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. 

The Dread

I stared at the front wheel of GANNET2 buried deeply in the clay. Our winch rope had split. A gravel truck that had come to our rescue was sunk up to his axles in the clay. I was feeling defeated. “We get this fixed and keep going,” Layne said firmly as she handed me a glass of lemonade from the fridge. I have now had to face my dread of breakdowns on the PanAmerican Highway. 

I should have listened when she wondered if the sand was too soft. That failure to listen haunts me even as I write this. If only…the most useless words in the English language reverberate around my head.  If only.

We got stuck lunchtime Friday and we got out just before dark. By the time we got towed to Hattieville, south of Belize City it was pitch dark so not only were we driving in the dark, we were being towed down the Southern Highway in the dark. 

The lady in the orange T-shirt above, Greslin was calling the Ram dealer in Chetumal, Mexico to see if the had a radiator. In five days they said, $700US payment in advance. A radiator? Why a radiator? Because a Toyota 4Runner that tried to pull us out broke it’s hitch and launched the shackle into the front of GANNET2. Not only were we stuck, now we were broken. 

The radiator shop said the part was broken beyond repair. But there we were with a van stuck in clay with no radiator and a bunch of people helping and it was all my fault. My planned roadside lunch stop turned into a three ring circus and I was the clown. I felt like shit.

Kenny was hauling gravel and he stopped by to lend a hand. Four hours later the back hoe that had been loading all the trucks on the highway showed up and tugged him out. Four hours and he was still smiling.

Another gravel truck stopped to try to get him out and that failed. The second truck nearly got stuck too. Tim the Englishman who has married into Belize was the man who stopped by originally to help with his Kia SUV. That didn’t work and we ended up snapping the winch rope. Tim helped me splice the winch rope back together later at his home. At least that is fixed. 

Germaine, a law enforcement officer with Belize Port Authority had the four wheel drive Four Runner and he came close to getting us out till the hitch fitting snapped. I should have put my tie mat on the rope to suppress it in the event of a break,  but I forgot in the hassle of the circus. The fitting flew back and wrecked the radiator. I have endless reasons to blame myself. 

Tim the Englishman was a helicopter engineer with the British Army for eleven years. Of all his assignments around the world he liked Belize so eventually he came back, married Desiree and decided to dump the rat race and live off grid on fifty acres her father deeded to her. The radiator came out frighteningly easily. I had already dug in to the winch previously in Mexico with Marcus the other English aircraft engineer I’ve met on this trip..! So now we went behind the winch and took the radiator out on the spot hoping for a repair. 

Look at that lovely clean radiator as was. Oh well. Finally Hernandez showed up with the back hoe. Had we only waited for him patiently we’d be back on the road now. If only…

He got Kenny out in a flash, loaded him with some dirt so he could make one load of landfill and with $60US from me as a thank you off the red gravel truck drove. 

My turn. That’s Ronnie below who lives across the highway  

Germaine and Ronnie preparing my 30 foot strap for the back hoe. 

I told you it was a circus. What a moron I am sometimes. I failed to control this event. Completely. 

Hernandez lifted the front end of the van up out of the clay and walked me to the highway. Scariest ride I’ve ever taken. 

Tim towed me home to his cabin in the woods. Murder was not on his mind and we have a safe place to park. A radiator and an air conditioning condenser (a small radiator essentially) are being shipped by Amazon to E-Zone a freight forwarder in Miami. We hope they will make the Thursday flight to Belize City though when customs will release them we don’t know. The country shuts down Friday through Monday for Easter. Sigh.

I always dreaded the mechanical breakdown and how well I could deal with it. Now here we are living in the bush with a family of Jehovah’s Witnesses treating us with all the kindness you could imagine. And no, I’m not going to convert. I’m pretty sure. But I am seeing Belize from a very different angle and that is fascinating. More than I ever expected to know. I see a rental car in my future if they aren’t all bagged  for the Easter holiday already. I still like to drive. And happily for me so does Layne. 

Argentina or bust. 

People We Have Met

I had a revelation last year, and it changed how I think of myself. I feel at home among travelers, that is my tribe. I too hate the goodbyes but I really enjoy the intense bond that forms instantly when you meet kindred spirits on the road. It’s unlike any relationship you make. We have intense friendships still from twenty five years ago when we met while traveling by sail. 

Mike is American, Sophie is Brazilian and they travel with two children and a microphone in a Class C camper. Mike Fox is a correspondent for NPR’s The World reporting obviously on Latin America. He loves freelancing audio and video work, he’s very good at it and they travel in a giant happy family heap. Their resilience and joy amazes me. You think Mexico’s dangerous…? Still?  

Marcus Tuck working on my winch ground wire. An electrical engineer nine years on the road with his wife, a retired attorney fluent in Spanish, as fluent as he is in electro-mechanical fixes, they are the ideal overland couple. They e been all over the place in their Iveco expedition 4x4 but Marcus is happiest fixing things. It’s another way to travel. 

A nice German lady and child making a fuss of this Mexican dog who keeps following me around. Never did get to talk to her but she was very polite.  

Duwan and Greg from Atlanta. Dealing with the ultimate horror of a breakdown hard to fix in their Ford Transit van. We enjoyed them right away and shared lots of trips, deep discussions and bottles of Mezcal. 

This is Layne poking in our fridge. I think I uploaded this one by accident. Oh well, thank you Starlink. 

Here we are trying to help Greg and Duwan track down the repairs on their van. The transmission died in January and after it was rebuilt the mechanic discovered they needed an electrical controller for the gearbox. As of this writing it hasn’t yet arrived from the States. They are the poster children for resilience and patience and good cheer in the face of adversity. Three months renting an apartment at El Rancho RV park. 

That Mexican dog again just resting…

Ron and Rosemary from San Diego at Hierve El Agua outside Oaxaca. Travelers through and through but not in a van. There are lots of ways to skin a cat. We met them on the trail and we got each other instantly. 

Angelica describes herself in her limited English (but not as limited as she thinks) as a Mexican princess. She has 500 pairs of shoes at home outside Mexico City. She has five pairs only in the Promaster van she shares with her husband and two dogs. 

Omar her husband promised to take us into Mexico City when we get back from Argentina. Saying goodbye was a wrench. We’d known them a couple of weeks? 

Sitting around talking and drinking comes naturally to me on the road. I never hung out in bars in Key West but out here we make our own watering holes. Life stories appear out of the blue. 

Mexican van lifers are rare but we met a few at El Rancho so things are changing.  

Joss from Belgium was a roofing contractor. He fell off a roof into a sandpit and broke his spine 25 years ago on the only rock in the place. He’s had two heart attacks and a near death experience since then. We had lots in common. A really smart funny man.  He bought a sprinter chassis and designed and built his own camper with obviously a wheelchair lift. He had his wife Ellie, a fire cracker have travelled South and North America and keep their camper in Mexico when in Belgium for the summers. Think you have obstacles to fulfill your dreams? 

His van below. There was a second wheel chair user at El Rancho, a Canadian woman from British Columbia who had an accident at twenty.  She and her husband and dog travel in a twenty foot trailer and pick up. You’d be surprised how strong the desire is to move in some people. 

Rob and Mandy from Colorado practicing taking off. They’re going home this summer worse luck to put right the ideas they have discovered from experience that don’t work. The paddle boards are going in storage and the bicycles are going inside the van and so forth. Mandy works as a graphic designer on the road and next year they are going to South America. They’ll probably catch us up. I can’t wait. Bridging the generation gap is easy on the road. 

Have you ever met a cheerful Canadian lunatic? I’ve met two. This is Rob with his new toy-an instant camera. 

Rob and Nicole an outdoor couple from British Columbia. A great sense of humor and people we’d never meet in real life. I watched him tearing up tubes and bolts in his Sprinter as he cursed the Mercedes mechanic in Puebla who turned a routine service into a comedy of potentially expensive errors. His Sprinter is eleven years old and tired with 225,000 miles on the clock. It won’t go uphills and once -I can’t believe this- Nicole got out and pushed to get them out of an uphill jam. Hero of the campground! Because they are crazy they had been thinking of taking the tired van South but I believe they are going home to re-think that plan. You never know with them…

Then there was Lauryn and Tristan with jobs back home on Vancouver Island but taking a winter leave of absence to enjoy Mexico in their Sprinter, seen here outside the bathrooms at El Rancho. We had an impromptu get together and it started raining so this was the nearest dry spot. Do what you have to…Do not trust anything they say as they love to pull your leg. Lauryn made me crazy with worry while setting up the Starlink telling me I’d done everything wrong. 

The nice German lady letting us out of El Rancho. 

The guy with the beard is Magic. That’s what he calls himself. He’s Polish, lives in Canada and travels with his equally fierce wife and very forward daughter. He terrified me. I had no idea how I had offended him.  He lived in the distant family section of El Rancho but  every time I crossed his path he towered over me and glared as though I was shit on his shoe. His daughter would come up to me and start bizarre conversations as only a precocious five year old can. “Do you like the rain?” “How old is your dog?”and so forth and I lived in dread of him getting pissed off that I might be engaging with his child. I dodged and weaved like an overweight fighter pilot to avoid them. 

Finally my last day I took my courage in both hands and approached him and apologized for whatever offense I had caused and wished him well saying I would be gone in the morning. He looked puzzled as he towered over me. 

“I’m just anti social,” he said at last after measuring me up. “I don’t like people.” And strode off to the loo. He drives an expedition vehicle which had me questioning how his self re-invention was going. Not well apparently.  

Not everyone enjoys having my joy at being on the road inflicted on them but I’m a man with no deadlines or bosses or expectations and that makes me very happy.  

I crossed paths with Alex and pointed out his gorgeous California registered  truck camper was just like the one Steinbeck used when he wrote Travels With Charley. “Steinbeck?” He said. “Really? I had no idea.” I was about to feel annoyed at him for mocking my accent when I realized he really is English. He went to the boarding school next door to the one I went to so we were rugby rivals we came to find out. 

Mathilda his partner is also English and they bought the “impractical”

classic camper in California to drive to Argentina. They have limited time unlike us old farts but I hope we meet again. They went into Oaxaca and we didn’t see them again. Brilliant connection severed too soon. Life on the road. 

In Yax-Ha RV park in Chetumal we met Chema and Elena who met each other after they each ended long marriages.  They have been together a year and a half and are still finding their way, she an independent woman living on her ranch in Baja, he a businessman trying to retire from his clothing emporium in Morelia. 

Chemo’s  real name is Jose Maria and he is handy. He conveyed a cargo trailer into a camper with hot and cold running water, 50 gallons to feed his onboard shower with a kitchen and bedroom included. Elena was listening  when I said there are lots of ways to travel. Chemo is doing all the things he could never do running a business and  raising a family but she loves living on her ranch. Compromise and  time apart let’s everyone have a share of what they want. Full time van life overlanding is not a necessary requirement for dividing happiness on the road.  

Mario from Aguascalientes dropped by. He doesn’t pay to park but we hung out and chatted. He’s driving a self converted van and wants to get to Argentina. 

He’s 70 years old and has set aside a year to get to Tierra Del Fuego like us, only faster. It’s been really encouraging to us to meet so many New Mexican van lifers of all ages with their own ways of being on the road.  

Yax-Ha (clean water in Mayan) was our southernmost Mexican campsite and we missed it as we drove away. 

That bloody Mexican dog again. I’m going to have to adopt him. 

A small cross section of people whose photos I managed to get. Layne keeps notes on everyone just as we used to when traveling by boat. Names, vehicle, direction of travel and contact information. 

Above right to left, Lauryn and Tristan, Dan taking a picture, Sharon, Greg and Duwan eating Japanese in El Tule. As you do. No matter what you drive.