Belize: Why Take Drugs When You Can "Roadtrip?"

Hi Readers!

We've started up our second cycle of classes here on Isla, but I'm still freshly back from the trip down south, and eager to tell you all about it. In fairness to your attention spans, I'm actually going to break it up into a few parts--this is just a small kindness as I still intend to write a lot here. In another post I will discuss the Mexico part of the trip (Playa del Carmen, Tulum, Chetumal, and Akumal), and for now I will write up some of my observations on Belize. Just one Mexico photo for now, the quintessential Mexican vacation photo:

(This actually only happened because we got caught in a rain storm in Playa del Carmen--we ducked inside a cheesy souvenir shop to wait it out and boredom got the best of me. I don't know how I got Ray to go along with it!)

In "getting away" from Isla Mujeres, we weren't really looking for more beaches and more Mayan culture--we've got a pretty good hold on those things here. That was a huge driving force behind our interest in Belize for vacation. Just as I had hoped, Belize was a highly different cultural experience than our Latino-Mayan culture/tourism culture here in Isla Mujeres. Belize is English- (and Kriol) speaking, is astonishingly ethnically diverse, and has a strong Afro-Caribbean culture rather than a Hispanic culture. Yet at the same time that Belize met some expectations, it caught me completely by surprise in other ways. This is absolutely the one place I've been where the people were the main attraction. By that I mean that the people we met were the most exceptional part of the experience, for their friendliness, for their openness, or for their just plain craziness. Most of the craziness was of the good sort, a defiance of conventions, but some of the craziness was a bit more perplexing and contradictory. Hopefully I'll make that statement clearer over the course of this post, but the experiences are hard to sum succinctly, thus proving this post quite difficult to write.

But, anyway, we'll see what I can explain! First off: Belize, in case you weren't sure, is just south of the Yucatan Peninsula, with borders on the West and South with Guatemala. Belize just got its independence recently, in 1981 from Britain--what took them so long exactly I don't know. One big factor, I believe, was that Guatemala apparently believed (and believes) that Belize is really just another part of Guatemala, and they've threatened to occupy it in the past. I've read that you can purchase maps in Guatemala which show it spreading all the way through Belize to the coast. [Morocco did the same with Western Sahara when I was there, incorporating it in maps and on the weather report on T.V.] Ah, Central American politics, never boring.We spent the majority of our brief time in Belize in the city of Dangriga, a little red dot in Central/Southern Belize on the above map. To get there--and nearly everywhere on our trip--we took buses. Our bus came down through the capital of Quintana Roo, Chetumal, which borders Belize. We then came down on the highway through the cities of Corozal and Orange Walk and transferred buses in Belize City. From there we drove to Belmopan (capital only in name, not in economic or cultural significance--Belize City still holds those titles), and then on to Dangriga. Thus, nearly all of my interaction with the majority of Belize is through the windows of a bus.

Belize by Bus: Some impressions of a strange, new land through the dirty windows of the public bus

Most of my Belize was a barely two-lane "highway" running along next to homes, businesses, fields. Lots of light trucks and second-class public buses shared the road with us; Belizean second-class buses are retrofitted Blue Bird school buses painted in bright colors with their destinations on cardboard placards on the dashboard. Along the sides of the road, the chicken and dog populations seemed to outnumber the people. They made their way along in front of homes constructed of cinderblocks, concrete, or thatch--tiny homes that would qualify as backyard sheds in the US. Large open patches of land along the sides of the road were often planted with sugarcane, but were more often covered with scrubby bushes and palm trees, as well as the errant banana tree. Everything was vaguely swampy, making it (and the rest of the country) an ideal breeding ground for mosquitos--a fact that my bus seat neighbor pointed out, with the advisory "they all carry Dengue fever." The people we saw and sat with on the bus ranged in appearance from Mestizo to Mayan to African and everywhere in between (there's a sizable Mennonite population in the North--and they really stand out in appearance and dress--and there's even a surprisingly large Chinese population here--they run most of the grocery stores and have been compared to Wal-Mart for their effect on local businesses). They mostly spoke Kriol, a language/dialect (fuzzy distinction) of English. Listening to it was like tuning for a radio station in the car: every once in awhile a few words come in perfectly clear, but the rest of it you strain through for comprehension.
A typical Belizean bus. Though there are "first-class" buses, which are not schoolbuses, they do not run to most of the smaller cities (and who wants to take first-class when it costs more anyway?!).

A local Mennonite, who I suppose is waiting for the bus (though I'm not sure that orthodox Mennonite tradition would allow for bus travel).

The American Midwest and cornfields? No, Northern Belize's sugarcane fields under a big sky.

After about four hours on this road, passing large towns of, oh, 200 or 400 people, we finally arrived to Belize City, or "Belize" as it's known here. I'd heard that Belize City was not the safest city after dark, so I was feeling a bit nervous about changing money as night fell near the bus station. Lucky for us, a bus station attendant, "Mr. William" attached himself to our sides, swaggering with us over to the closest gas station ATM--for a tip, naturally. I was happy to pay the tip, given that the layout of the city was anything but intuitive, and that I felt infinitely safer with a local guide (though he was a bit suspicious himself). Once back at the bus station, we were first introduced to the quintessential Belizean meal: rice and beans, fried plantains, and coleslaw. Normally they add chicken, but the lady serving it at the station was so sweet that she took off the chicken for us (two vegetarians) and replaced it with extras of the other stuff.
The sum of my knowledge of Belize City: the bus station. Most cruise ship visitors to Belize will dock in Belize City, but I don't believe many of them learn any more about it than I did. Instead they go to the resorts on the barrier islands, or "Cayes" (pronounced "keys" here), or along the coastline. They may also go to some of the Mayan sites in Belize, or may stay a few nights at an expensive eco-lodge. I believe few, however, will experience the same Belize we did.

Our bus to Dangriga finally arrived, Belizean-time, and was again a tricked-out schoolbus, painted in Rasta colors. We squeezed on the grade-school seats with the locals and waited until our driver deemed it time to go. I had always figured that Belize was Bob Marley country, but instead our bus driver chose a Daddy Yankee-heavy playlist for our journey, thumping reggaeton throughout the bus as we raced along. The big flashing white light atop the bus (schoolbuses do have such lights, you know), sometimes flashed along in time with the music, adding a strobe light-like effect that eerily lit up the landscape on the side of the road. With the wind tunneling in through the windows and the volume of the music, I felt like I was rocking out in a big Belizean party with my busmates. Perhaps it was the fast beat of the music that compelled our bus driver to take the road at the speed he did. All I know is that by the time we hit the curvier section of the road further south, I was gripping the seat in front of me to keep from rolling out into the aisle. How Ray slept through that, I'll never understand.

We finally rolled into Dangriga around 9:30 that night. After so much bus travel and excitement, we were exhausted and took the first hotel suggestion we were given. We fell into a dead sleep until early the next morning. When we got up, we quickly realized that this is not a town of early-risers. The only people out on the street were children on their way to school. These streets were majority dirt (and those that were paved had a nice layer of dust on top), the homes and businesses were tiny, and everything was generally far less developed than we had expected (it made Isla Mujeres look like the island of Manhattan in comparison). We had not bought a guidebook to Belize, being cheap, and so we had no map of the town nor strong memories of what had guided us to chose Dangriga in the first place. I did remember a briefly borrowed Lonely Planet guide whose Belmopan section said something to the effect of: "Travelers here will find themselves facing a basic existential question: What am I doing here?" That question was echoing in my mind in this strange, small city where we knew no one and had no strong reason for being. It was quickly dispersed, thankfully, once we found the sign for "Val's Backpacker Hostel." We trekked down the road to see if they had space. Not only did Dana, the owner of Val's, have space, she also provided us with great conversation, friendliness, fresh coffee, ice cream, and the internet connection I used to start this post.

From the time that we met Dana on, Dangriga did not feel like a strange land any longer. In fact, we soon met so many quirky new friends that we practically became part of the neighborhood. The town's so small that the opening line became, "I saw you there, and I heard you talking..." This was usually followed by advice or a sales pitch. We were told who was related to who, how people knew one another, asked for advice about philandering husbands, and invited into people's homes. We ate soyburgers with our hippie, hemp-loving American ex-pat Barbara; visited Grace, an aging seamstress who told us all about her glaucoma and stroke; ate at the local diner with Ernest Raymond, Jr., who gave us not only his full-name but his entire life story; and came to know a whole cast of characters in this town. Perhaps the best small-town experience, however, was going to the barbershop. To preface this trip to the barbershop, I should tell you a bit about Ray's hair adventures in Isla Mujeres. Ray wears her hair in dreadlocks. Despite the number of foreigners who visit Isla with dreadlocks, this fact has proved wondrous and puzzling altogether to the students and staff of La Gloria English School. She often gets unprompted petting on the head, as people ask over and over again: "Is it real?" "How do you wash it?" "How did you do this?" Needless to say, there aren't a lot of hair salons in Isla Mujeres that would know what do to with Ray's dreadlocks. Belize, however, is another story, where a huge percentage of the population is of African and mixed ancestry. Therefore, we decided to go to the salon and get Ray's hair done.

While there, I was coerced into getting a "nip n'snip" (in Kriol), or a trim, as well (not that it wasn't badly needed, anyway). So what would have already been a pretty long process of curling and tightening and setting Ray's hair turned into an even longer process when I joined in the fun. Our charismatic hairdresser, Pamela, decided that I really needed to "roll a set" or have my hair curled too. I figured, there are only so many opportunities to get your hair curled in a Belizean barbershop, why not? Soon after, Pamela's cousin came into the shop, and you could find the four of us critiquing women's fashion magazines and singing Shania Twain karaoke together under our giant hair dryer chairs--good times.
At the barbershop with my ever-so-attractive giant fuchsia curlers.
Pamela and her glamorous creations. : )

Anyway, as may be clear from above, my best memories of Dangriga seem to have come from the people we met. Some of the strangest memories are also of people we met. Most people there are just so incredibly open that all of their idiosyncrasies, for better and for worse, are on full display. Within 5 minutes of meeting a rasta-esque Belizean who sold us pirated CDs, he was trying to convince us that Obama was the antichrist. Another guy, at the local enthographic museum, spent a good half-hour describing the tragedies that had befallen the Garifuna people in their past. They had been free blacks, whereas the British in British Honduras (Belize formerly) had slaves. So to keep the two populations from colluding against the British, they smeared the Garifuna image, saying they were "cannibals and devil worshipers." We nodded along in agreement to everything this man said, about how terrible it was to have such slander and stereotyping spoken against a group of people. On our way out the door, however, he stopped us and asked us to remember the story and take it with us. We said of course we would, and that we were headed back home to Mexico the next day. "Mexico?!" he said, "I don't like Mexicans; they're all thieves." He then went on in a tirade of stereotyping and slander against Mexicans, which obviously left us slack-jawed for it's hypocrisy. As Ray put it, "I expect more out of people who have been persecuted."

The other big issue we faced in Dangriga was people assuming that tourists=$$$$$. It's the same in Isla Mujeres, where the economy is still really struggling right now (due to a lack of said tourists). Ray and I, for our next trip, may make some t-shirts which say "I get paid in pesos!" which may give people a hint. Normally I get it worse than Ray, my blond hair attracting more generalizations (just as it attracted more catcalls in the Middle East). "No, we cannot afford to buy your beer," "No, we will not spend $40 to buy a painting," "No, we are not interested..." etc. The real reason that this became frustrating, and this issue's not unique to Belize, is that you never know if someone is chatting you up for genuine interest in sharing their culture, or if they expect some sort of tip or "appreciation" at the end of it. It makes you wary of being open to the culture or to local people, which is a real shame.

Anyway, this post has dragged on far longer than it should. I guess I just want to tell you all about everything in Belize or otherwise you won't understand what a strange experience it was. I've still left a lot out--it's amazing how much you can pack into such a short time period. I'll just leave it at a few pictures below, and say that I'm glad to have experienced Belize, trippy as it was!
Our friend Barbara's bus, which is also her home and her hemp-merchandise shop. She's found a pretty good place to park, right next to the Caribbean (save a hurricane coming to town).
Dangriga's main street. The little palapa on the corner is the local bar/hangout--appropriately called "The Shed."

Most of the homes in the center of town were concrete. As you got further out--on this road, for example--most of the homes were wooden with corrugated tin roofs.
A Dangriga internet cafe.

Before: Miss Julie's rice and beans, fried plantains, coleslaw and "Glorious Belize" coconut water, so Caribbean

After: YUM. FULL.

Watching the sunrise over the Caribbean from our adirondack chairs at Val's Hostel. Note the makeshift soccer goal to the right--soccer's popular here, but I was told that basketball's the big game nationally.

Rural Belize from the schoolbus windows (takes you back, doesn't it?).

Thanks so much for reading. Catch you again soon!