Days 7 & 8 - Belize Rules the Universe

So, let me tell you: If you're ever travelling abroad, or hacking your way through Third World jungles, or whatnot, I definitely recommend calling someone at home at some point. You'll be amazed to find how calming and strengthening it is merely to be reassured that you still have a life to return to back in the world.

After spending several hours of entire frustration trying to hack the Cibercafe (sic) in Pelanque, our first night there, I felt I had mastered the setup. So, on our second and last night, I was leisurely uploading our last installment. Little did I know (not having, um, read the door) they closed at 9:30–and their dial-on-demain ISDN line goes down like clockwork at the same time. So, I was in the middle of changing some filenames (and thinking about what to put in the e-mail announcement) when my connection to the outside world went down like Monica L. at the first strains of Hail to the Chief. This left me a bit in the lurch. Short higher tech options, I resorted to telephony, and dear-heart Elizabeth (the current flame), logged in on my behalf and snatched &c. from the jaws of &c. (This should explain the unusual provenance of the last announcement mail. As for the (even odder) mail before that, I can only disclaim that after two hours of battling to upload stuff, I was way too tired and frustrated to try to find the "identity" menu in Microsoft Exchange–in Spanish–and so I just posted using the identity of whatever bozo had been sitting there last.)

As I walked Elizabeth through the necessary steps, I realized that I had not thought about the fact that I would have to show her how to log in to fuchs.stanford.edu (an aging Sun SPARC 5), and how to change a few file names. As it turns out, however, while this redoubtable chick spends her days building e-commerce web sites which are generally more complex than most stuff I touch, still she does it all under Windows NT. Can she possibly get along with a hardcore Unix geek? This could be humanity's next great source of man/woman trouble–now that religion is dead (and perhaps even after money problems (i.e. scarcity) have gone the way of the dodo). It is, of course, always something.

Pulling out of Palenque at 6:30am, we pass a soldier who smiles and waves (a first). This one actually looks more like a U.S. soldier (cute, clean-shaven, stolid in a teddy bearish kind of way) than his Mexican military breathren (hairy, scowling, menacing). After that, we pass a checkpoint where a totally unarmed guy merely asks us a couple of questions (including: "Do you have any food... chicken, pork?" Fuchs: "Nope, I'm a vegetarian, you've got the wrong car.") Happily, militarism seems to be declining as we move further from the U.S. border.

On the road, Sara and I continue to grapple with the intractable vagaries of our trip schedule. There's just no good way to do everything. As we try to juggle our priorities, we remind ourselves of what Robert Pirsig related as the "Values Trap," which is personified in the form of the Indonesian monkey trap: Trapper makes a precisely-sized hole in a coconut; chains the coconut to the ground; puts some rice in. Monkey comes along, slips his hand into the coconut, grabs some rice. At that point, his fist is too big to get out of the hole in the coconut. At this moment, the monkey is caught in the value trap of not stepping back and reevaluting the importance he places on that rice, in light of the relative importance of his life (which he is about to lose). Sara and I are interested in learning from the monkey, and not getting ourselves killed or detained, so that we might not miss sunrise from Pyramid IV at Tikal, or some such thing.

We also discuss how much time and effort I'm putting into keeping up with note-taking, writing, photo-manipulation, and uploading. That amount is probably "way too much." However, I am cognizant of the fact that I am creating something which will be a comfort to me for the next fifty years. It's kind of sad to say, but this trip only lasts two weeks; while I will have this record of it for my whole life. Heck, I'll probably spend an additional two months, before I trundle of for Stygian shores, looking back at it, and showing it to other folks, and whatnot. In a certain (possibly unhealthy) sense, I am not taking a trip; I am storing a trip for endless future use. Of course, the more common (and probably correct) view is just that I am one of those folks who is better at recording and analyzing experience, than actually experiencing; to a certain unfortunate extent, the moment eludes me.

After a string of occasional dusty, impoverished, and wide spots in the road, we pass through a veritable metropolis–big enough to have its own roundabout (which I now know to be a traffic circle). Whenever I navigate one of these I can't help but think of a time before, when my English friend Ali told me, on the phone, that she had been thinking of me. "Have you, really?" I asked, delighted and hopeful. "Do you really think of me?" "Yes," she answered warmly.. "I think of you every time I go around a roundabout." "What's a roundabout?" I asked. "That's why I think of you," she smilingly replied, "because I know that you wouldn't know what one was." Ali knows exactly what I will fall for; I am defenseless at the feet of her (insufficiently merciful) wit. But, I am coming along with English terms and culture; I'll not (I hope) be so vulnerable next time.

The border crossing into Belize is ridiculously hot and humid; crowded and stressful; and terrifyingly officious. We have to cross back over the bridge three times to square all our paperwork. At every instant, me being who I am, I am certain that (if we are not arrested) we are going to be refused entry. I'm sure every snag will spiral into a catastrophe. I don't imagine that anyone there other than us is in any way incented to get the two of us over the border. The utter lack of any control over what happens to us is an agony; I abhor it. I will have to modify myself if I am to do this kind of thing on a regular basis. Sara notes my panic. I try to explain: "One of my highest goals," I tell her, thinking out loud, "and not to put too fine a point on it, is that of 'not being fucked with'. I want more than anything else to be left alone, particularly by agents of the state. At this border crossing, not only was I being fucked with at every turn (and had to smile at it), but there was the gnawing fear that I would do something wrong, be thrown in a Mexican jail, and thus lose the right not to be fucked with for all time." Sara seems to understand–though she does raise the good point that some behaviour modification on my part would be to my benefit. "I'll try," I concede. "But, really, I would just make a great Montanan." Roughly two seconds later, we pass our first crossroads in Belize: Montana Street. Mmm....

Inside Belize, we are almost instantly rewarded with a glimpse of the water. First impressions: Belize is like coastal Carolina–sandy, scrubby, yards that come right up to the road, palmetto(-ish) trees. The first town we pass through is Orange Walk. It is small and poor like the Mexican towns, but instantly, recognizably, importantly different. Where the poor rural Mexican bergs were like ghost towns with people still in them, Orange Walk is pretty, clean, functional. The fruits laid out in market are bright and colourful. The lawns are neat and manicured. The town is poor–but clean and orderly. It is obviously functioning; people obviously live here; and they appear to like living here enough to take pride in it. It strikes me as a world of difference.

God, it feels so good to not be at the border crossing! I'm already dreading the next one (Guatemala is said to be worse than Mexico), but for now, at any rate, we are again free to roam the countryside as we will. I realize that I will never feel stressed on a domestic trip again; in fact, I'm looking forward to the relaxation. If anything goes wrong, I'll simply pick up my phone, dial for a tow truck, dial 911. I'll ask anyone I see for directions, all in my mother tongue. Problems will be no problem.

We roll south on a seemingly endless straight road, and stop for Pepsis and directions at a backwater outpost along the way. The old gents out front raise their arms in unison to the right, toward Belice (Belize City). Shortly after we pull out again, the first notebook turns up dead; 60 3x5 pages of doctor's prescriptions. At the wheel, thinking about the emergency backup hotswap Mead notebook, I ask Sara if she can "do me a favor." "No," she declaims, "you used up all your favors when you made me run back across the bridge between Mexico and Belize." She'll probably get mileage out of that one for years to come.

Belize is coming off more civilized every minute. As we approach the ex-capitol (Hurricane Hattie wiped out coast-squatting Belize City in 1961, after which they discreetly moved the capitol inland to Belmopan, a city with much less character), we pass numerous elaborate pedestrian crosswalks, a "Tourist Police" vehicle, and a pair of totally unarmed soldiers in stylish black berets. We hit the water, and gaze out longingly at on one of the Cayes in the distance; this is as close as we're going to get for now. An incredibly pleasant and solicitous tourist police officer at the corner gives us stellar directions. He marvels at the digital camera, a routine we go through daily. [Let me tell you, we are getting a lot of mileage out of this US$330 device. No one we've run into has ever seen one before–and few have ever heard of one, or know what to make of it. When we snap folks' pictures, and show them the shot three seconds later, we may as well be Cortes and his men coming ashore on horseback. This our magic would come in handy again that night, catching the eye of the most important figure in San Ignacio.]

We're about to make the turn onto the western highway toward the region known as the Cayo, and its center–San Ignacio. At the corner, there is a police car, with a couple of officers conferring. I ask them to verify that this is really the western highway. A smiling, strapping officer comes to the window and reassures us–and then, much to our surprise, he asks if he could trouble us for a lift to the Belmopan crossroads. Normally, picking up a rider on this trip would be out of the question. But, this guy is a cop, he's extremely prepossessing, and Belmopan Crossroads is right on our way. As he swings into the back, we learn that his name is Gary Gentle–and that he is one total sweetheart of a man. We soak up his personality for the next hour:

Gary has been on the force for eleven years, and is part of an elite team known as the Dragon Unit, trained by U.S. special forces, and charged with anti-terrorism, drug interdiction–and backing up other police units as necessary. This last is what brings him to Belize City. He lives, and normally works, in Belmopan. But with the coming elections on the 7th, violence is expected in Belize City, and he and his fellows are there backing up the regular force. The United Democratic Party, or UDP, lost the last general elections (to the rival People's United Party, or PUP), and Gary believes "the UDP will do whatever it takes to stay in power; it is a scary world." He also thinks that the PUP is much more responsible to the people, and he strongly believes that they will win the election.

Gary has spent a lot of time in the U.S., including in New York City. He claims he had "U.S. fever" and had to go. He said that while it is different, and sometimes difficult, being an alien in someone else's country, still he was shown "a lot of love" by the people he met in the States. When he got back, he did some work showing tourists around Belize, and felt it was his way of saying thanks. And there's no question he'll be coming back, to Chicago most immediately. (I tried to explain to him how cold it often is in Chicago, to which he replied, "I prefer the cold to the heat. I've lived in heat all my life. You can always bundle up against the cold.") He's also very keen to hit California.

Gary grew up in a small village in the Cayo called Esperanza ("Hope"), where his father is a Pentecostal bishop, and he literally has too many siblings to keep track off (some by a previous marriage). Two of his brothers are in the Belize Defense Forces (BDF), one a major; two others are police officers as well. However, he describes himself as the black sheep of the family: where all his siblings literally go to church every night, and three times on Sunday, this wasn't for him; he much prefers to go to movies in the evenings.

Gary is buff. He doesn't drink, works out every day, boxes, and spars with a tae kwon do master. This is all in part because he takes his job seriously, and it's a tough job these days. Used to be, he says, when you showed up on the street just in the uniform, "you got the respect. Now, sometimes when you go up to someone and tell them they're under arrest, they say, 'You want me, go ahead and take me'." He's incredibly well-mannered and well-spoken, and carefully warns us of the few dangers we might face (slick roads, bad drug-using types in the Cayo). In short, he's precisely the sort of upright, strong, gentle, protector figure you would want at your back; if you were being mugged in an alley, and could pick anyone in the world to show up to your rescue.... Gary Gentle, indeed.

We drop him off at his door, and take a farewell picture. He gives us his home and work numbers, and tells us to call if we run into any trouble. He also gives us the name of his brother, who is, I think, actually the chief of the San Ignacio police. I give him a card and my home number, and tell him when he finally makes it to northern California.... As we start to pull out, Gary sheepishly comes back and knocks at the window, and hands us a small Belize Police badge as a souvenir. It is way too cool. And with that, we finish the short hop to San Ignacio. (You can drive the breadth of this country in under two hours.)

We roll into San Ignacio across a temporary bridge, in place while the regular one–the only suspension bridge in Belize, and mighty cool looking–is under repair. I throw the Trooper into four-wheel drive, and we naviagate the narrow and irregular streets, climbing out of town to Cahul Pech lodge where we are staying. The name refers both to a group of Mayan ruins nearby, and the group of cabanas in which we are staying. The view of the town from our front porch (for $70 Belize/night; the Belizean dollar is tied to the U.S. dollar at 2:1, most places take either) is fantastic, particularly in the next morning's mist. From just over the other side of our hill, Guatemala spreads out dizzyingly below.

We grab a quick shower and make tracks for Eva's Cafe in town. Eva's is THE place to be in San Ignacio, and in the Cayo, and is run by a garrulous ex-British serviceman name 'o Bob Jones. Bob has been running this joint, providing tourists with advice and assistance, and basically making himself a fixture for over 16 years. Every guide book we've seen mentions Bob, and one goes so far as to say, "While the Cayo has no government tourist or information office, it does have Eva's–where information on tours, activities, travel advisories and more is always available. The government should take a lesson." For a while now, Eva's has also had two Net terminals, ha ha, so we are very anxious to establish ourselves at Eva's, and maybe even meet the legendary Bob. (There was also an article on Eva's and Bob in the New York Times, I'm told less than two weeks ago (and dutifully reprinted in The Cayo Trader). You should be able to find it if you cruise to the site and search for "San Ignacio". If anyone happens to do so, and could save the text and images for me that would be great; I'd love to have it here.)

We locate and stroll into the joint in a wave of freshly showered and checked in good humour, stroll up to the bar, order a couple of cold ones, and sit down. The place is funky, interesting, cozy, warm, and all around cool. As we continue to the check the place out, we are immediately approached by another pair of young American tourists, also on their first night in San Ignacio.

Scott and Stacey are outgoing, interesting, extremely friendly, and from Houston. They are engaged to be married, and she is an MIS consultant with a Big 6 background, and he is getting his Masters in architecture. We all hit it off, and we happily invite them to join us at our table. The official beer of Belize is Belikin, and after a few of these in an awesome pub with sympathetic company, I am just about happy enough to pass out. (As my dear friend Mandy's Irish drinking buddy might put it: "Why would I want to be out hacking through the jungles... when I could be having a pint?") At any rate, we have so arrived. When Bob himself comes on over (attracted, natch, by my brandishing of the digital camera), we hit it off fairly well. From back behind the bar, Bob sends his sidekick out to invite us on the Pine Mountain Ridge Tour tomorrow. This is rumoured to involve 1000-foot falls, a big cave, swimming in a river, a rainforest hike, and other stuff out in the Cayo (all for $35 Belize); also, Scott and Stacey are already going–so how could we refuse? We would be going out to some remote areas, but, heck, if you can't trust Bob in these parts, whom could you possibly trust?

We order what are almost certainly the best veggie burritos I've ever had (following the sage advice of Liz back in Charlottesville to "eat the burritos first because they're yummy") to top off the beer, and stagger out onto the main street and back up the big hill, well content. The walk is mighty sweaty, though (and we're running out of clean clothes).

The next morning we rise early, and, watching our problems disappear one by one, we drop of all our dirty clothes for the $8 (Belize) laundry service. We stumble back down the hill to Eva's, and drink fantastic coffee while the group gears up, and orders bag lunches. We all pile into some sort of mini-bus with offroad tires and an, um, eclectic interior, and head off into the Cayo.

Joining me and Scott and Stacey and Sara on the tour are two Frenchmen name of Bertand and Pierre, and two other young Americans, Aly and Lauren. Turns out they both live in Berkeley, and graduated from Stanford. Aly and I find ourselves trading (detailed) cycling routes around the Bay Area, which seems kind of an odd thing to be doing sitting on a bus bouncing down a rutted road in the jungles of Belize.

First stop is the Thousand Foot Falls which, um, well, I will not contest the assertion. We stand on dangerous precipices, and a grand time is had by all. (There was also a stellar view of the rest of the valley to be had, just a quick trecherous hike to the side of the Falls overlook.)

Back onto the bus, and stop 2 was the hike; we set off through the rainforest (that's Stacey ahead), cavorted under some truly amazing flora, and hit the road when the van met us at the end of the trail.

Stop 3 was the Rio Frio cave, a truly knockout structure, like a 200-foot high train tunnel through the mountain. It's got its own sand bars, and magma formations, and treacherous slippery rocks. Scott and I virtually simultaneously quickdraw our (identical) mini-Mag lights, which we had each been carrying for God knows how long, waiting for this magical moment. We wander off lavishing praise on the institution of the Mag light, while the women smirk. We also slam down some lunch here.

On the bus, Aly and I talk some more: turns out he spent three months in Guatemala during undergrad, and has some good tips for us. He's visited Tikal (among many other places in the country), and tells us that it is just as spectacular as everyone says. He also coughs up a trivia tidbit: There's a shot of Tikal in Star Wars–some rebel fighters, near the beginning of the film, flying over one of Tikal's pyramids (as rebel base).

It further turns out that he and Lauren are thinking about a day trip to Tikal tomorrow. Unhesitatingly, we offer them a ride out (if they think they can catch a bus back). We made the offer because we like them and will be happy for the company–but on further reflection I realize that Aly's great Spanish (which could be very useful to getting us and the car across the border), as well as his knowledge of Tikal and the country in general, could be great boons to us. At last word, they are still deciding whether to stay or go–I did warn them about the possibility of delays in getting our permit to take the car across the border. I certainly hope they will end up joining us for the day.

I've decided to make an effort to kick the habit of putting execrable Spanish into these pieces. This is in part in honour of being in an English speaking country (it's mostly that, with a good bit of Spanish, and Mayan, here); but also because I was beginning to be able to hear my fluent friend Andrea cringing from 4000 miles away.

Our last stop is an hour-long dip in the cascading pools of the Rio-On. We strip down (or change in) to suits; hit the water; cavort under and around the waterfalls; towel off (more or less) and climb up higher for a better view and a farewell shot.

So, I have written all of this sipping Belikins–first from the balcony of the bar that overlooks our stand of cabanas, and, later, from our front porch, when the rains came (and were blowing on the laptop). I'm sorry this edition was so long, but as the person said, I haven't had time to make it shorter. And now, a short lounge in the hammock, and then we crawl back to Eva's with our tails between our legs for more beer, food, festivities, socializing–and hopefully uploading of content. Tomorrow: we go up against the Guatemalen border, and if we prevail, then it's Tikal for us–the ostensible crown jewel of this trip. I hope everyone is happy and safe wherever you are cavorting tonight; and wishing you "a lot of love" from chirping San Ignacio, TheCayo, Belize.