And a new type of sport that will soon be available in the country is ice skating. You've probably heard of Nancy Marin's plans to build a synthetic ice rink in Belize, and she's planning to launch that later this year along with her ostrich restaurant.
She had a soft opening of the restaurant that saw major success, so now she's ready to give the Belizean public something new to put on their plates. According to her, it's been a rocky journey so far, with a lot of trial and error, including losing 16 eggs earlier this year.
Today, she told us more.
Nancy Marin, Ostrich Farmer
"We were very excited, we had four hatched, I wasn't exactly happy with the numbers because we got 20 eggs and out of the 20 eggs we only had four hatch but it's still a big news for us because we managed to hatch them in the humidity. During the time that they hatch was a lot of humidity two months ago and a lot of heat and so we had to take them into fully air conditioned room, I had to move the incubators to my home so that we could have this success but they're two months old now and within the next couple of weeks, you all will be able to have a viewing."
Courtney Menzies:
"What are the factors that led to the other 16 not hatching, is it the humidity?"
Nancy Marin, Ostrich Farmer
"You know we made a lot of mistakes and the first one was that they did start laying really early like I had told you guys back then. We didn't expect to get our first egg in late January, it was supposed to be closer to like March, April. And so the eggs were not fertile. The first maybe ten we got were not fertile, we had to eat those, big sacrifice. And then I started to realize the humidity was affecting them because then we had one or two that the embryo died in the egg and so that's why I decided intuitively to just move the whole set up into my house where I could have an enclosed room where we could seal off and fully air condition 24 hours to be able to fight the humidity."
"We do have the building up already where we're going to AC the building that we have at the farm, it's going to be expensive but I'm very happy it can be done and we've ironed out the kinks."
"We had to butcher the first ostrich because the male kicked the youngest female in its leg and broke its leg so we had to do an emergency butchering then I figured, let's do a soft opening so that Belizeans can taste the meat and we could also get feedback to see whether it would be culturally acceptable or not and I can tell you from everybody that tried it, only one person said it tasted like liver and he didn't like liver, so that was literally the only negative we got, everybody else loved it, they compared it to beef, it taste just like beef as far as I'm concerned but we sold 175 pounds in one week."
Both the restaurant and the synthetic ice rink are supposed to be open in October.
