dive Shop.

He suggested I consider running his new dive shop instead, which made sense to me because he had a better infrastructure already built and deeper pockets and I thought as things developed, we may work well together.  During our conversation, I asked him if Yim would be able to manage The Inn at Roberts Grove, since she was acting as Executive Administrator of the Ramada in Victoria BC, which had three times the amount of rooms.  He said he would like to meet her so I flew home and brought her back to Belize.

It took a bit of coaxing but she agreed and we were set to go.

As fate would have it, in 2001, Yim was named the Best Five Star Resort Manager in Belize. I knew she could do the job…

Building Pre-Fab Houses.

Our houses were built in San Ignacio, about three hours away on some very awful roads and transported to Maya Beach on a flatbed truck and set down on the property. You can see the first boxes on the ground below. We then positioned the first section where we wanted them on the property and started to add the roofs. The house closest to the beach was the first to be placed on its footings and then the roof was added. We wanted to get the roofs on as quickly as possible so we could start working on the interiors.

Our help was mostly hired from San Salvador and Guatemala and were a good group of guys – hard working. It was actually a lot of fun… None of them spoke english so I tried speaking with them in french to see if they would understand but nope. For the most part, sign language was how we got things done when the builder himself wasn’t around.

Once we had the roofs on, it was time to start sanding and varnishing the interiors and setting up house for incoming guests, who arrived the week after we finished. The hardwoods were all local and polished up beautifully but it was hard work. Yim and I did all this by hand with two small hand sanders because that was all we could find.

In the last few weeks that we were readying the houses, we built a wooden walkway throughout the property, added a stone walkway to the beach shower we constructed and managed to have the furniture brought in and plant 50 or so trees and plants. We also managed to make sure the first guests had access to kayaks, as we had promised, even if we had to borrow them.

Getting to do some diving along the Barrier Reef…

Of course, part of the original idea was that Yim and I would build our own Eco-Dive Resort and during our first couple of years visiting, spent quite a bit of time visiting some of the best dive spots, like Ranguana Caye, The Silk Cayes and Moho Caye, to mention just a few. We also headed out to Glover’s Atoll on one occasion.

During our years in Belize, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to teach scuba diving off the barrier reef of Belize, and that is enough to spoil most anyone as southern Belize is one beautiful place to spend your days diving.

Moving Houses with a Forklift

Something I never expected to happen while building a house happened, and I suspect Belize may be one of the only places it could happen. When the Pre-fab sections were delivered, the builder came down and the only big piece of equipment he had was a forklift so… the houses were hoisted up with a forklift onto the back of a flatbed truck and pushed and prodded through the property until we got them situated where we wanted them.

Surprisingly, we had the houses settled in the spots we wanted within a day or two and set on their foundations, such as they can be called. Construction went quickly after that and within 3 weeks, we had the houses finished enough to be able to lock the doors and start working on the interiors.

That presented a bit more of a challenge because every carpenter on the peninsula were busy rebuilding most of the resorts and getting anyone to build our cabinetry proved very difficult but we perservered and managed to get Aaron Loewen to help us out. More than likely this was because we had agreed to manage The Inn at Roberts Grove and he had constructed that resort so as General Managers, we held a bit of sway with him at that point.

In early 2001, I built a website to start taking bookings and the website was so successful that we had the property booked for a full year starting in December 2001.

Unfortunately, in September of 2001, a hurricane hit the Placencia peninsula and destroyed almost everything in its path. We were fairly lucky as we only lost half of one of our roofs along with some other damage but after moving down there, we managed to get the property ready for our first guests in plenty of time. However, at that point we decided not to try and build the rest of the resort and concentrated on managing The Inn at Roberts Grove while hoping to continue completing Ocean’s Edge as time allowed.

And, if you recall, September 11, 2001 happened in New York City so we had some challenges to deal with during our move.

Regardless, we decided to move down to Belize from Victoria, BC to manage The Inn at Roberts Grove and operate and expand Ocean’s Edge. We drove from Victoria because we wanted to have a car when we arrived and the trip took us 17 days, traveling through Washington State, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas before entering Mexico and heading south towards Belize, an adventure in and of itself.

In Mexico, we were stopped 9 times at gunpoint and asked for our paperwork. Fortunately, they like Canadians and we were quickly allowed to continue along our way.

Yim was smart enough to write out a list of everything we owned inside the Trooper in Spanish with english translations so when we were stopped, and the Policia asked us what was in the truck, she handed them a sheet of laminated paper listing everything we had. We had 60 CD’s and one Policia tried hard to tell us that we were only allowed 50. We think he wanted 10 of our CD’s but we played dumb and he let us go on our way.

In 2004, we sold the property, which is a long, long story but to this day, the houses at Ocean’s Edge remain our design and the landscaping of the property was entirely our vision.

Yim and I planted all the trees ourselves, by hand, that the visitors to this property currently enjoy and hired Julio, who is still maintaining the property 20 years later. The property may have been maintained by the new owners but we had the vision and we enjoyed ourselves for the years we were there. Walking the beach, gathering little coconuts sprouting palm trees and enjoying the life we had while we were there. We had a wheelbarrow and we would wheel it down the beach and come home with 20 sprouted Coconut Palms and stick them in the sand…

It was the beginning of our storyline.

Below is a portfolio of photos that show the initial stages of the development and a few of the later stages. I’m glad I got to do this in my lifetime…