Belize Please!

CHAPTER 7

As some of you might have guessed, we are a little behind in our blog.  It turns out that when you are trappsing around Central America, everyday seeing new and unbelievable, once-in-a-life time sights, actually sitting down and finding time to write about them all kind of gets relegated to the back burner.  I suppose it is a good problem to have though, it certainly beats the alternative- not having anything to write about.  Because of this slight delay in our writing schedule, you may be confused as to where we actually are at the current moment…  I am sitting here, with cold beer in hand, under swaying palm trees, on an expanse of black sand beach cradled between the twin volcanoes of Isla Ometepe, in the middle of Lake Nicaragua- with a terrible case of writers block.  But, now that I know that you know the truth, that we are about 1 month behind in our ramblings, hopefully it will be the motivation I need to finally catch back up, and stay up to date.

Our trip has been going well, if not incredibly fast.  We can’t believe that we have been on the road for almost two and a half months.  We have driven 7262 miles to date, and are about 1/3 of the way to our destination, Ushuaia, Argentina.  We’ve been pulled over twice by police, and have been hassled at numerous police and military checkpoints, but the largest bribe I’ve handed over was a cold beer from our fridge.  One flat tire and one broken shock have been the extent of our mechanical mishaps (knock on wood), and our camper topper has worked like a charm, aside from its unwaterrproofness which we learned the hard, and very wet, way (now we always put on a make-shift rain fly).

We’ve really developed a good travelling dynamic: on travel days, we try to get up early, and switch off driving every 2 or 3 hours.  I usually drive in the cities and at border crossings, while Kacey takes the role of navigator- which is a crucial one considering the incredible lack of road signs in most Central American countries.  Aided by our paper maps and GPS, we are pretty adept at feeling our way through the chaos of jumbled streets that make up the larger towns.  Between major cities, Kacey takes the wheel and there is not much that can slow her down.  To keep us occupied when the scenery isn’t too spectacular, we plug in the iPod and listen to music or pod casts of This American Life or How Stuff Works, that we downloaded before we left, or we take turns reading our “road” book out loud to each other- we usually pick a travel narrative about someone doing a similar adventure to ours.

On non-travel days, we try to wake up at a reasonable time, do stretches and exercises, run on the beach or swim laps in the ocean if possible, and eat a light breakfast: Quaker instant oatmeal for Kacey, and a Cup-O-Noodles for me- both with a generous helping of hot sauce and garlic powder (I know, hot sauce on oatmeal?, but you have to be creative when your on the road I guess).  Then, depending on if we are in a laid back beach front village, or a bustling tourist mecca, and all places in between, we will spend the day trying to balance our adventurous-see-the-sights side, with our relax-and-act-like-we-are-on-vacation side, while important take-care-of-business items, like writing silly blogs, take a very distant 3^rd place in the priority power struggle that is the traveling life style.

It was during one such power struggle that our bronze medal winning take-care-of-business item really “stitched us up”, as our new English friends Tim and Amy would say.  We had just spent 5 days on the tranquil island of Caye Caulker off the coast of Belize, had taken the ferry to the mainland, collected the Golden Boy from the parking lot of a hardware store in Belize City where we had left it (they assured us that even though the security guard left at 9pm, no one had had any trouble, ever, and that we would be alright- this took a huge amount of faith on our part considering Belize City was one of the more dicey towns we’d been in, and going to the island would mean we would be at least a days journey from any chance of getting back to protect it or save it, even if we were aware of any immanent danger, which we wouldn’t be) and drove the 2 hrs to the border city of San Ignacio to position our selves for crossing over into Guatemala early the next morning.  All of our gear stored, important documents ready for the border officials, and key in the ignition, we realized we were missing one vital item: one night earlier, after a boisterous evening of revelry celebrating the awarding of our PADI Scuba Diving certifications, we were in no state to pack up our stuff that night.  We subsequently woke up a little late and packed in haste due to the immanent departure of our ferry to the main land, forgetting our GPS beacon that Kacey’s dad gave us in the window sill of our room.  This was the mother of all delays.  A full 12 hours later, after driving back to Belize City, waiting in vane for the GPS to arrive by post from the hotel on the island  (as they said they would send it), travelling all the way back to the Caye and arguing with the devious desk clerk to eventually get it back, taking the ferry back to the main land, and returning to San Ignacio, we finally returned to our starting point.  This was just one, though probably the most poignant, instance were a good, healthy three way tie between our priorities would have really saved us a lot of trouble.

Belize was an enigma in Central America, more Caribbean than anything else, and the slow, accented English rolling out of the large smiles of the locals was music to our ears.  After a month of struggling to spew out my bad Spanish, when all that would come out was my bad Portuguese, there was nothing better than casually conversing in English and having the other person understand what I was getting at.  No, it wasn’t really that bad, and with Kacey’s help, my bastardized Portuguese-Spanish vocabulary is slowly becoming more intelligible.

The Belizeans were outgoing and friendly.  Nearly every person you passed walking down the street would shout out a greeting.  As we were rifling through the back of our truck out side of our hotel, one man bicycling by even shouted “welcome home!” (the loads of stuff we were unloading must have given him the wrong impression).  Their authenticity was astounding, and it was hard not to walk around with a silly grin on your face brought on by the pervasive feeling of bliss and kindness exuded by everyone.

The atmosphere given off by the dilapidated buildings and run down shacks that made up Belize City was somewhat less appealing, but considering the horrendous hurricanes that plague their coast, mixed with the typical ever-present Central American poverty, there is not much they can do to improve it.  Their one apparent ticket to salvation is the holy grail of tourism. We embraced this fully.

We had intended to only stay in Belize for a few days, not even leaving the mainland.  But after a short time in the dusty center of Belize City, we came to the conclusion that a relaxing stay on a Caribbean island was just what we needed.  Luckily for us, Caye Caulker was only a short boat trip away, so we bought our tickets and were drinking frozen cocktails on the beach by that afternoon.  The next day, with only a slight idea of what it entailed, we inquired at the island dive shop about getting Scuba certified.  Before we knew it, we had agreed to a three day course, and were suited up and swimming with the fishes within an hour.  I knew that the certification process should be the same every where, but this took me by surprise when our “confined water” practice dive (usually performed in a pool, thus confined) was done off the end of the dock, in the big blue ocean!  There wasn’t much wave action in this particular part of the bay, and the water was actually slimy and opaque green.  My beautiful fiance didn’t really care for swimming around in the muck, and she let me know it in not so many words.  I thought that this had sealed the door shut on our Scuba diving prospects, but when we boarded the dive boat and dropped anchor over the reef for our first open water dive, we were both giddy with excitement.  The sea was crystal clear and bath tub warm. We descended to 40 ft. and were amazed at the world that opened up before us.  There were mountains of rock on all sides, creating long winding canyons that we explored.  There were forests of corral covering any available surface, except for the bare patches of soft white sand along the canyon floors.  And there were fish of every size and shape, painted with colors taken straight from a Crayola box.  They would circle around you like you weren’t even there, darting in and out of the protective corral.  I  felt like a space explorer, walking on the surface of another world, everything was so foreign and spectacular, absurd in its uniqueness, in a word, amazing. I wondered at that moment wjhy I had waited so long to get in to Scuba, and I knew that we would be prolific divers for the rest of our lives.

On our subsequent open water dives, four in total, we saw some incredible sights: long green barracudas with needles for teeth, giant flapping eagle rays which would jump clear out of the sea sometimes, a curious dolphin hunting for fish, enormous black groupers as big as a person, and quite possibly the scariest sight in the ocean- a group of sinister prowling sharks, circling below us as we descended on our final dive.  Our schmuck of an instructor seemingly didn’t see them, to our great consternation, and we kept on going- landing softly on the bottom, with the sharks now at eye level.  He made signs that they wouldn’t hurt us, but as we swam off, Kacey and I looked back to see three of them following us.  I could almost see them licking their lips, thinking about how good my juicy mid-section was going to taste for diner (contrary to what I indicated above, this road trip hasn’t exactly been ‘kind’ to my physique, even with the workout routine.  All those delicious Mexican burritos weren’t going to eat them selves, were they?).  Well, the sharks must have been on a diet too, because they left us alone, and with them left something I had never felt before- a primal flight instinct, that you can only get when you are in the presence of a predator.

Though we were on the island for a week, our time there felt short.  One of the main diving attractions that Belize has to offer, the Blue Hole, has eluded us this time.  But that’s how it is with travelling, you have to leave some things undone, so you have a reason to come back- which we will!