I paid for something in San Pedro in October and the change came back wrong.

Not wrong like somebody shorted me. Wrong like the face looking up at me out my own hand wasn’t the face that was there the last time I stood in that same spot buying the same thing.

The Queen was gone.

Now, you go searching for Belize right now, and you gonna find the same two articles written four hundred different ways. One of them is telling you how to do Belize on a budget. The other one is telling you how to do Belize like you got it. Balling on a budget, or baller status. Pick a lane.

I’m gonna tell you something. Every single time we went, we went balling. Three trips, three times, and we ain’t never went over there pinching. So I could write that article. That ain’t the article.

Because here’s what both of them got in common: they only talking about your money. Neither one is telling you what’s actually changing on that island while you standing on it.

Three trips to San Pedro in three years. October 2024, March 2025, October 2026. Same island. Same water. And three things changed right in front of me that I ain’t seen one travel blog mention yet.

Let’s get it in.

1. The money changed, and it ain’t a small thing

For the longest, Belize money had Queen Elizabeth on it. You in an independent country, in the Caribbean, in 2024, handing a man a bill with the Queen of England on the front of it.

That’s over.

The Central Bank unveiled a whole new series in January 2025, and the new notes went into circulation August 4th, 2025. The Queen came off. Two Belizean men went on.

George Cadle Price is on the $5, the $20 and the $100. He was the first Prime Minister. He’s the man who walked Belize to independence in 1981. They call him the Father of the Nation and that ain’t a nickname somebody made up for a brochure.

Philip Goldson is on the $2, the $10 and the $50. Here’s the part that got me. Goldson was a founding member of both major political parties, and I had to read that twice. Think about what that means. Whichever way the country swings, he’s in the room. You don’t get on the money for picking a side. You get on it for building the thing everybody argues inside of.

Now, the old bills still spend. Both sets circulating right now, still legal tender, and the value ain’t moved, two Belize dollars to one US dollar, same as it ever was. So this ain’t a money problem for you. You ain’t gotta do nothing different.

But think about what you holding.

I went in March 2025 and the Queen was in my pocket. I went back in October 2026 and two Black and brown men who built that country was in my pocket instead. I watched that flip across my own trips. That ain’t something I read. That’s something I was holding.

And look at the flag while you over there. Center of it, there’s a coat of arms, adopted the same year they got independent, 1981. Two woodcutters standing on either side of a shield, one of African descent, one Mestizo, one holding an axe, one holding a paddle, big mahogany tree growing up behind them. The motto underneath says Sub Umbra Floreo. Under the shade, I flourish.

Two different men holding up the same country. That been on the flag the whole time. It just took till 2025 for the money to catch up.

You can go somewhere and spend money. Or you can go somewhere and understand what the money means. Two different trips, same plane ticket.

That’s what I mean when I say nobody talking about this. Somebody could’ve told you that. Nobody did.

2. The speed bumps got bigger, and there’s a reason

Golf carts is the whole transportation situation on Ambergris Caye. Not rental cars, not rideshare, golf carts. You get one, you drive it, that’s how you move.

And the first trip, the speed bumps was about a foot, just little ones you ain’t even feel. By 2026 some of them is closer to two feet and they taller. You feel every one of them.

Some folks complain about that. I ain’t one of them.

People have died out there on those carts. A tourist was killed on Secret Beach Road in December 2024. A visitor died on First Street in May 2025. That’s real and it’s recent and that’s two that made the news.

And this ain’t me guessing. In August 2026, two months before we landed, the San Pedro Town Council came out and announced a whole package of safety measures because accidents went up. More speed bumps on the newly paved roads. Stricter inspections on the carts. New helmet standards. More police checkpoints. The Traffic Supervisor said it plain, that most of what they seeing comes back to drinking and driving and unsecured helmets.

They been fighting this a minute too. Back in 2019 the Traffic Department started inspecting rental carts to catch people who had altered the speed limiters. Somebody out here modifying a golf cart. On an island. With pedestrians.

The posted limits is 10 miles per hour downtown and 15 everywhere else. Ten. You can jog faster than the legal limit in downtown San Pedro and people still out here trying to see what the cart’ll do.

So when I say make the bumps bigger, I mean it, and I’ll tell you exactly why. A sign asks you to slow down. A bump makes you. You can ignore a sign all day. You can’t ignore your spine.

Now I’ma be straight with you about one thing, because I ain’t gonna sell you a clean story. In that December 2024 crash, the report says the driver hit a bump and the passenger came off the cart, and they suspected he’d been drinking. So the bump wasn’t the hero in that one.

But read it again. The bump didn’t throw her. The speed threw her. The bump was just where the speed finally showed up and collected. If he been doing ten, that bump is a bump. At whatever he was doing, that bump is a launch ramp.

There’s different levels to it. The bump ain’t the danger. The bump is where the danger gets a receipt.

And keep the carbon monoxide detectors. I’m saying that out loud and I don’t care how boring it sounds next to the turquoise water pictures. You got small rooms, you got generators, you got equipment running, and a gas you can’t see and can’t smell. That detector cost almost nothing and it’s the only thing in that room that’ll wake you up. Every place you stay, look for one. If you don’t see one, ask.

That ain’t paranoid. That’s the same thing I been doing on commercial job sites for years. You check the thing that kills quiet first, then you enjoy yourself.

Some links below are affiliate links. No extra cost to you, and what comes back to me is pennies on the dollar. I only put up what I actually use.

And since we talking about carts and hospitals, here is the boring one that ain’t boring at all. Travel medical insurance for Belize costs less than one dinner on the island. Your regular plan from back home mostly stops at the water. A clinic visit on a Caribbean island is cash up front and you sort it out later.

I ain’t never had to use it. Three trips, not once. That is exactly why I keep buying it. You don’t buy it for the trip where everything goes right.

3. More people means more rules, and the rules is coming

Here’s the one I know is gonna rub somebody wrong.

2026, we taking the ferry, and I go to use the bathroom at the terminal. A dollar. Belize dollar, so really about fifty cent US, and there I am paying to use the bathroom. It wasn’t like that in 2024 and it wasn’t like that in 2025.

And I’ma be honest with you, I stood there a second. Not over the money, I had the dollar. I just wanted to know what a dollar get you.

I’ma tell you what it get you. A clean bathroom. And if you ever pulled off the highway in America and walked into a gas station restroom, you know good and well that’s worth more than fifty cent. I paid it, I used it, and I came out thinking they might be onto something over there.

But that’s not the point. The point is that’s a thing that didn’t used to exist, and now it does, and it showed up quiet, and ain’t nobody warn you.

That’s not the only one either. The Belize Port Authority raised the water taxi passenger fee to $3.00 effective January 1st, 2025. Operators got a US$1.50 port fee per leg sitting in the ticket price now, plus a booking fee on top. It’s little charges stacking up in places that used to just be free.

Now why is this happening? Because more people coming. That’s it. That’s the whole mechanism.

When a place gets discovered, the place gotta start managing the people. Managing people costs money. So you get fees, you get rules, you get procedures, you get a man at a door where there used to be no man and no door.

And I’m not mad at it. Somebody gotta clean that bathroom and somebody gotta get paid to do it. I’m saying it’s change, and change is the thing travel writing never covers, because travel writing is written by people who went one time.

You go one time, everything is just how it is. You go three times, you start to see the island moving.

The part that ain’t on nobody’s list

We also saw the biggest cemetery I ever seen in my life. Both sides of the street, and they stacking them, burying up instead of out, because there’s only so much island. I ain’t got a lesson for you about it. It just stayed with me.

But the thing I’ma actually remember happened on a chess board.

My mama came with us this trip.

Now me and Quita been stepping on that sand since the first time we went. Out there on the beach in the Caribbean, music going, recording it, putting it up on TikTok. And we can step. I want to be clear about that. I know what I’m doing out there.

But put anybody next to my mama and you find out real quick there’s different levels to this.

My mama is the real queen of stepping. And stepping ain’t stood still neither. They mixing animation in it now, all kind of different dance folded into it, and she knew all of it. So I’m standing there watching my mother take my wife somewhere me and Quita wasn’t gonna get to on our own.

Two birds, one stone. Mama got to teach it. Quita got took to another level.

And Quita was spent. I mean spent. My mama ran her so many times she was laying forward like it was a skit, like somebody wrote it. It was funny and we got all of it on video.

Me? I got up for a little bit. I ain’t go buck wild though. You know me, I did my little thug thizzle and got back behind that camera, and that’s exactly where I wanted to be.

Because here’s what I was really looking at. That’s Chicago stepping. On Belizean sand. My mother carried something out of Chicago and handed it to my wife in another country.

They gonna remember that forever. So am I.

So why go back three times?

People ask me that. Out of everywhere you could pick, why run the same island back three times.

Here’s my answer.

There’s a version of travel where you collecting countries. Get the picture, post the picture, go home, do it again somewhere else next year. That looks like something. That’s motion.

Then there’s going back to the same place enough times that you start noticing what moved. The money in your hand is different. The bumps in the road is taller. The bathroom cost a dollar now. You can’t see none of that on trip one. You gotta go back. That’s movement.

But there’s a third thing, and I ain’t understood it till I was standing there with a camera in my hand watching my mother teach my wife how to step.

You don’t just bring something back. You bring something with you.

Chicago Minded was never about Chicago. It’s a mindset. And a mindset ain’t got to stay where it started. It goes where you go, and if you doing it right, you hand it to somebody while you out there.

🏝️ Where to book your stay in San Pedro

There is no one right answer on this, it depends what matters to you on this particular trip. So here they are side by side with what each one is actually good at, and what each one costs you in convenience.

What I do, for whatever it is worth. I price it on two of the third party sites, then I go check the hotel direct. If direct is close, I book direct, because when something go sideways at eleven at night you want to be talking to a front desk and not a call center in another time zone. If direct is way higher, I book the third party and keep it moving.

If you going, go prepared. I put the whole pre-trip run down in the free San Pedro checklist: the paperwork, the money, getting from the airport out to the island, and the one government form that’s free that websites out here charging people for. Costs you nothing.

If you want the long version, the full Belize guide runs over six thousand words on everything from landing to leaving. And if this is your first time leaving the country at all, start with First Time Out The Country before you book anything.

Dig. Build. Grow. Even on vacation.