The Garden Of Eden

I thought I was back in Florida with all those pine trees.

I was wishing we had GANNET2 when we pulled up in our rental 4Runner and met the owner, a young Belizean called Phil. 

Go check out the river he said so we did, skirting a Belizean RV parked in space number one.

We didn’t walk to the bottom of the falls but I took a dip in the pool at the top. So did Rusty, he loved it. 

It was a ninety degree day even at 1700 feet altitude. 

When he enjoys a walk he licks my face and yesterday he let me know this was the best place we’ve been in a while. 

He wasn’t wrong. 

I didn’t want to leave. 

Phil’s dog Turbo fell in love with Rusty and they ran together. It was idyllic and once GANNET2 is back on her feet we’ll come and spend a few nights here. 

$15US per person per night, hammock, tiki hut, fire ring and water faucet included with bathrooms and showers available.  

In this vast expanse there are only five spaces so privacy is guaranteed. 

The road out here from San Ignacio used to be a rough dirt track but they have built a paved freeway along the hilltop ridges. The idea apparently is to continue the paved road all the way to Caracol, the vast Mayan ruin complex twenty miles deeper into the woods on the Guatemalan border. We plan to check that out Saturday. 

For anyone nostalgic for the old dirt track the mile long drive to the campground off the main road is still a sandy track, reminiscent of what you might see in a national forest in Florida or the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. 

The road from San Ignacio is lovely especially for someone like me who barely tolerates dirt roads but has never  reveled in it, and that was  even before we got stuck.

And guess what? We once again met the peripatetic Mario, the 70 year old Mexican vanlifer from Aguascalientes. We exchanged updates since we last saw each other in Orange Walk and promised to meet again on the road as we are both going south. 

We had left Tim and Desiree’s place (marked with a pink spot on the map above) later than planned and decided to go check out the Western Highway to San Ignacio as a closer destination than the beach. I had been expecting a steep mountain climb but San Ignacio, just nine miles (15kms) from Guatemala is at a mere 300 feet above sea level. 

On the way we stopped to pick up some “Mexican style” tacos from two nice ladies cooking roadside. They spoke English but their setup and their food was so reminiscent of Mexico and we loved stopping  for roadside food. 

Delicious break over we kept driving into the hills of Belize’s Cayo District. Spanish Lookout is a town half way up and it’s on our list. Apparently it’s a Mennonite community which operates semi- autonomously in exchange for a flourishing agriculture program that feeds Belize. I am curious to see it even though the Mennonites freak me out a bit. 

The cayo district appealed to both of us as we slowed for the endless topes and took the time to look around and enjoy the order and color and cleanliness of the villages we drove through. 

There are no place name signs along the highways. In the Cayo District there are solidly built bus stops with the community name printed on them. 

Cayo District the more we drove it seemed to represent the way you’d like Belize to be. Prosperous I dare say and we enjoyed the drive through these pretty little towns.  The gang lands of Belize City and the moldering huts lining the northern Highway were left behind. 

Not everyone lives in a modern cement home but the yards were tidy for the most part and the residents seemed to take pride in their homes. 

With Guatemala a few miles away Belize turned bilingual again. 

We also passed the Central Farm recently visited by the President of Taiwan when her motorcade messed up our visit to the capital Belmopan. 

San Ignacio dead…

…and alive. It seemed in first acquaintance to be a busy town with lots of activity. First we extended our Belize phone SIM card and the clerk was a bright spark which helped. 

We have a hotel reservation for Sunday and Monday nights (Easter Saturday the country is fully booked) at a dog friendly place on the outskirts with a pool, WiFi and the blessings of air conditioning. Tuesday we hopefully pick up the radiator and hopefully are in the road Wednesday or Thursday. A whole lot of hoping. 

After visiting the campground at San Miguel we bugged out trying to get home before dark but it is a 60 minute drive to Hattieville from San Ignacio so we were primed to fail in that regard. Especially as I was hungry functioning on two tacos all day. 

We headed reluctantly back down to the dismal flatlands of Belize from the pleasures of the Cayo District. 

“Stop!” Layne snapped the code word for roadside interest and she got this one right. A furniture shop and eatery all in one called Unique.  

They offered Chinese food and we ordered chicken dumplings and egg rolls which in Belize come with French fries. Okay then. This looked different 

The Taiwanese owner Margaret brought our drinks, passion fruit iced tea which was as delicious as the food. She has lived in Belize for nearly thirty years and loves the natural ambiance of her home with hummingbirds paraqueets and butterflies in her garden. She quit her former life as a newspaper shot of in Taipei and with her business partner set out to make a new life here. 

I am terrible at taking snapshots of people and she really is delightful and cheerful and happy. She also loved Rusty a fact her two well nourished and cared for dogs did not find attractive. 

They peered through the gate as Rusty lorded it at our table. As we got back in the rental Toyota Layne said  she’d have asked Margaret if we could park in her lot for the night had we been aboard GANNET2. That’s how comfortable she feels in the Cayo District. 

We stopped for gas, the usual fiasco at 13 gallons for $166. Luckily Belize dollars are two-to-one do we actually paid $83 in real money which was bad enough. 

Soon enough the tropical night fell over the highway, as we navigated  more unchecked bush fires pouring smoke into the sky. There are no rural public services in Belize, public works or fire departments or highway patrol to help traffic through the flames and smoke. We arrived at the store in Hattieville unscathed so I suppose no harm done but it was weird.  

This is one of the nicer stores in the coastal plain but it’s like shopping at Fort Knox. When they shut up shop at night there will be no looting. There are no windows and the main door is an armored roll up affair. Such is the confidence of shop keepers in their neighbors and police patrols. 

With these weird tiles you can’t even aerosol gang graffiti, were you minded to. 

Oh and I found an off brand lager in a can  with an old fashioned pop top. 

How cute is that? 

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.