The Great Adventure, Part 4: Belize It.

DIARY

It was a slogan we came up with in the days leading up to the wedding, and when we finally arrived, we discovered we weren't the first to think of it.

Our flight was not comfortable, being squeezed and crushed in with over-aggressive air conditioning. Somehow, I fell asleep just a couple minutes into the inflight screening of Sahara (Jess stayed awake and bought headphones, to watch). I woke up at the george H.W. Bush airport. We landed and crossed to the terminal where our flight to Belize would leave in four hours. At a nearby food court, I ordered Chines and a couple hours later, Jess (felling a bit under the weather) ordered bourbon chicken from a French restaurant. We sat in the terminal, read our magazines, and did our word and crossword puzzles until noon.

The second stage of our journey left on time and this plane was much less crowded then the last. I sat by the window and watched Houston sail by, followed by the huge silos and containment bins for the oil industry. Then, a brief space of farmland. Then, the Gulf of Mexico. I manage to catch a little sleep.

This flight was shorter, and I woke up to see our approach to the mainland again. We passed over dense jungle, what I would soon come to identify as miles and miles of mangrove trees. We finally pivoted around to land at the main airport in Belize City. The airport was only about the size of Bishop (Flint's airport), with a single landing strip large enough for a major aircraft. We'd worried about our one hour changeover, especially after a half-hour wait in line to get our passports cleared. From there, however, we had a smooth check-in with Tropic Air. We found ourselves rotated around the airport, leaving the banks of the terminal, wheeling through check-out, check-in, security, and finally landing in a touristy waiting area with little souvenir shops and a bar. After waiting a half-hour on the wooden benches and poking around some Mayan crafts, we were escorted out to the "stage three" flight. This was a tiny plane with just enough room for its twelve passengers, and the seats were irregularly bolted onto a metal track running along the floor. We breezed down the coast for a lurching thirty minutes, coasting between towering cloud formations and and riding high above coconut and shrimp plantations. The German tourists in front of us and kids huddled in the three seats behind me (Jess and I were in single seats on the aisle; we did not get to sit together) talked excitedly about the strange shapes below ("A barracuda!" one exclaimed, from over a thousand feet up). As we turned in to land at Placencia, the children lost their composure... we were coasting low over the lagoon, aimed toward the landing strip, but all we could see was the water underneath getting higher and higher, racing up to meet us. Finally, the plane touched down on the muddy strip, bouncing up and down before coming to a half several hundred feet from the Caribbean Sea.

The plane wheeled about slowly, and deposited us outside a small building labeled "Placencia" and just next to it, a trailer for TropicAir. Men with wheelbarrows waited outside to gather our belongings. The kids and tourists clapped when the propeller finally stopped.

* * * * *

The sky was overcast and a light rain started to fall as we waited on the porch at the Placencia air strip. A clerk told us that Kitty’s Place, which had just changed ownership and was now known as Sak’s at Placencia, had been called and our ride would be arriving shortly; “it’s right around the corner.”

Just a few minutes later, a bright green Toyota van turned the corner and picked us up. We met our driver, Charitina, and rumbled away through the dirt, rolling long around the airstrip, turning briefly at the end, and rolling away. We turned into the mangrove foliage, but the resort was quite literally “just around the corner.” We stopped at the resort and checked in, reserving our place at cabana #9. A quick tour took in the main near the road, then, moving toward the beach, past cabanas and townhouses painted in pastels, we found a two-story structure with a gift shop on the lower level and the cafeteria above. From here, the beach was dotted with hammocks, and interrupted by an below-ground (freshwater) pool. Parallel to the cafeteria building, the final three cabanas swept off to the north. Ours was the last.

My description doesn’t do the resort, or really any of Belize, justice. First off, the place was described as “barefoot informal,” and this was quite an appropriate designation. The cabanas and outlying buildings were each connected by a network of paths, lined by squat coconut trees and flowers. In fact, these paths were more extensive than I first thought, and on one of our last days at the resort I discovered a pond sheltered toward the road.

The cafeteria building, in particular, was very graceful, with an porch running half of the second floor perimeter, and windows connecting the interior with the outer gallery. Of course, freezing is of no concern on the Caribbean shoreline, so none of these windows were fitted with glass or even screens. (In fact, our biggest obstacle the whole time was our lack of resistance to mosquitoes, to which the locals were fully acclimated).

Our cabana, a wash of soft green and yellows, was supported on stilts, with a wooden porch fitted with two hammocks, and several squat chairs and a rainwater basin out front. Inside, however, the accommodations were nearly as spacious as our present New York apartment. They were air conditioned, with a small kitchen and eating area to the left, a living space to the right (including a king-sized bed), and a bathroom to the back and right. The cabana’s interior was white with dark wood panels, and a mural of life in Seine Bight (the next town to the north) painted above the bed. The bedspread was a vibrant rush of red and black fabric, probably inspired by Mayan weavings, and the space was air-conditioned with access to hot-water, and a refrigerator. Best of all, we’d received a welcome package with a complimentary bottle of rum and a gift shop gift certificate.

We explored our cabana. Our luggage arrived. We took short showers and a nap during which the sea was tossed by a violent storm. Then, we woke up and went to our first dinner. Without exception, the food at Sak’s was splendid. It tended to be a little spicy, but was very rich and well-seasoned, light but filling.

The sun had fully set by the time dinner was over. Jess and I returned to our cabana and unpacked our luggage as another storm was on the way. I also plucked a coconut from a tree and spent most of the evening banging it open with a stone. After over an hour, I succeeded, and Jess and I shared coconut and coconut juice. I’d felt I should demonstrate my survival odds on a palm laden desert island. We went to sleep as the thunder mounted over the sea.

* * * * *

The storm woke us up at about 4:30. Jess and I fell back to sleep.

I woke up again around 6:30. I showered, dressed, and shaved, and Jess got up and we went to breakfast. Breakfasts were generally as refreshing as the dinners were rich, and were built mainly of fresh fruits, juice, and beans. Afterwards, Jess went back to lie down some more. I stopped by the office to ask about our night on French Louis Caye (when would we go? Wednesday) and our tour of the Mayan ruins (would it be possible? Probably). I went back to the cabana, changed into my swimsuit, and went swimming in the ocean for the first time… (I had waded in waist deep in County Clare, Ireland, and then touched the water at Atlantic City, but these don’t really count). It was strange, feeling the extra buoyancy of salt-water, and I pushed out far enough that I found rocks and coral and sea-creature-things on the floor just beneath me. I managed to pick one up, and turned it over in my hand, admiring the wormlike twists and ridges, before I realized that my hands were stinging wherever they touched. I dropped the coral and swam back to shore.

After another shower to wash off the saltwater, Jess got up and we went for a walk to Placencia Village along the beach. We passed by a number of other resorts, and houses still in ruins, presumably from Hurricane Iris which had devastated the region in late 2001. A storm sprang up to the north, and thinking it was going to break upon us, Jess and I headed into the village and started looking for a place to stop. Placencia village is home to several thousand people, but is dominated by one paved road and two “sidewalks” that are also paved and run parallel. The sidewalks are only large enough to accommodate foot-traffic, but effectively formed the blocks lining the sea and those pressed on the interior; against the road. As we hurried along the eastern sidewalk (Jess had taken off her flip-flops because they were rubbing against her ankles), we met a local craftsman, Wade, probably in his twenties, who offered to take us to a bar.

Almost immediately he asked if we were “Bob Marley fans or churchgoin’ people?” We answered that, yeah, we’d heard some Bob Marley and liked it. We didn’t really decipher the question until several hours later. It was Jessica who actually figured it out.

Wade took us along the path all the way to the very end of the village, greeting many people along the way, and finally we arrived at a small bar built on stilts at the very end of the peninsula.

English is the official language of Belize, but the local dialect is English Creole. We were generally able to understand what was being said, but sometimes had to strain or guess on the specifics.

I bought Wade a beer and we talked about music, such as Belize’s rap and turtle shell percussion, blues in the U.S., and after awhile, Wade walked back with us along the sidewalk, before stopping and asking for some help. I reluctantly gave him five dollars, figuring there wasn’t any polite way to decline. His brothers tried to sell Jessica a necklace, but we quickly said goodbye and walked back north along the main road, finally getting back to Sak’s about three hours after we had left.

Back home, Jess and I lay around our cabana, went to dinner and turned in early. We enjoyed, as much as anything else, the freedom to wake up or go to sleep at the times we chose.

This was soon to change.

* * * * *

Our next major adventure was our day and night out on French Louis Caye.

We were originally scheduled to meet the captain at 9:30, so I went to breakfast at 8 to do some writing. At 9, however, Jess and I were rushed to the main office where were to leave at once. Then we waited an hour. The front desk attendant rented us snorkel gear and we traded stories while waiting. He warned us of the different kinds of coral and told us a bit about the caye, a small island ranged eight miles out from the mainland.

Our captain, a gnarled old Creole seadog took us out of Sak’s, across the streets, and onto a small dirt path I’d never noticed before that ran straight into the dense groves of mangroves. There, next to a small house, on a swampy inlet was parked a tiny skiff. We loaded in our belongings and rolled away through the waters. The inlet led to a larger channel, also lined with sand and mangroves, which gradually widened for several thousand feet, and finally turned out into the lagoon that runs the full western side of the Placencia peninsula. The lagoon, almost thirty miles long (though we were just a couple miles from the tip) and up to a couple miles by raced by as the skiff picked up speed, and finally we coasted around Placencia village and the boat was brought in at the same bar we’d visited the day before. There, our captain picked up a British woman who was familiar with the locale and was bored and interested in a ride. The captain announced there were squalls out on the sea and we’d have to wait them out for a few minutes.

Stratus clouds passed overhead, and a bit of rain did fall, but it must have become clear to him that whatever weather blocked us off, we weren’t going to outwait it, so he loaded us back into the skiff and turned away from land.

The coast of Belize is dotted with hundreds of islands. Some were long and flat and thousands of feet from tip to tip, while others consisted of the couple of palm trees (and an occasional shack) we’ve seen in so many comics and cartoons. Some islands, a few quite extensive, seemed to contain no dry land at all; just thousands of the grumpy mangroves.

On our way, we did actually pass through two small squalls, and Jess and I both were soaked to the skin.

· · ·

When we arrived at French Louis Caye, we found it was an island of oblong shape, about four-hundred feet tip-to-tip. Both ends were flanked by clusters of mangroves, but the bulk of the island, including the entire east-facing bank, were dry and grassy or sandy. Between the confluence of mangroves on the west, a dock ran out over the water, and this was we docked now, greeted by a man who lived on the island and his dog. Just ashore, to the right of the dock was a cabin, much smaller than our cabana at Sak’s. The cabin was raised on stilts, again with a small enclosed porch with no glass or screen fitted in the windows, then a kitchen with just enough room for a fridge, gas stove, counter and small table, and past that, the bedroom fitted with multiple windows, a queen-sized bed and a bunk bed. Just outside were rainwater tanks that supplied the cabin, and past it, a compost outhouse and shower. Facing the cabin on the east was a perfect crescent of white-sand beach, and a grill had also been set out in front, as well as a very seaworthy kayak, and very non-seaworthy rowboat. To the north, the island began to diminish, with a small halo in the towering palms midway along the island, but most of these trees were fitted with hammocks. Likewise, chairs had been set against the seaward bank the entire way back, and at the northern tip, a single-planked “bridge” twisted out into the mangroves.

The island’s only resident gave us this tour, accompanied by his dog, Thunder, wile our captain and the British woman brought in coolers and bags of groceries for us to use over the next day. Meanwhile, we were offered a snorkeling tour. I was reluctant at first, but we were quickly persuaded, changed into our swimwear, and headed out into the water from the dock.

This was Jessica’s favorite part of the trip. At first, the bottom was sandy and clear and just a few feet deep. Breathing was difficult, and I was always trying to keep my aching limbs up or clear the last bit of saltwater out of my throat. Soon, however, we were swimming among ridges and clumps of coral that rose up from the sea floor, eight or ten feet below, sometimes within a foot of the surface. The fish here were either translucent, speckled, or bright stripes of blue and yellow. The corals were a range of shades, and most striking were the stinking, floating fire corals. As Jessica would tell so many of our friends, “it was like the Discovery channel!” We saw seaweed, a conch, a sea cucumber, brain corral, a starfish, a Nurse shark (which Jess saw, but I did not). We “put in” on the other side of the island, at the facing beach. Jess took a shower, while our guide led me back into the water, in the shallows near the mangrove where thousands of little fish flitted back and forth, and we saw a tiny Murray eel, dangling out from among the roots.

· · ·

After our full tour, our guide, captain, and the British woman left, leaving us alone on the island with Thunder. Supposedly a cel phone linked us to the mainland, but as we’d find out, it didn’t work.

I fixed us a meal of chicken and potatoes mashed with tomatoes, and Jess lay down for a nap. I snorkeled some more, but overextended myself and was both exhausted and nastily sunburned when I finally came in off the dock. I’d earned two monstrous blisters on my heels for my trouble. We took a nap, and two quick storms passed by, the sound of the rain on the tin roof easily outshouting the thunder. Later, as twilight came on, I went out to catch some fish for dinner in the kayak. I was unsuccessful, probably because I was using a lobster hook fitted with a quickly thawed frozen shrimp as bait. Nor did I try for long; the kayak kept drifting southeast, away from the island, and as the sun sank into the sea and dark started coming on fast, I was worried about being lost and unable to find my way back.

Dinner plan #2 involved the grill. I put some kindling our guide had micheted for us before leaving and used some blank leaves from my journal as tinder. The coals didn’t light. I tried again, this time using the heavy brown paper from the bag the charcoal came in, and had much better luck. Soon, frozen fish and corn were toasting over an open flame. Jess and I had a meal of grilled fish, corn on the cob, fresh pineapple, and rum cokes. The meal took about an hour to prepare, but sitting on the porch with Jessica in the soft light from our cabin, and enjoying the breeze that came in off the sea was one of my favorite moments of the whole trip.

· · ·

As soon as dinner was finished, however, Jess and I realized we were up against something completely new.

First, after the sun set, the breeze died, killing any last hopes that another storm might relieve the heat and humidity of the island.

Second, nature was only quiet out here during the day, and neither of us had any conception of just how much live lived on this tiny island.

I’d first noticed the hermit crabs during the day, a few squatting in the shade under the cabin. As soon as it was dark out, they emerged by the hundreds. And I do mean hundreds; you couldn’t walk three feet without encountering there or four hermit crabs. They were fun to play with. About fist sized, they crawled up inside discarded seashells, and when you picked the shells up, they retreated inside except for a single projecting claw.

There were also lizards, small geckos, that bothered Jess much more than me. The main problem with these was they didn’t, like the hermit crabs, squat in the darkness well away from the cabin. The lizards crawled up on the beams and rafters of the cabin itself, including on right above our bed, and licked ants off the inside of the tin roof top.

Third, we’d both been afflicted by the elements in the last several days; specifically my sunburn and Jess’ numerous mosquito bites. My blisters had gotten all pussy.

I remember at one point, around what we both hoped was dawn, I went out to the kitchen to get a drink of water. I noticed the time on the clock, noticed the thing in the sink crouched under the dirty dishes, got my drink, and returned to the bedroom.

“What time is it?” asked Jess.
I told her: eleven. She let a groan of primordial sadness.
Then, reading my mind, she asked: “Is there anything scary in the kitchen?”
“Honey, don’t go in the kitchen,” I said.

· · ·

For the next many hours, we tried unsuccessfully to sleep. In addition to our earlier troubles, we head a loud chirping from somewhere above us. At first I thought it was a bird, but Jess finally managed to prove that it was a noise made by the lizards she was terrified would fall on us in our sleep. I also announced, at some point, that “the inevitable has happened.” A hermit crab had somehow, miraculously, impossibly, ascended the stairs and invaded the sanctity of the kitchen. I escorted our guest back outside.

The radio died out around midnight, leaving us alone with the rolling of the ocean.

Again, I got up to get a drink of water, noticed the time on the clock, noticed that the thing was still in the sink, got my drink, and returned to the bedroom.

“What time is it?” asked Jess.
I told her: two. She let out another groan of primordial sadness.
“Is the thing still in the kitchen?”
“Sweetie, don’t worry about the kitchen.”

Jess had reached a breaking point, and I wasn’t far behind. I proposed to get rid of the thing in the kitchen, then wash the dishes so it wouldn’t come back. We’d take a walk. We’d look at the stars. We’d take a shower to cool off. We’d have a snack. Then, we’d be able to sleep.

When I got rid of the thing in the kitchen and did the dishes, Jess asked me what it was. She’d later confess that her imagination had run wild: she’d imagined hundreds of hermit crabs, monkeys, or a six-foot iguana. Instead, “it was the largest, most hornèd cockroach I’ve ever seen!” Jess didn’t like the idea, but I thought she still seemed somehow relieved that it’d be something so familiar.

We left the cabin, navigating with the flashlight among the hundreds of hermit crabs, and several clusters massing in some bizarre hermit crab mating ritual. We sat on the chairs the looked eastward, and on the low sky, dozens of miles out, we saw the faint shadows of storms racing to the south; jagged and distant and silent cuts of lighting. Above us, though, the sky was clear, brilliant and meteor rich. They raced in secondary streaks against the liquid trickle of the Milky Way. After a shower and a snack of more fish and pineapple, the time was just after three. We had no trouble getting to sleep.

· · ·

The next morning, I woke up before Jessica. I read a little, sitting in the hammock with our rum at my side. Jess got up, went swimming, took a shower, and we had a breakfast, mediocre compared to our earlier meals (those fish were on their last legs), but also two eggs and toast, and halves of a strange melon: grapefruit sized that tasted like watermelon, it had kiwi-like seeds nested in the brightest magenta pulp I’ve never seen outside of a box of highlighters.

Jess packed up. I did the dishes. At about one, our ride back to the mainland arrived. We’d started to get anxious at their lateness, wondering if we’d soon wrestle with another night of hermit crabs and cockroaches and lizards.

The ride back to Belize was harrowing, but not as harrowing as the initial trip out, and we didn’t get soaked this time. Back “home,” we decided to “take it easy” for the remainder of the day. We took a much-needed shower, had a late lunch, then a long nap, dinner, cleaning our air-conditioned cabana. Relaxation.

* * * * *

The next morning, Jess and I were up before seven. We had no alarm clock in Belize, and for whatever reason, left on its own, our bodies’ clocks reset themselves, so we went to bed early (around ten or eleven) and got up early (around six or seven). We grabbed breakfast and met four other passengers going on the Monkey River tour with us: Gia and her husband Jeff, Sonia and a slightly-daffy relative named Noca. Our pilot, Junior, met us at the main office, took us down the little path to the skiff, and we boiled out down the lagoon, stopping at a quay in Placencia for gas.

I realized now that, while Placencia only has the two sidewalks and the one road, boat travel is more expeditious here anyway… after all, the peninsula is twenty-five miles of unpaved road before connecting to the mainland; as a result the docks and canal system is much more complex and heavily trafficked than the roads.

As the sun rose, we skimmed out over the sea in a half-hours straight shot to the Monkey River Village at the end of the Monkey River. Once there, we stopped to use the bathrooms at the village’s only restaurant, Alice’s Restaurant. The restaurant didn’t have any running water, which troubled some of the other passengers, but we met our charismatic guide, Percy, and got back on the skiff with Junior to head up the river. Percy (aka “Rambo”) is evidently a figure of some local renown, for being Monkey Rivers main contact to the outside work through his jungle tours, and he’s gained broader recognition for making documentaries on the local wildlife and taking Steve Irwin through the jungle.

The village disappeared into the jungle almost immediately, and on the way, Percy told us about many different varieties of Jungle medicine derived from roots and trees. Soon the mangroves of the seashore were replaced by massive trees and clusters of sugar cane, though from the boat we really couldn’t get a full sense of the jungle’s density. We saw iguanas, orioles, and the “Jesus lizard” (which runs across the water for several seconds at a time). Percy explained that the jungle had changed in the since Hurricane Iris devastated southern Belize in 2001. Originally, this was a climax rain forest, with massive old trees limiting the expanse of undergrowth and preventing excessive erosion. Most of those trees had fallen in the storm, and the jungle had quickly become choked with water retaining undergrowth. The forest would be thicker, wetter, and more difficult to get through than before. Adding to this was our choice to visit during the wet season… not only are most creatures in the jungle nocturnal, but they tend to avoid the water, which limited the amount of wildlife we’d actually see. And as we learned when we got off the boat, the water contributed to other hazards.

Just several miles in up the river, we stepped off the boat onto a sandy bank and entered the shade through a rough path. Immediately we found ourselves in a sort of perpetual dimness; the growth overhead and all around was so thick that little ambient light made it in. I’m not kidding when I say that if it had been even a little bit darker, we would’ve needed a flashlight to find our way about.

Percy had spotted a cluster of howler monkeys high up in a tree from the boat. He ran up to this tree and began banging on it with his machete, and yelling in a hoarse voice at the monkeys. One of the monkeys, a dominant male, responded with a weird, bestial, almost human roar that sounded almost like a voiced belch. Percy and the monkeys threw their arguments back and forth for about a minute, and I caught a glimpse of them, thirty or forty feet up, huge shapes hulking among the branches. We continued into the jungle.

On the rest of our tour through the jungle, we passed heavy spider webs with fist-sized spiders, and peanut-butter colored termite colonies (“they’re minty,” said Percy) at war with invader ants. We sloshed through calf-deep puddles, and then briefly emerged onto “high ground” with massive clusters of bamboo shoots, each shoot about six inches thick and towering, the clusters themselves easily fourteen or sixteen feet in diameter. We actually crossed a log across a stream. Back on the boat, we stopped to pick and eat some bananamellow seeds, I picked a white spider out of Jess’ hair, and I was attacked by a bottle fly that I didn’t see.

When we got back to the Monkey River Village, we stayed at Alice’s for dinner, choosing either fish or chicken. Despite the spareness of the accommodations, the food was delicious, deep fried, and seasoned with rich spices. After we ate, Percy took us for a walk around the town, which had been devastated by Iris. The village was small, with two road that were beaten paths in the grass, shooting straight back along the shoreline between houses on stilts, and then back toward the river again, one block back. There was one solid structure, a cinder block building, used as a hurricane shelter. Since Iris, the population had dropped to 180, but people were having plenty of babies. There is one midwife, but no doctor, in the town. They receive electricity approximately from dawn to dusk, and collect their water from rainwater drums. We said goodbye to Percy, and shoved off.

Junior motored us toward home, stopping on the way to look for manitees, though we eventually settled for Egrets instead. We were back to Sak’s by 12:30.
-
Jess and I showered, took a nap, cleaned our cabana, and sat out in hammocks and in the sun. I wrote in my journal, while Jess did her crossword puzzles. Later, we bought gifts at the shop and we ate dinner at the cafeteria, though Jess was pelted by mosquitos. We later went down to the “Sand Bar” on the beach, which is supposedly open on weekend nights for caraoke. It wasn’t that Friday, though. The lights were out, and the hut was deserted. I thought a storm was on the way, from the fierce winds and currents of lightning ranging from the sea toward land. I spent a half-hour taking long-exposure photos of the clouds, and caught some of the action. The storm, however, passed us by.

* * * * *

The last planned adventure on our trip was on Saturday, the day before our departure. Mayan ruins: I’d been looking forward to this all week, and they’d be the high point of my trip.

We ate breakfast and met Sam, our driver, at eight in the parking lot. I was ecstatic to see another beat up Toyota van; we were traveling by land, to the south of Belize, near Guatemala, to the foothills of the Mayan mountains. First, we drove north along the length of the Placencia peninsula, passing through Seine Beight, a Garifuna town of several thousand (the Garifuna, or Black Caribs, are descendents of Native Americans and African slaves). We continued on through Maya Beach, another village, and at one point the water advanced on both sides, and the peninsula was only forty or so feet across. After an hour or so, the lagoon disappeared into boggy soil, and we met up with the Southern Highway, a paved two-lane road, and started south. About a half-hour later, we stopped at Sam’s farm for him to pick up some supplies, and continued southward, passing a sign for Monkey River Village and a dusty road running away between coconut trees. About two hours into our trip, the pavement dissolved into dirt (“This is where the government ran out of money,” said Sam), and after rolling through a couple more villages, we pulled off the main road onto a drive, climbed a huge hill, and had arrived at Nimli Punit, the first ruin on our stop.

· · ·

Nimli Punit is a small site, though it did not seem so to me (the closest I’d come were the petroglyphs in Michigan’s thumb). First, we found several outpost buildings with the stalae inside. The stelae are standing stones, typically inscribed with Mayan hieroglyphs and engravings of Gods and kings. The hieroglyphs, where decipherable, typically denoted a calendar date and chronicled the dedication of buildings and temples. The stelae had originally been located on the ruins themselves, but had been moved following vandalism. They were up to fourteen feet long, and had the appearance of very ancient, very aged tombstones. Nimli Punit was also a grave site; the bodies of royalty and priests were interred under the temples.

We found Sam and started back toward the site itself. The location was gorgeous and very intimate; the jungle grew very close in on the ruins, and we were the only visitors at this time. Sam explained many aspects of the Mayan civilization, most undoubtedly true, although a few (typically involving UFOs and crystal skulls) I took with a grain of salt. First, Nimli Punit had been a town of several thousand. The temple complex, all that visibly remained, was reserved for royalty and civic events. The villagers had lived in small huts in the surrounding area. The stones had been fitted together perfectly without mortar, and in the moist leveled structures, practically no erosion or decay had occurred. Other temples, perched on the sides of steep hills, had started to crumble and fall. Many of the stones were covered in a silky, vibrant green moss.

While wandering around the ruins, I was attacked by Bottle Flies. These are mosquito-like creatures, with very wide “fangs.” I didn’t feel them bit, but was startled to look down and find my arms traced with thin streaks of blood. “Better than if they were beef flies,” Sam said. He explained that when the beef fly bites, she injects her eggs beneath your skin. The larvae gestate there, living off human blood, and then, when they’re fully grown, erupt through the skin.

One of the most fascinating features of Nimli Punit was the ball court. Flanked by two stone tiers – grandstands to hold a thousand or so villagers – the game was played along a long lane with a stone circle at center, and a vertical hoop placed in an adjacent wall. The exact rules of the game are unknown, but it involved knocking a bound ball through the hoop. The game had a strictly civic role. Sometimes the chiefs of two cities would play as a method of resolving disputes with the loser being sacrificed. Othertimes, as a celebration, two of the city’s most powerful warriors would play, although in this scenario, the winner was sacrificed.

Sacrifice had an important and complex role in Mayan society, which I can’t possibly do justice to here. In addition to the circumstances I described in connection with the ball games, sacrifices could be selected from among virgin girls outside the royalty, and prisoners of war were also often sacrifice. Sam’s answers were evasive here; it was not uncommon for a family to have to see one of their members sacrificed, and this was a fact accepted by both community and victim for the prosperity of the city. However, Sam stopped short of saying that sacrifice was considered to be an “honor.” I speculate that, just as we see in pre-Renaissance Western civilization, the Mayans had a communal understanding of life overwhelmed the sense of self and individuality that we prize so dearly today. Sacrificial victims, then, might have gone to their fate not with a sense of rage or triumph, but resignation. Sacrifice occurred when the victim was restrained as a priest knocked open her chest with a sharp bit of obsidian and wrenched out the heart.

We examined the rest of Nimli Punit, including some colossal trees (one toppled by Iris) and vines, and crossed a bridge with Mayan women imploring us to buy the crafts they had set out before us. I bought a tiny basket. We got in the car and heading on our way.

· · ·

Jess and I ate sack lunches which included burgers and liters of orange juice. Sam stopped to greet some Mayan villagers he’d gotten to know on his travels, then stopped again in a tiny village for a snack for himself, and Jess and I walked down the road to a bridge over a river. Two children, practically naked, were crawling out onto the sun-baked metal beams and flinging themselves into the river some twelve feet below. They’d squeal in delight, crawl back out, race up the slope, onto the bridge, and back again. Jess and I met Sam at his van and we continued.

Sam told us a bit about his life; how he’d led tours of Belize for some twenty-five years, and during the slow season, he’d drive off to some remote region and pay a local to show him around.

It was only another half hour or so before we reached Lubaantun, our last stop. We parked on the bank of a large hill with a path running to a stream below, and up again the other side. Four Mayan boys met us there, asked our names, and said they’d see us on the way out. When we had crossed up the far side of the hill, we were greeted by several girls, who also asked our names. Then, the head of the site wanted to speak briefly with Jess and me. He explained that, just as Nimli Punit was renowned for its stelae, Lubaantun had acquired a reputation for its supply of ocarinas. The head showed us some ocarinas he’d been dusting off, then offered to sell us a replica he had made. We politely declined, and returned to the site.

One of the most nauseating and weirdly compelling aspect of this day was what we learned about the last year of Lubaantun’s history. At the turn-of-the-century, archaeology was a subject that excited great interest, but hadn’t developed yet to the point of scientific care and rigor. An “archaeologist,” then, who had learned of Lubaantun and secured funds for its excavation grew impatient with the duration of the project, and planted dynamite atop the various temples to remove debris. The debris was removed, along with a good portion of the temples.

Lubaantun was a significantly larger city that Nimli Punit, and must have had a larger and/or wealthier royal family from the size of the temple complex. The temples themselves were, as at Nimli Punit, built of stone expertly cut and fitted and held together without mortar. Although the Mayans did use stones of occasionally differing size, they were committed to regular, measured surfaces, and I didn’t see the sort of esoteric cuts I’ve noticed in pictures of Incan ruins. It was saddening to see the temples, in such perfect condition after over a thousand years, climb skyward, then suddenly stop at craters and jagged stones where the blast had reached.

Lubaantun’s ball court was larger than Nimli Punit, and as we walked from one configured temple to the next, we found little sidewalks, passages, and galleries, where villagers would have mingled and traded and come for official business. Down in the shadows of one of the temples, we found another piece of the sites bizarre recent history. The archaeologist’s daughter had accompanied him on his blasting expeditions, bathing daily in the stream that ran at the foot of the ruins. On the morning of her sixteenth birthday, she found a crystal skull in the stream, with empty eye sockets and a working jaw. Many tabloids decorating the offices at Lubaantun shout questions: “How could the Mayans have accomplished such a feat of workmanship???” There’s no definitive answer; the daughter is still alive and refuses to allow the skull to be examined, despite the Belizian government having extended a claim. Myself, cynic that I am, think that the archeologist had some glassmaker blow the thing, then hid it in the stream. Sam, however, had an extraterrestrial interpretation.

When we left Lubaantun, we first passed the Mayan girls, who had outsmarted the boys and sat on their blankets with goods about them, greeting us by name. I bought myself a dragonfly necklace. On the way out, when we met the boys, I was ready to buy Jessica a cloth with a stitched design, when I found that I was out of money. The boys, clearly disappointed, nevertheless smiled at Jess and me, and Sam offered them a ride to the road, while I shared the rest of my orange juice.

“Do they share their profits?” I asked Sam when we’d left them at the front of the site.
“No,” he answered. “They each do this on their own.”
“What do they do with the money?”
“They keep it. Right now they’ll be using it to buy schoolbooks.”

· · ·

I was starting to run a little low on steam myself. Sam stopped at the Mayan homestead outside Nimli Punit, where he sold bundles of grass to the family for a new roof, and then we stopped a while later at a Spanish-speaking village, Bella Vista, for snack. The residents were mostly Guatemalans; they were migrant workers working the vast orchards and plantations that spread out along the Southern Highway. When we finally got back to Placencia, we found a musical festival at Seine Bight. And back a Sak’s, a little later, we said goodbye to Sam, and settled in for the last night of our vacation. I had the seaweed shake. There wasn’t a storm that night, but the wind was loud in the palm fronds.

* * * * *

The next morning we began our very eventful trip back to Ohio. First, TropicAir called and asked if we could leave early, so we flew about our room packing our stuff in a frenzy, then I took a quick tour of Sak’s, snapping pictures. The ride over Belize was as tempestuous as before, but this time, Jess and I sat together. We checked in at the airport, and spent four hours waiting for our Continental flight. The Continental flight was over air-conditioned, as expected, but the real excitement began when we were stateside again.

Evidently there had been significant storms that week, with many flights being rerouted to the hub in Houston. Because we were international travelers, a Byzantine series of regulations not only required us to get our Passports stamped, but to pick up our luggage and then re-check it. At the re-check, the attendant refused to put our luggage through. He said, “you’ve already missed your flight.” After a long and frustrating wait in the first-class line (which we weren’t supposed to be in, and were haughtily told so), we were secured rooms at the nearby Marriott and given vouchers for dinner.

When we finally arrived and dropped off our luggage at our room, we decided to bypass the restaurant altogether (which would close shortly anyway), and check in at the bar. We overspent our vouchers, but bought a pitcher of beer and food which we shared with our fellow travelers who were arriving in droves. The poor bartender was forced to contend with a massive crowd for a Sunday night, all angry and ready to get their drink on. We sat next to a Dutchman returning to somewhere from Costa Rica for confusing reasons involving a wedding. He chatted with us about politics and travel and Continental airlines, and downed screwdriver after screwdriver. Myself, I stuck to my Shiner. Finally, exhausted, stressed from our mishaps, bitten and sunburned and more than a little tipsy, Jess and I collapsed on our bed and slept until the next morning.

We made it out to the airport in the early evening, and found that our new flight had also been delayed for several hours. Finally, after an uneventful (if late) turn up over the south and the American midwest, we landed in Ohio and were met at the luggage claim by Julie. Our honeymoon was over.

END OF POST.