Six days ago, we moved from the wintery Blue Mountains outside of Sydney, Australia to a small Garifuna village, Seine Bight, in Placencia – a southern peninsula of Belize (formerly British Honduras). Within 20 hours we had moved from virtually alpine weather to tropical humidity and thunderstorms and an imminent rainy season.

When I say alpine, it was so cold our lips were cracking and my hands were almost bleeding from cleaning our Katoomba house. Aching bones from the cold.

We used Australian pet shipping company Jetpets to transport our four pets – a miniature dachshund and three cats – from Sydney to Los Angeles, to Houston and then to Belize. The cargo guys from United got the details wrong and we had to get the animals from Belmopan and then pay some "made-up on the spot" import duty on our pets for the local bureaucrats. The most expensive part of our relocation was pet shipping and getting a container of our stuff (mostly books and musical instruments and some clothes) shipped from Sydney to Belize. My husband joked that our cat Sabrina below, being a true Australian, looking a bit dishevelled at LAX, may have had too many of the free drinks (catnip) on the plane.

Jetpets had never moved animals from Sydney to Belize which kind of indicates what a random move this was. I don’t think Belize is the most obvious place for Australians to relocate to. Jetpets didn't know what procedures were involved. I organised the import permits for my four animals: a miniature dachshund and three cats and their vaccinations for rabies and so on.

Usually when we travel to the United States there are invariably Australians around. But in this part of Central America I haven’t met a single Australian so far. The expats we have met are mostly American and some English and a lot of retirees.

Why Belize?

We had visited Belize earlier in the year and liked the simplicity of the country and the people and the beauty of the Caribbean beaches, so different from the surfing beaches of Sydney. Its an English speaking country so easy to negotiate. The population is small - about 350,000. Cost of living is quite cheap in terms of rental however import duties are high and you can only get basic groceries here but lots of fresh organic produce and seafood.

We are digital nomads so technically we can work anywhere in the world as long as we follow the local rules and regulations and pay appropriate taxes, which we do. We wanted a change. A big change. There is a brittleness to Australian society possibly arising from our convict origins and the harshness of the climate and more specifically the political climate which has shifted radically to the right in the last decade. Australians present as easy-going and friendly and this is generally the case however we were seeing more and more of a police state emerging. Australia is supposedly a multi-cultural society yet this present Government is basically interning political refugees on Manus Island in unforgiving conditions.

Our Garifuna Neighbours

We met one of our neighbours today in our little village along with his three delightful children and their new kitty, Grace.

We have only been here not quite a week and we are still finding our feet here.

Moving to a developing country has to be done with some caution. Even though we did buy a Green Jeep online before we arrived which we picked up from the International Airport. And that turned out okay, so far.

There are pros and cons to the drastic move we made. There are numerous power and water outages - which is a bugger, particularly if you work online - so we might need to get a generator. There are social problems here arising from the nature of this developing country, corruption, high rates of alcoholism, unemployment amongst the locals and possibly expats, a significant murder rate and crime. The shops here are pretty basic - think grocery shopping in the 1950s. There is no manufacturing industry here so imported goods are expensive. I will have to drive to Mexico to get good sulphate free shampoo, for example. A lot of my emails bounce unless I use a VPN as my friends probably think I am a Nigerian scammer because of the Belizean IP address. The telco here is rubbish - international calls are very expensive, but the local Internet at our home is as fast as Australia (which isn't fast thanks to the current incompetent Government and the National Broadband Network NBN).

In the meantime one of the best things we did was simply decluttering - we live in a smaller house with less stuff that we don't need. I also felt my anxiety melt away even though this was a very scary move.

So if we don't get murdered in the next week for our minimal possessions, I will write another post, otherwise #deathinparadise

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