No Man’s Land

Belize just doesn’t want to cooperate. The hell with it; I decided to have coffee and cake instead. 

I had picked up a Toyota 4Runner earlier in the day at the AQ car rental company in Ladyville, a suburb of Belize City, and we decided to take a forty minute drive to check out Belmopan, the inland capital of Belize. 

I was given an extensive walk through of the car which rates as high clearance and is good for dirt roads so we can visit isolated Mayan ruins.

There is nothing inexpensive in Belize and a $40 a day car became a $500 a week rental with “fees and taxes…” Our Visa card covers insurance -Layne checked - so that saved us a fair chunk. I was also told we can’t drive the coastal highway from Belize City to Dangriga which is under construction and dangerous. Fair enough we must drive through Belmopan to reach the coast. Belizean transactions  are convoluted, so bend over and enjoy. 

Layne the navigator found a first stopping point called the Art Box, a dust catcher store filled with souvenirs and stuff. And, it turns out really nice loos. Suddenly that’s an issue now we are, temporarily, no longer traveling with our own toilet.  

I noticed two things as I walked Rusty in front of the Art Box. One was that there was almost no traffic on the Western Highway and two there was a flag of Taiwan in front of the store. 

“If we want to stop for a coffee they have a really nice place to sit and enjoy one,” she said noting the store sells expensive art work. We got in the 4Runner and left toward Belmopan.

The joke was on us. We got to the roundabout which serves as the junction to follow the Western Highway to Guatemala an hour away or to turn left into downtown Belmopan. Traffic was at a standstill. Police were directing cars into Belmopan from the west but the road we were on was closed.  We waited ten minutes and then followed the example of a motorcycle in front of us, we simply turned back. 

Then we saw the police roadblock just past the Art Box. We were stuck so we pulled into the parking lot and went inside to enjoy a coffee a little sooner than we had ever anticipated. Pretty soon people stuck in their cars abandoned them at the road block and came in from the 90 degree afternoon for refreshment and toilets, a stream of pedestrian refugees. 

A tall heavyset red faced Englishman came in for a soda for himself and two bottles of water for his overheating car. He was mad, announcing loudly “This mess won’t make the President of Taiwan popular.” He told us he has lived in Belize 15 years and has never seen a traffic jam - which we thought was more positive than negative but he wasn’t in the mood. “I live a hundred yards down the road and the police won’t let me go home and my car’s overheating.”  He was fit to tie. Then the truck horns started. The khaki uniformed figures stood their ground on the hill at the their checkpoint and from behind them came wave after wave of protest air horn burps, as ineffective as waves on a rock. We ate our delicious moist carrot cake. Below you see some normal heavy traffic on the Western Highway well north of Belmopan on a Monday afternoon. 

Eventually of course we got to Belmopan in the fullness of time and drove around a bit before shipping for some chicken for our hosts and taking a look around for ourselves. We found some of the most foul unappetizing food markets I have ever seen. Layne refused to go in by herself on the grounds she didn’t feel safe. Yes, the sane woman who fearlessly tours Mexican cities and markets without a care in the world. There is a dour, angry air that hangs over the people loitering around the markets, some waiting for buses after a long day at work with shopping bags to carry, others with nothing better to do, eyeing up the mincing middle class whites coming in to be plucked. These places creeped me out just as much. 

Inside we found filth and trash mixed in with packaged goods dumped in the aisles. I was too intimidated to take pictures. Above the frozen chicken in one store was a pile of rotting white bread, still packaged but turning yellow green and black as it sat. I was so revolted I was ready to throw up and I’m the man that empties our van’s toilet without a second thought. We did the best we could in the least awful market though I later had to ask Tim where the elites must shop because these stores are too much for me. Belmopan is a pit even though it calls itself the garden city. 

We drove around trying to take some pictures to give you a feel for the place. I can’t say it was successful but we tried. 

Belmopan was founded by the British as the new capital of British Honduras after hurricane Hattie wrecked 75 percent of Belize City, the old capital on the coast, itself a city with a fearsome reputation today. With cause, but that will be another post. 

Belmopan is built on an inland plain named for the two nearby rivers, the Belize and the Mopan.  It has all the soul and quirk of a planned community laid out, not maintained then wrecked by inertia, inefficiency and incompetence and indifference. 

There are heavy government buildings hewn out of hurricane proof cement, moldering in the tropical damp. Sidewalks are rare and random, stores look like afterthoughts and the city is about as warm and welcoming as any dystopian town might be expected to be. Take a look. 

“In the shade I bloom” is the national motto. 

Note the Taiwanese flags flying from Chinese owned businesses to honor the president’s visit. Her country invests in Belize to win some small international recognition but it’s clear the aid isn’t being invested by whoever pockets it. 

I only talk here in terms of US dollars so when you see a career boosting job earning $7 that means $3.5 US as the Belize is pegged at two to one. That equals an hour’s labor for half a gallon of gas. That’s advertised on the billboard as an hourly wage worth getting trained to achieve. Answer phones for half a gallon of gas an hour and your problems are solved. 

And if your car has no license plate- no problem. 

We filled three quarters of a tank for $95 (US) and if the car in front of us had no license plate that’s no problem either, rather it appears to be the norm. Gas stations advertise no prices so if there are deals we don’t know where they were.

The whole country is a monopoly mostly owned by Bowen and Bowen (look them up if you care to) who keep out foreign beers and only sell their Beliken Beer products (no Mexican beers!) and Coca Cola (no Pepsi in Belize!). Mennonites known to many embittered Belizeans as Money-nites control agriculture and run their own communities with their own rules. You don’t see much small scale farming in Belize unlike Mexico. 

If you have social security in Belize the green tower is your source of strength. The British army is still in Belize to protect the country from the threats from Guatemala who is laying claim to Belize through the International Court of Justice. Britain reneged on an 1859 treaty to build a road to the town of Livingstone on Guatemala’s Caribbean coast, therefore Guatemala says it’s owed Belize. No dice say the Belizeans. The lawyers are presenting their cases. 

Belize prides itself on being multicultural and you can count Black Caribbeans (Garifuna), Latin Americans, a few Europeans and East Asians into the 400,000 people who live there. I was sitting at a table in a restaurant and one next door table was speaking Low German while the other one was speaking Spanish. 

To illustrate the multiculturalism we had a pretty good Indian lunch served with glacial slowness in Belmopan, lamb Rogan Josh…

…vegetable biryani with naan and both were excellent. 

Rusty was so perfectly behaved the server had no idea he was there and freaked when she saw him. I could never live in a country where people loath dogs convinced they are all rabid terrorists.  

I said to Layne how much I enjoy not eating Mexican food. Not because I don’t like it but in Belize you have the opportunity to go beyond one national cuisine. 

This is downtown Belmopan, the central market overflow. 

To me it looked like a refugee camp. Layne separated and went her own way which surprised me and worried me a bit but I had Rusty leashed and figured she’d be okay. 

Two Belizeans walked by, youngsters in their twenties and he said to his date “fat dog” in Spanish. That’s because I feed him every day and love him I said, also in Spanish. They looked away and pretended I didn’t exist. I guess most “white boys” as we are known rather peculiarly, don’t speak Spanish in this multicultural paradise. 

I got a picture in one of the supermarkets of the cause of all our traffic trouble chatting with Belizean lawmakers. Education in Belize statistically is sub par but on the ground it looks horrible.  I got used to seeing crocodiles of school kids in neat uniforms in Mexico but the schools here look desolate. 

I don’t see fire stations, rural health clinics or hospitals but the country claims to have a network of rural health clinics. We see bush fires burning as this is dry season and the tactic is to let them burn themselves out.

If I had had my motorcycle accident here I’d be dead though most likely that would have been the outcome in much of Mexico. I am acutely aware of that privilege. 

A bus stop below. Local initiative seen everywhere thanks to zero public government works. 

I wish I weren’t negative about Belize and as hard as this may sound it has nothing to do with our breakdown. On the contrary I have met outstanding Belizeans whose friendship I shall treasure. But as an institution this country is corrupt and is a cruel facsimile of a functioning democracy. It’s easy for us: we swoop in we observe, we criticize and we leave. No problem. 

It’s for the Belizeans I wish things were better. Americans fly into the tiny islands, hang out in a resort, go diving on the magnificent reef which we sailed in 2000, but never give a thought to the mainland. The place where the minimum wage is $20 US per day and with an economy pegged to the dollar everything costs more than in neighboring countries. And yet where Desiree makes the best tortillas we’ve ever tasted. Layne is working on duplicating them.