World Tour 1998

Belize

We only spent a few days in Belize, but it was an 'experience'. We wanted to get as far south as possible, not wishing to get stuck in Belize City or Dangriga, both notorious for their sleaze and crime. We spent most of our time in the small coastal town of Placencia, where we went Manatee spotting in the mangroves before escaping from drugged up crazies on a 20ft twin engined power boat to Guatemala.

Goodbye Civilization - The Road to Belize
We rose early to get the bus to Belize. The buses for Belize leave from a special bus station on the south side of town. We were hoping to grab some breakfast before we left, but a bus was preparing to leave just as we got there, so we had to settle for a large bag of crisps and a bottle of coke. We really had been spoiled rotten on Mexican bus services. Not until Chile were we to experience such luxury and efficiency. The Belizean Venus line bus was an ancient American schoolbus. It even had all the original stickers inside "Your child's safety is our business". One look at the driver, and I doubted this. The only other passenger was a twenty something American man, on his way to Belize airport to get a flight back home to the US. (Why he didn't fly from Cancun, I don't know). He wasn't looking forward to Belize, even for the few hours he was travelling to the airport. "It's like so backward man" he whinged "There's only two paved roads in the entire country. It beats me why they don't invest in some infrastructure like the Mexicans have done, then they'd attract a lot more tourism." He went on "You know, they even have a two hour time difference with EST in the US, it puts people off coming." I was appalled at the arrogance of this last statement. Why should the whole world adjust it's national clock just to suit lazy American tourists.

We reached the border after about half an hour, it's only just outside town. We had to unload all our baggage and queue up for border formalities. A disinterested immigration officer processed the forms without once interrupting the conversation he was having with his mate. He didn't say a word to us. He was speaking Creole, a very odd bastardised form of English that is the main language in Belize. I could only decipher a handful of words.

Belizian Newspapers

I bought a Belizean paper from an urchin on the other side of the border, which bills itself as "the most popular daily in Belize". I guess that means it has a circulation of a few tens of thousand then. The journalism was dire. It was like a cross between a free-ad paper in the UK and a student rag, parochial and opinionated. There was a two page special discussing Coconut oil and whether or not it should have been classified as a hydrogenated oil (and thus unhealthy) by the WHO. The author reinforced his views by underlining and capitalising about half of the text, arguing that there was no evidence that Coconut Oil was unhealthy. A pull out section covered a recent agricultural fair. Another article discussed the merits of wheat as a food. There was a letters page where all of the correspondence was from Ghanan women telling us what their hobbies were; "cooking, cleaning, marriage and coming to Belize" – any takers? There were numerous articles covering the country's crimes; a couple of murders, an armed robbery from a truck. An alarmingly high number of crimes given that the population of Belize is only 260,000.

As the bus rumbled southwards, it soon filled up with locals, mostly blacks and a few mestizos (mixed Spanish and Indian origin). Unlike Mexico, where the mestizos dominate the upper and middle classes, here everyone seems to be poor. In the North of Belize, there are many acres of Sugar Cane plantation. We passed trucks loaded to the brim with cane, and more than a few hard looking machete wielding cane cutters boarded the bus. As we neared Belize City, we suddenly slowed to a halt in traffic. Just ahead of us, there had been an horrific bus crash. Two buses, one regular service like ours, the other a bus carrying factory workers home, had collided. One of them was semi submerged in a lake by the side of the road. The drivers side of the other, about 300m away, was completely ripped apart, a tangle of steel. We later discovered that the driver had had his arm ripped off and was in a serious condition in hospital. On the other bus a number of people had died. The horrible thought "it could have been us" crossed our minds – if we'd have caught a bus half an hour earlier, it would have been. "Your child's safety in our hands" – God help us.

Belize City - What a dump!
Belize City is a ramshackle dump of a town. We were only staying for an hour to get a connection south, to Placencia, a small coastal town. We had lunch of cheeseburgers in the bus station restaurant, but they weren't burgers and there was no cheese, served up by a sullen sour faced woman from an unsavoury looking kitchen. We met a missionary and his wife who were getting the same bus to Placencia. He was the local Anglican vicar in the village, and they had been attending a diocesan conference in the capital. The vicar's wife fitted the stereotype; overweight, lank haired, bespectacled and gregarious. They'd been in Placencia for over two years and were due to retire soon to a rest home in the Isle of Skye, Scotland (that'll be a shock to the system I thought). I got the impression they really didn't like it much here in Belize, though they were cagey on the subject.

A New Sport
Bus Racing on the Dirt Tracks of Southern Belize
The Z-line bus to Placencia was another battered ex-US schoolbus, driven by a black man with dreadlocks. The conductor was a fetishist for Nike clothing. He had Nike shoes, baseball hat, T shirt and even earrings. The ticket to Placencia was only a few dollars, for a journey of four and a half hours. As we rolled through the grubby suburbs of Belize City, the bus filled, mostly with blacks, and a Rastafarian switched on a ghetto blaster. We were to be treated to loud reggae music for the entire journey. There was a Caribbean Island atmosphere aboard.

Within 20 minutes, we turned off the paved road onto a rough dirt track. At first I thought we were just taking a detour to a nearby village to pick up more passengers, but I was wrong. This was the road to Placencia. It was rutted and pot-holed, but that was of no consequence to our dreadlocked driver who pushed the bus to the limit. A group of brothers in the back seat were howling with delight and pain as bus bounced them right out of their seat. I could feel the back wheels sliding away from us as we rounded bends, only regaining traction at the last minute. We overtook all the other vehicles on the road, including a number of 4x4s cautiously picking their way along. At one point we closed in on a bus from a rival company. It was kicking up huge clouds of dust, and it was almost impossible to see what was going on. This was just as well, since our driver chose to overtake on a blind bend sliding dangerously and crashing through pot holes, we just pipped him. There were few obvious settlements on the road south, but every now and then we would stop at some side road to collect or drop people off. Presumably they then had a substantial walk to their real destination. The landscape for the most part was jungle, with the occasional clearing or plantation.

Placencia - Paradise Found
	It was growing dark by the time we finally reached Placencia, a small fishing village at the end of a peninsula. About forty minutes was added to the journey time as we had to detour through a huge banana plantation owned by the United Fruit Company that lies a few miles outside the town.
Almost all of the houses in Placencia are on stilts, a precaution against the hurricanes that frequently ravage this coast. All of the buildings were made of wood. People were sat out on swinging chairs or lolling in hammocks on their verandas enjoying the cool evening air. At last the bus pulled up its last stop, at the end of the road. It felt like the end of the known world. We'd picked out the Paradise Beach Hotel from our guide book, it sounded ok, and we set off with all our gear along the beach to look for it. We never got there. Halfway along the palm-lined beach, we came across a big black woman cooking food outside her house with a couple of gringos sat at a wooden table. "We're looking for the Paradise Beach Hotel, is it far?" we asked. "You lookin' for Paradise, you don' need to go no further babe, it right here", piped up the black woman, flashing a gold tooth or two. (Uh Oh!) "You wanna room girl, I got me some beautiful rooms, you'll love them. Come, let me show you". So we followed Brenda off into the undergrowth. The apartment belonged to her brother in law "- a fine man. My sister done well marryin' him" The apartments weren't quite finished, but they were big, had a clean bathroom and a kitchen too. Besides, they were cheap at 16 Belizean Dollars a night, so we accepted the offer. "We havin' a bit of food on the beach right now. Why don't you two lovers come and join us when you settled in". It sounded good, so we went to the shop, bought a litre of local rum and some cans of coke and wandered along. The other couple with Brenda were from Hamburg. Like us, they had simply been walking along the beach when they were ensnared shortly before us. Brenda was larger than life. We talked for a few hours about this and that, during which time she revealed that she was only 33 years old (looked more like 43). By the end of the evening, she'd convinced us that we should go on a boat trip the following day with her 'brother' to spot manatees, and she'd tried to sell us some weed. Prison sentences for drug offences in Belize are instantaneous and severe, so this would have been a dangerous offer to take up. We later discovered other dangers too.
31st May, Manatee Hunting, Placencia
We met Dougy, Brenda's so-called brother at the Dockside bar, a lovely thatched roofed place built at the end of a jetty. Dougy looked a bit doped out, but seemed pleasant enough, that is until we started talking money. Brenda had told us one price that was somewhat short of what Dougy had in mind, but we managed to sort it out. Brenda arrived with a cool-box full of home-made sandwiches and lemonade. We clambered into Dougy's launch along with the couple from Hamburg. Dougy opened up the throttle and we sped out into the mangroves that stretch for miles along the coast. We were hunting for Manatee, aka the Sea Cow, that lurk in the brackish waters feeding from the thick weeds on the seabed. It was at this point that Katie confessed "What exactly is a Manatee then?" I was glad that Dougy answered, because I wasn't entirely sure myself. "It's a like a huge stinkin' pile o' shit." Said Dougy. Enlightened, we started scanning the horizon for these elusive creatures. They are mammals and come up for air only every 15 minutes or so. Dougy was looking very uneasy at the back of the boat. "Does anybody have a joint?" he asked. When he found that none of us had, he decided he needed to go back to shore to get one, and let the throttle out. It was like being in Miami Vice, shooting through the canals at breakneck speed with a junkie at the helm. After this brief interlude, he was much more relaxed.
We never actually saw any manatee, only a few ripples and bubbles from afar. We did see some other interesting wildlife, a few lazy pelicans, flying ducks, a barracuda, and an incredible diversity of starfish. But most memorable were the dolphins. It was me that first spotted the fin in the water. "Shark!?" I announced. We motored slowly towards the spot, but it had disappeared. Then suddenly it resurfaced, quite close, leaping out of the water to draw air three or four times before finally flipping its tail up in the air and diving deep. After this, we saw quite a few of them in different parts of the lagoon, and were able to get alongside one of them for a short while. It was thrilling. We ate Brenda's sandwiches in the boat. They were superb, a herb and cheese concoction. The only trouble was, there weren't enough of them.		Dolphins in the mangroves near Placencia
When we finally got back to Placencia, Brenda was in the Dockside bar. "Did you all enjoy yourselves?". Then she invited us to have a fish supper with her on the beach. Her 'cousin' had caught some fish that morning, and she was planning to cook them up on a fire as a treat for us – for free. She showed us the fish. They looked great. We accepted the invitation.
At six we wandered down to the beach. It was dusk, and Brenda was slouched in a wooden beach chair watching the fish on the fire. The moon was up, almost a full moon, reflecting off the sea. We strung up our hammock between a couple of palm trees and "chilled out" with some Belikan beers. Brenda served up the fish accompanied by slightly spicy beans and rice. It was delicious. "Chill the pill guys!" said Brenda.

Belizean Economics

The cost of living in Belize is high by local (Central American) standards. This was explained to me as resulting from astronomically high import duties and high sales taxes. With such a small population, the government struggles to raise enough revenue for development. This also explains the poor infrastructure. The tax on a new car for instance is 100%. This explains why most of the vehicles on the road are unroadworthy wrecks.

Paradise lost – the awful truth about Brenda
We were feeling a bit crowded by Brenda. She had been very kind, but there was something odd, something didn't quite feel right. We decided to give her stretch of beach a wide berth this morning, and strike out on our own for a change. Besides, we'd been here two days and hardly seen the town.
Placencia is strung out over a couple of miles. There is a single road, a parallel 'sidewalk' (a beach footpath) and a long palm-fringed bay. Belize was a British colony for many years, seized from the Spanish in the 1800s. It retains many vestiges of Englishness which seem quite bizarre in this tropical fly-blown setting. We had a great English breakfast of eggs and bacon, with a pot of tea at a place called Miss Daisy's. They play cricket, bake great bread, sell bottles of stout in the bars, and the money still displays the Queen's head. We wandered up the beach, a long curving bay fringed with Palm trees and colourful stilted houses. It is very pretty, but not much good for sun bathing. The sand is uncomfortably gritty, and the sea is chock full of weeds.		The bar in Placencia

Eventually, we came to a small hotel and bar at the end of the bay, run by an ex-patriot Englishman. Here we learned the awful truth about Brenda. I asked the bar owner if he'd served here in the British Army, which until the 1992 had had a 200,000 strong presence in Belize to help protect against the threat of invasion from Guatemala. "No, actually, I'm one of two English residents who wasn't in the forces". He had been an estate agent, doing very well for himself, but the hundreds of miles of driving on Belize's primitive roads had destroyed his back, so he'd bought this bar in Placencia and settled down with a local girl. "So how come you've been here for three days and it's taken you that long to find the best bar on the beach?" he asked somewhat arrogantly. "We've been staying right at the other end with Brenda" I explained, at which point his eyes goggled and he looked worried. "Don't what ever you do eat anything she cooks you!" he suggested. Too late, I thought. "She's been closed down by the health inspectors three times, no electricity, no running water, just washes herself and her stuff in the sea!" he explained. I'd earlier seen a man peeing off the jetty, so this didn't sound too good. "Don't get me wrong, she's agreat cook. She used to work for me here when I first opened" He went onto explain"...had to get rid of her though. When she first started here, she had a $10 a day crack habit, which I didn't know about, and it grew to a $100 a day habit. She was taking money off my customers up front and pocketing it, so when I went to get the bill at the end of a meal, they said they'd already paid".
	Crack addiction was, sorry is,a major problem in Placencia. This was due to an event a number of years ago when a bale of Columbian crack washed ashore, presumably dumped by drug runners on therun from the coastguard. In a macabre drama similar to the film "Whiskey Galore", locals betrayed oneanother, argued and fell out over what they should do. The original intent was to flog the stuff and get rich, but most of the booty disappeaered, and a generation of hardened drug addicts emerged, including Brenda. It was Brenda's 33rd birthday the day we arrived. She didn't look a day younger than 43 - what a tragedy

Sea odyssey to Honduras, via Guatemala

We left the beach bar, now fully enlightened, and in truth not a little panicked. We worried about the safety of our belongings and ourselves. We returned to the house, taking a wide detour round the back of the beach to avoid Brenda, and they were thankfully all still in place. We left Placencia the next day, headed for Honduras. It was our intention to try and get to Honduras by sea, since it was only about twenty miles away. The alternative would entail a huge detour inland up into the mountains, through Guatemala.

Our guidebook, the 'Berkeley Guide to Central America', was hopeless. The regular boat service from Placencia to Honduras proved to be non-existent. A rastafarian boat owner called Carl, with somewhat less than his full complement of teeth, said he could run a trip provided we could round up at least 10 people, for $20 a head. This seemed unlikely, we'd not seen more than 10 other tourists in total. The ex-pat bar owner thought that there was a service from the port town of Dangriga, which was 80km bumpy ride north (the wrong direction). "Ask for Lopez". I figured there'd probably be hundreds of blokes called Lopez - and the chance of fiunding a ride were low. The only remaining seaward possibility was to take a trip to the southernmost town in Belize, Punta Gorda, and get a boat from there to Guatemala.

At 10am, we chucked our packs into a water taxi, a grubby old tub with a canvas cannopy and a noisy but largely ineffective diesel engine. There were two planks of wood to sit on. The taxi was delayed leaving, waiting for a last minute passenger, a burly man in a T-shirt, carrying a battered attache case appeared, accompanied by a gangly scowling youth. The burly man was a cop, and the young lad was his prisoner, and they were on their way for some justice Belizean style. Fortunately for us, the policeman spotted a faster launch and commandeered it. They zoomed off into the distance, leaving us to chug lazily through the mangroves. Our cap'n attached a fishing line to his toe, and dangled it over the side of the boat in the hope of catching some lunch. It took us an hour to cover no more than about 5 miles to the village of Independencia, a jumble of very ramshackle huts, with outdoor latrines hanging over the riverside - even more fly-blown and remote than Placencia. A friendly chap in dreadlocks accompanied us from the jetty to the connecting bus service about a mile away - a long walk with packs in 90 degree heat. We waited for ages before the banana yellow ex-US school bus showed up. The ride to Punta Gorda, or PG as it is known locally, took about an hour, during which time we chatted with a toothless old man in a baseball cap. He was writing a book about the region, assisted by a US anthropologist. Given that he seemed to know everything and everyone in the area, we aksed him about boat services to Guatemala. He was doubtful we'd make it in one day, and recommended we stayed at 'Grace's' place.

We found Grace's place opposite the police station. As well as running a hotel, she serves fine food, bank, bureau de change, ticket booking, laundry - you name it. So we ate, changed money, bought boat tickets, and got our laundry done whilst we waited for the ferry to Guatemala. The 'ferry' was a 20ft long fibre glass power boat, completely open to the elements, with two meaty outboard motors. There was just about room for 20 people four abreast on hard bench seats. The first mate, a fourteen year old in cut off jeans hurled all the luggage into the prow of the boat and handed out big sheets of polythene to all the passengers. This was one scary ride. The boat zoomed way out several miles into the deep blue sea, crashing heavily on the waves. The usefulness of the polythene sheets became apparent. It was fun at first, but the incessant crashing against the waves became very painful. There were five in our row, and Katie started complaining about lack of space. But she wasn't wedged under General Noriega's cousin's armpit like me, so I told her to quit moaning. At last ... the huge container ships of Puerto Barrios, Guatemala's principle port, loomed up.

You are reading the story of Adrian and Katie's travels through the Americas between May and August 1998.
Adrian and Katie put the rat race on hold for a year to travel the world.


Adrian & Katie's World Tour News - Belize                                              Last Updated: 20th July 2000
Web Page by Adrian Ball  (email: adrian.ball@virgin.net)