The Last Post

Wrap up

A number of Belizeans have complained to us about high taxation (especially import taxes) and the government but it’s clear that it’s OK to do so.  The printed briefing from Raggamuffin Sailing spoke about “an exceptionally corrupt government” and we got one restaurant bill that didn’t have “tax” printed just before the total but “tax extorted”.   Even so, their sales tax is 12.5% compared to the UK 20% VAT.   One odd thing about the economy is that with the Belize Dollar tied at two to one, prices are just quoted in $, so you have to check whether the price is Belize or U.S. and the two currencies exist almost side by side in some places.

 People here in San Ignacio are even friendlier than everywhere else and they all say hello or good morning which naturally causes me a lot of trouble.  Do note that I always say hello or good morning too, more often than not first and with a smile.   I wouldn’t want you to think that I’m really Mr Grouch.   We come into town for the Saturday market where lots of the local smallholders come to sell their produce.   There are also a few Mennonites with their dairy products and the usual U.S. or Europeans who’ve settled.   One broadly accented Devon man selling his local wine.  A distinctive taste, let’s just say it really, really doesn’t travel very well at all.   Another was an alternative therapy woman running some sort of retreat and selling her health drink.  Apparently based on tea and sugar, it contains “all the B vitamins, enzymes which are good for you and all the benefits of apple cider vinegar”.  Which are ?  I ask, innocently.  “Well, it’s very good for you”, followed by a list of things it is good for, but not apparently bullshit.   I wish I’d thought at the time of asking “enzymes, aren’t they the things in biological washing powder ?”  I heard a loudly spoken American extolling the virtues of the new technology he’s involved with which is “medicines from plants, not pharmaceuticals and of course there are no side effects”.   It makes you want to weep sometimes.

Our last hotel for two nights of relaxing and we have a booking.  No Bunce listed but that’s happened before because hotels often seem to pick up Heather as the name, so another look and yes we’re down as Heather Leslie.  We thought we had a cabana in the grounds but instead we’re given a room with a view over the valley.   Then, the following morning we discover that we should have had a cabana and that we have the room for someone who booked in after us who just happens to be called Heather Leslie.

Just by our hotel was another Maya site which had only been discovered in 1950.   I imagine as the town expanded up the hills and the forest was felled this place was just sitting there under 1000 years of dead leaves.   It was Sunday lunchtime when we went and as we walked in a couple were leaving “you got it all to yourselves” one of them said and we had, almost.  There was a manned gift shop and a couple of archaeology students but apart from that we really did have the place to ourselves for a while.  It was about 400 yards by perhaps 300 yards so not quite Tikal but fantastic to be there virtually alone.   Once half a dozen people had turned up and made it crowded we walked back to the hotel for a beer.

Would you believe it, on our last morning just before we left for the airport, guess who were also in the restaurant having breakfast.   It was the Germans again.   We ignored them.

  

That’s all folks !

Placencia and up country to San Ignacio

the final few days 

 

We met pretty well everybody from the boat again wandering round, or later at the tremendously good ice cream shop.  Well, except the Germans.  Placencia is at the southern end of a narrow peninsula and is really a beach with buildings on it.  It’s about 400 yards wide and even the restaurants in the middle on the road are strictly on the beach and fairly close to the sea.  While Caye Caulker was just touristy this place is like a real home town with tourists.  We like it.  It is dusty and sandy but like most places we’ve seen in Belize pretty clean with not much litter.  It has the usual scattering of westerners who’ve settled offering ‘alternative remedies’ to the gullible but which merely induce varying degrees of incredulity in us.  To be honest most people would be looking after their inner well-being better by making sure that their salad was washed in clean water.

I thought I‘d say something about the buses here.  It’s clearly not allowed to carry weapons as a passenger because every time a farm worker got on he handed his machete to the driver who stowed it under his seat.   Also, definitions are inexact to say the least.  Our Express non-stop to Belize City bus which we were only getting for half the distance so was obviously making at least one stop, set off dead on time when we left Placencia at 6.15 and had stopped to pick up passengers at half a dozen places before we even left town.  For about an hour of the journey the driver stopped every few minutes to pick up or drop off and then for no apparent reasons did the rest of the journey as stated, driving straight past people frantically trying to wave him down.   We arrived on time.  This particular bus had a full set of well-treaded tyres and a typical ‘Belize windscreen’ which is broken with a crazed pattern across it.  Not tiny bits as in safety glass but like a cracked  window .  Taxis are the same and I wonder if this is a security device.  You can’t take out a broken windscreen in one piece but you can lift out a nice unbroken one with a couple of big rubber suckers. 

On the run up to San Ignacio we had to change at Belmopan.   This town had been planned to be the new Capital after a huge hurricane in the 1960’s caused millions of pounds worth of improvements to Belize City,  but the idea seems to have been  just not been followed up in true Belize style.  This area has a large Mennonite community, a Christian Religious sect who won’t use mechanisation and various other modern inventions.  The men wear mid blue shirts, dark trousers, big beards and all look like Abraham Lincoln out to do the gardening while the women wear unflattering cotton dresses and headscarves and they all look like Russian babushkas.  Horses and buggies are used for transport.  They now run the biggest agricultural and dairy businesses in Belize.  However, it’s unclear to me why they chose what seems to be up to the mid to late 1800’s as the time that human ingenuity and invention was acceptable but after that wasn’t acceptable.

We think we’re quite good on security and it helps to be a suspicious bugger.  If we’re in a taxi with bags in the boot we never both get out unless the driver does.  If he doesn’t get out, H gets the bags while I take my time paying from inside the vehicle.  I also always carry a dummy wallet as well as a money belt.  The dummy has some old credit cards with the numbers cut off and a sheaf of low denomination notes from other countries we’ve visited.   A selection of small notes in a shirt pocket means we can pay for a couple of beers or an ice cream without having to get out the real wallet and giving away which pocket it’s in.   This sort of suspicion has drawbacks of course.   If someone approaches us or says hello, my first thought is nearly always, whatever they’re selling I don’t want it, but of course most times they are just being friendly.   I nearly cost us the visit to THE White House garden when we were in Washington when I just said “no thanks” and walked on whereas H actually listened, collected the free tickets on offer and we got in.  I’ve since heard that you only usually get to visit the garden courtesy of your Congressman intervening.

With the end of the trip approaching, we had to do some planning and have booked some time at a lodge near San Ignacio to do some birding and relaxing.  Run by a big Belize family, one son of which runs a well known birding outfit here, it had good big cabinas and attractive grounds with a large variety of plants.  It was run in what you could call relaxed Belizian style.   For instance the 6.00 bird trip for us and an Italian birder, Maurizio eventually left at 7.15.  For you non-birders this is late for tropical birds which tend to disappear as it hots up.   Seeing tropical birds is rather like discovering birds all over again.  We often have no idea even what family they’re in and so many look like someone with a random box of bird bits has just stuck together contrasting pieces of anatomy  and colours.  Toucans are a case in point.

On our second day we decided to canoe along the river, taking in what turned out to be a magnificent botanical garden, ending up at the lodge.   When we arrived upriver and asked for the ‘dry-bag’, our driver had forgotten it.    You can see this might have ‘consequences’.  We should have sent him back for the bag and waited but we didn’t.  And so it came to pass that at the first set of rapids we tipped over, got upright and then we sank it.  Cameras, binoculars, money and passports all got considerably wetter than recommended by the manufacturers,  but at least the water wasn’t cold.  We were of course soaked, I did my back no good at all trying to lift a canoe full of water while holding my dripping camera bag in the air with the other hand, and one of the paddles was drifting downstream.   It was a clear, clean creek but we were well and truly up it with only one paddle.   The cash dried out well, freshly laundered, the passports look lived in, bins seem OK but my nice new Canon isn’t.   I must say though that the last few days walking round without a pack full of photo and electronic gear has been very liberating.

Pensioners of the Caribbean

Yo ho ho and as many bottles of rum as you can manage

What we’ve got ourselves is a three day two night sail from Caye Caulker in the northish to Placencia in the southish of Belize.   Picked it off the internet, looked good so we booked it.  Then we saw another review which described it as a ‘party boat’ which puts it about 40 years too late for us.  Ho hum.  The Ragga Queen is a fifty footer with a mast in the middle, one at the pointy end and one at the flat end.   An international crowd, our party was two Germans who appeared not to want to talk to anyone for the whole trip, a really nice Argentinian couple from Lionel Messi’s home town of Rosario (best footballer in the world), two gorgeous 20 year old blonde Norwegian girls on an extended trip and four Brits including us.  Everyone else was from North America, four interesting Canadian women, two couples from Kansas whose homeward flight was to be cancelled due to snow in Kansas and a youngish couple from Seattle one of whom was working while travelling by writing code 20 hours a week for a software company.   A Belize crew of three made up what was quite a full boatload.

We were due to leave at 8.45 and dead on time at 9.30 we got underway, and so did the reggae, although I suppose the name of de company should’ve give it away, mon.  It was very windy as forecast and we’d grabbed some seasick pills just in case, remembering my sailing friend  Roger’s words that “the worst thing about being seasick is when you realise you’re not going to die”.   As it happened we were fine for the whole three days so either we didn’t need the pills or they were really good.  The plan for the trip was to stop and snorkel on the reef several times a day, run some fishing lines to see if any fish were willing to sacrifice themselves for our dinner and camp overnight on small islands.  So that’s what we did.

Neither of us are good swimmers and the last time we snorkelled was probably 15 years ago off Queensland.  The sea was choppy for the first snorkel  this trip and  we both found it difficult and tiring but the condition of the reef was very poor.   Lots of sand on the coral, few fish and very little colour, it was like watching a black and white TV after a colour one off Queensland and the other tropical reefs we’ve seen.   I believe the Parrot Fish which nibble at live coral are part of the problem but it was disappointing and quite shocking really.   That said lots of people enjoyed it.   We did have the motor running a fair bit as well as sails but as it was a small outboard it couldn’t be heard much.   The colours are stunning and made much more vivid by the tropical sun.   The sky is an unblemished blue while the sea ranges from the palest blue where shallows sit over sand through a huge swatch of blues to the darkest of blue in deep water.   White horses play around small outcrops of coral near or breaking the surface.  The islands are always green topped with trees and ringed with pale golden sand.   On this first day of sailing there was a fair bit of chatting amongst us but we were still very much a bunch of strangers

Islands/Cayes were further apart than I thought ranging from quite sizable to specks, with our first night stop being on a specklet.  The smallest ‘island’ we saw was like a shed on stilts, presumably standing on land just under the water but it was miles from anything else.   Our night-halt island was unnamed and  sandy with a couple of trees and it was only about  50 or so yards across.  Really not much bigger than those desert islands you see in cartoons with two castaways leaning against the single palm tree.  A strongish breeze was blowing as we tried to set up our tent facing the east for sunrise but we had neglected to take into account that as the wind was also blowing that way we’d have sand dunes in the tent by morning.    In what had been an interminable 15 minutes briefing that took an hour the night before we left we were told that the group would probably split into the drinkers and the non-drinkers.   Sure enough on the first night as we all got stuck into our first half pints of rum punch we realised that we had accidently left all the non-drinkers behind.   I can recommend the coconut rum.

The Germans still weren’t talking to anyone.

Three of the four Canadian women were Health Care professionals and one told me that when travelling with a friend who was an accountant they’d adopted alternative jobs to add a bit of spice to their stories.   Pam had claimed to be a Killer Whale trainer while her friend was allegedly a pole dancer, but with a twist.  The friend apparently had ‘good upper body strength’ (my words, not hers) so it was a plausible story.  The twist was that she specialised in old folk’s homes, being employed by the relatives and taking a 1% cut of the inheritance should she induce a fatal heart attack.  Some people are just too suspicious because I don’t think they ever got anybody to actually believe the last part of the story.

The two Norwegian girls on the extended holiday had so far only been in Brazil for two weeks but were already the colour of warm caramel.   They spoke excellent English and were really pleasant girls but we can’t believe they were as completely innocent as they seemed to be.   One of them, Annae had the same pale green colour eyes as the famous ‘Afghan Girl’ photograph, which you would recognise if you saw it, even if it doesn’t sound familiar.  Yes, Anna with an e on the end.

On the second day, an unsuspecting barracuda was to become our dinner that evening.   Pike shaped and with a similarly effective looking set of gnashers, this one was about 3 feet long.   The captain said he was marinating it by pouring rum down its throat but in fact he was killing it quickly and in only a few seconds it was dead.    I suppose it would be bad for business if it took a lump out of one of the paying customers.  We had it that night with cheesy potatoes, and rum.  Generally the food was OK as it was prepared in fairly cramped conditions and I suppose you could describe it fairly as having a narrow culinary bandwidth.

Our second night was on Tobacco Caye, a 5 acre island completely covered in buildings which were mostly fairly ramshackle.  From the sea only a few could be seen because the trees were taller but once ashore it was a dystopian vision of an idyllic Caribbean island.   After a few more half pints of rum punch and dinner and rum punch, dancing broke out on the dock.   No, of course not me.   (Although he did pose for the male topless photo).  Talking to the Kansas contingent that evening one of them came out with a phrase I liked which was that “Americans think 400 years is a long time and Brits think 400 miles is a long way”.

Did I mention the two Norwegian girls in their little bright yellow bikinis ?  A lot of heads turned whenever they went from one end of the boat to the other and along the side they were framed from mid-calf to neck by the walkway and cabin roof.  Of course, it was the juxtaposition of those primary colours and caramel against the Caribbean sky and azure sea that kept catching my photographer’s eye.   Captain Ramsey mopped the cabin floor regularly after the snorkelling to keep it dry but I think most of the mopping was of the crew’s dribble because they were drooling every time the girls went through.

Something we notice in developing countries particularly is the belief that if you have some music EVERYBODY wants to listen to it.  Shops have speakers outside blasting the area, usually with more than two slightly distorted guitars , buses have music and television which are often nothing to do with each other (fortunately not in Belize) and this three day sailing trip turned out to have reggae and similar most of the day.   On the boat it was so pervasive I didn’t hear it most of the time so I wonder if anybody hears it after a while.  If so, what’s the point of it.  When we climbed the volcano in Guatemala, high above a Maya village and across a valley we could hear amplified music at 7.00 in the morning from what I estimate was 2 to 3 miles away.  It really is just audible litter which you cannot get away from. 

As we headed into Placencia we found out that about ten of us didn’t have a hotel booked so we would all be scouring the town.   At the dock we all said our goodbyes like old friends parting for the last time.  I suppose it did seem like a long time from the start of that briefing, but then it stopped and we went sailing.  It was a very good crowd and even I couldn’t find anyone I wanted to throw overboard.

The Germans never did talk to anyone.