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Home Countries Belize

Simple Escape: The Back-To-Basics Lifestyle In Cayo, Belize

For Me, This Beautiful, Welcoming Place Is Unadulterated Escape

Kathleen Peddicord by Kathleen Peddicord
Jun 21, 2020
in Belize, Lifestyle
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farmers market in belize

Image Source: iStock/Roijoy

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Lief and I have been in Paris since December. We came for the holidays then were caught in the lockdown.

We’re not complaining. The City of Light is one of our favorite places on Earth and not a bad place to hang out for an extended time, even under quarantine.

Still, seven months is the longest either of us can remember spending in one place in a long while. We’re ready for a change of scenery. Maybe you feel the same way.

I’ve been feeding my wanderlust these past many weeks of confinement by day-dreaming about other places in the world I most like to be… including and especially Cayo, Belize.

For me, Cayo is unadulterated escape.

Whenever I’ve been able to organize my schedule to allow time in this beautiful, welcoming, and quirky little corner of the world, the reward has been a sensation of freedom that I’ve known nowhere else.

In Cayo, the burdens and concerns of the rest of the world feel far away and unimportant.

As friend and longtime Belize expat Mick Fleming put it when I spoke with him, “We watch the news here each evening, and we know what’s going on out there.

“It’s not that we’ve got our heads stuck in the sand. It’s that we choose a different reality. This life, here in the Cayo of Belize, this is the reality we choose to make.”

In Cayo, it doesn’t take long for any other reality you’ve brought with you to fade.

In this frontier land of rivers and rain forest, your mind and your body are occupied with challenge and discovery from sunup until you fall exhausted into your bed each evening.

Belize’s Cayo District remains a place where a man (or a woman) can stake a claim and carve out a simple but rich and rewarding life. The older I get… and the crazier the world seems to get… the more I like the sound of that.

To reach Cayo, you travel the Western Highway from Belize City. The view all around is of fields and pastures, trees and jungle, rivers and livestock…

Here and there a small house of concrete block or timber, in the distance the outline of the Maya Mountains. The land in Cayo is fertile. This is Belize’s breadbasket. Farmers grow corn and sugarcane, watermelons and citrus.

You share the road with Mennonites driving horse-drawn carts and children walking home from school. Everyone going about his or her business…

Here, in this land of escape, life revolves around the land and values independence above all else.

To be truly independent in today’s world, you need to be energy-independent.

That’s part of what Cayo offers, too—a chance to take yourself off the grid. This doesn’t have to mean living a backward or burdened existence. Thanks to 21st-century technology, the self-sufficient life can also be comfortable, even fully appointed.

And it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You could establish a fully off-grid homestead with rain catchment and a stable of animals… or you could plant a kitchen garden… even on the wall of your kitchen.

That is to say, you don’t have to be a mountain man or a pioneer to start. You don’t even need much space to achieve a real level of independence.

And, while Cayo, Belize, resonates with me as a top choice for where to think about embracing a self-sufficient lifestyle, you can pursue these strategies anywhere in the world that sparks your imagination.

Kathleen Peddicord

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Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord

Kathleen Peddicord has covered the live, retire, and do business overseas beat for more than 30 years and is considered the world's foremost authority on these subjects. She has traveled to more than 75 countries, invested in real estate in 21, established businesses in 7, renovated historic properties in 6, and educated her children in 4.

Kathleen has moved children, staff, enterprises, household goods, and pets across three continents, from the East Coast of the United States to Waterford, Ireland... then to Paris, France... next to Panama City, where she has based her Live and Invest Overseas business. Most recently, Kathleen and her husband Lief Simon are dividing their time between Panama and Paris.

Kathleen was a partner with Agora Publishing’s International Living group for 23 years. In that capacity, she opened her first office overseas, in Waterford, Ireland, where she managed a staff of up to 30 employees for more than 10 years. Kathleen also opened, staffed, and operated International Living publishing and real estate marketing offices in Panama City, Panama; Granada, Nicaragua; Roatan, Honduras; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Quito, Ecuador; and Paris, France.

Kathleen moved on from her role with Agora in 2007 and launched her Live and Invest Overseas group in 2008. In the years since, she has built Live and Invest Overseas into a successful, recognized, and respected multi-million-dollar business that employs a staff of 35 in Panama City and dozens of writers and other resources around the world.

Kathleen has been quoted by The New York Times, Money magazine, MSNBC, Yahoo Finance, the AARP, and beyond. She has appeared often on radio and television (including Bloomberg and CNBC) and speaks regularly on topics to do with living, retiring, investing, and doing business around the world.

In addition to her own daily e-letter, the Overseas Opportunity Letter, with a circulation of more than 300,000 readers, Kathleen writes regularly for U.S. News & World Report and Forbes.

Her newest book, "How to Retire Overseas: Everything You Need to Know to Live Well (for Less) Abroad," published by Penguin Random House, is the culmination of decades of personal experience living and investing around the world.

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