Staying in Touch By Email: Cyber Cafes

ABOVE: A Belize all-in-one-stop offers good Belizean food, ice-cold beers, Cyber Cafe, gift shop, telephone cards and a friendly chat with a local tour guide. The sign above the door says "Tikal Trip Tomorrow".

Your second option: Cyber Cafes. Instead of connecting your laptop to the telephone and calling home to access your ISP, you can just lug your laptop to the nearest Cyber Café and hook it up directly to the Internet.

As we noted earlier, computers are easy to get in Belize. Many Mom and Pop shops assemble them locally and the next trend has been Internet Cafes or Cyber Cafés. This phenomenon got started as a way for people without a computer to get Internet access. But is has evolved now to become a meeting place for locals and travelers, and as a resource to learn the basics of surfing the Internet or getting free computer support. At a Cyber Café you can just sit down and get on the Internet and check your email.

Even the smallest towns have at least one Cyber Café. So for the traveler who has brought along his or her trusted P.C. or Macintosh, its often easier to take it to the local Cyber Café and ask for it to be connected to the Internet and pay the hourly rate – usually a couple of bucks per hour. Most Cyber Cafes use satellite Internet access or DSL so your speeds should be pretty much what you are accustomed to at home. Ask before hand as some Cyber Cafes will not know how to hook you to their network. You will have better luck trying computer shops that also have Internet Access signs on them. All major towns have offices for the local telephone monopoly Belize Telecommunications Ltd. And all these offices have at least two computers available for public Internet access.

Most folks have accounts with Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or AOL and can access this from a web based form on any computer connected to the Internet. If you are using another ISP and normally connect via POP Mail, check their website before you travel. Most ISPs, even smaller ones, offer a web-based email access form so that you can pick up and send mail from any computer worldwide using your existing email account. Tip: Check your web based email access before you leave home to verify your username and password. If your ISP does not offer web access for your email, you can get an account at Mail2Web or Mail Start and use this to access virtually any email account through a web browser.

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