I’m losing track of time, a not uncommon feature of life in retirement. Today is Friday and we are getting ready to take the shuttle to the hotel owned by the same family that owns El Gran Mestizo resort. Hotel de la Fuente is in downtown Orange Walk where we are offered a free breakfast, included in the cost of our van parked on the resort grounds. We pay $35 a night to park, a lot by our standards but I don’t know how much a room is in this expensive country.
There is no electrical hookup and no sewer dump but there are sparkling clean fully equipped toilets just steps away. The New River runs past the property and Rusty and I have just walked it. It reminds me of a motorcycle trip I took in 1979 when I was in West Africa and a similar resort took pity on me and let me stay the night at half price. I didn’t have a Key West City Pension in those days.
I saw giraffes grazing and hippos bathing in the African sunset in northern Cameroon and this morning I watched the mist rise off the cooler waters of the river, no hippos in sight, but I was suddenly 21 years old again sleeping in a tent by the side of the African Highway.
There’s a house on the street outside El Gran Mestizo resort and there are two loose dogs and several chained ones. Better that I suppose grumpily than abandoned and starving. Their cacophony when they see Rusty keeps him firmly on the property on his walks with me.
Yesterday Layne took a tour on the New River to the Lamanai Mayan Ruins and what started as a small group from the resort turned into a packed boat filled with 40 people.
Her guide at Lamanai said that was nothing even though she felt crowded. Imagine when a cruise ship load of visitors show up on a dozen buses…
I had to stay behind not only to look after Rusty during her six hour excursion but also to try to solve the slight right pulling steering. I took a Tope at speed and I think I knocked out my freshly set alignment. The van at Caribbean Tire was too tall for the equipment. Sigh. We’re going to check the shop in Belize City today and hope for the best.
I had a chat with a guy at the tire shop while I waited. He grew up in Tampa but decided to come back to his country of birth as he couldn’t stand the pace of life in the US. He has some land, doesn’t pay rent and has a son and grandson in NewYork City. Don’t understand him he said, he’s covered in tattoos. There is one thing he misses: Burger King fish burgers. Every time his mother goes to Florida she buys some at the airport and brings them home to him. “They don’t taste the same,” he said sadly. “Nothing does.”
