next blog

hello

i have a new blog for my next adventure which starts next tuesday:

www.tibetanpickle.blogspot.com

it is rather orange.

thank you and goodnight, this is the official end of this blog. xx

and now for something completely different...

if you didn't know already, which would be understandable as i haven't published the news publicly on this blog - i have left belize and am back in england. i am going to dharamsala next tuesday in north west india, to teach english to tibetan refugees  for 2 months.  i'm fairly excited about this, as this is where the dalai lama lives in exile. i will obviously be writing a blog all about this: the address is www.tibetanpickle.blogspot.com (i wanted the address indianpickle, but it was already taken -it's a cookery blog about indian dishes).

they told me the place is fairly remote, in the foothills of the himalayas i guess - my room will have a view of the mountains apparently, and if i get sick of the monotonous food they cook in the school it is possible to get a hamburger from the nearby town, and also a capuccino. i thought this was a nice touch. you can read a lot more about the project on this link if you so desire - if you don't then that's fine, you can read about it on my blog instead, as it happens:

http://www.workingabroad.com/page/218/tibetan-teaching-programme.htm

this announcement about having left might sound rather sudden, but in fact i have been wanting to leave for a while, and for various reasons. but i didn't want the blog to become negative so i didn't mention it there. robert will stay and carry on with the resort on the island, and hopefully one day i'll go and see it as a finished and successful resort, complete with ultralights on floats whizzing around and the futuristic hovercraft transferring lots of happy guests, and no hurricanes.

the other day, whilst still in belize, we flew in the little ultralight to a mile high (5280 feet to be imperialist, or is that metric who knows? why can't they just have one way of measuring things). anyway that was pretty cool. it was in fact pretty cold, but we had our extremely cool (as in trendy), warm flightsuits on, as you'll see in a picture if i get round to posting it. robert flew to 10,000 feet the other day, which is around 2 miles. he has flown to 20,000 feet before, with oxygen, in his hang glider. we flew low over some cows on the way down, as that is one of my favourite things to do whilst flying.

so far on returning to england, i have had quite bad jet, and culture lag, making me very overwhelmed at a week in london (i'm now in yorkshire but still adapting back to the modernization - it is, despite what you southerners might think, quite modern up here too you know). there are 300,000 people in the whole of belize and when i came back last time from belize it had been via mexico and new york, so i had acclimatised to crowds of people again. this time it was like how an alien from a very quiet and hot planet would feel if he/she landed in london in winter, ie quite weird. i managed to avoid rush hour on the depths of the tube, just got buses, or the shallow tube lines, which i can cope much easier with. i noted how dull and choppy and grey and uninviting the thames looked, compared to the turquoise tropical water off the belizean coast. i ate some smoked salmon and had a few lattes and marvelled at how easy it is to get any item you could possibly want here, and how most of the world doesn't have access to this luxurious consumerist lifestyle, and really is it that good for people anyway - no i don't think so, and many a more intelligent essay has been written on that subject than my wafflings here.

i went to a bonfire for bonfire night up here in yorkshire, in hebden bridge, i was accustomed to crowds by then otherwise that would have been a bit of a trial. the fireworks were a bit weedy we thought, and you couldn't get any warmth from the huge fire, as there was a health and safety fence keeping you at least 10 metres away. this would never happen in central america, you can walk right up a live volcano and stick your face in the flowing lava if you so desire over there, and no one cares two hoots.

thank you for reading my blog for the last 6 months and hope you enjoy the next one which should start some time next week. over and out, look out for some pictures on the next and last post. xx

gone with the wind

well folks, hurricane richard has been and gone last night. it hit the belizean coast around 5pm or so and was  90mph winds, when it got to us in cayo it was probably 60mph, which isn't hurricane strength anymore. actually to our surprise we slept through most of it. it was very windy and swirly around 1-2.30am, and we heard a few cracks as branches got blown off trees in the garden. then it went very silent and calm around 3am, robert said we must be in the eye of it now - this kind of freaked me out thinking we were surrounded by it. so we were expecting it to kick in again maybe an hour later, but it never did - so either we are still in it and it is a really gigantic eye, or it was just the edge we got and the eye didn't pass over us here. i think it is the latter. power has only just come back on, around 24 hours after going off at 8pm last night, so i haven't known what's happening today in terms of where the storm is now etc. having no power makes one much more creative, i played my guitar earlier outside (have to make the most of the daylight hours when there's no electric lights), and did some tidying up and a few code word puzzles (like a crossword but with no clues, just numbers instead). i just had dinner at len and cathy's next door, and the power went off again during cooking, but came back on fairly soon, so we still go to eat our pasta. my head torch came in really useful for this minor crisis.

in the middle of the stormy night i had remembered i'd left a sock hanging on the washing line. pah, that'll be long gone robert said. but lo and behold, the sock remained this morning. perhaps due to its smallness (it was a small ankle sock with little cartoon dogs on it), the wind had just gone around it instead of pinging it off the line - i bet a bath towel wouldn't have lasted. i believe some of the wooden shack type houses in the city got blown down, but apparently there weren't any deaths, which is good. the island didn't suffer any damage apparently, as the storm hit central belize and missed the north and south bits which is where the island is (in the south). the national storm evacuation organisation here that decides when to evacuate the islands and open the hurricane shelters, is called nemo - i guess this stands for national emergency something something. i think it's funny that nemo is latin for nobody - i guess this isn't a widely known fact otherwise more people would find it funny too. from the island they called the coastguard to see if they would help with getting the (lots of) workers off the island, and the coastguard said no, you've got enough time, do it yourself. nice. thanks coastguard. we had to call them before with a minor emergency a few months ago, but it was saturday night and they were obviously out partying as nobody answered the phone...

here is a list of animals we have had in the house recently:

a tarantula - twice - the same one, we're pretty sure. the first time he was in the bathroom, the next time he was in the kitchen. we figured out where he was getting in and blocked it up with some kitchen paper.

a frog - he was in robert's shoe, a shoe that hadn't been worn for a while. he tried to shoo him out of the house, but gave up pretty quickly and told me that the frog was in the house somewhere as he couldn't get him out. i found him today, the frog, by the shoes and shooed him outside with the broom. this is the main purpose of having a broom in belize, to shoo things out of the house with. this frog is pretty docile and slow so it took a while to steer him in the right direction.

a bat - in our bedroom of all places. i have heard noises in the roof and in the walls here, and we sent francisco (the guy that mows our lawn for us) up into the roof space with his machete. from the amount of noise i'd heard up there, i was expecting him to report back that a pack of wild dogs were living there. he reported back that he had found one bat. francisco speaks only spanish, bat in spanish is murcielago, a pretty cool word. i was amazed that it was just one bat making all that noise. the other night i had just got up to go to the bathroom and when i came back in i saw something drop from somewhere onto my pillow. i yelped and grabbed robert (formerly asleep), and said help help. i didn't know what it was, until it flapped around the room a bit, then flapped out and we never saw him again. seriously i don't know where he is and i have looked around the house, and there are only 4 rooms and there aren't exactly any hiding places. mystery bat.

some dogs - luz next door has 3 dogs - the newest one is negra from the island, we brought her up here in the back of the truck as she had been eating the wildlife on the island and had been banished. she's really sweet, and always tries to get in the house, but we don't really want the dogs in the house. i let her poke her nose in for a bit and look around, and i always feel bad for squashing her nose in the door to get her out. the other 2 dogs are called chica - little girl, and chicita - very little girl. they are still getting used to negra being around and sometimes fight. we are trying to teach negra not to run after us when we leave in the truck because one of these days she will end up squashed on the road if she doesn't learn.

it reminds me of the old lady who lives in the shoe with all those animals around. there are obviously others that don't really need a special mention, like tiny ants, and medium ants, and flying ants, and spindly spiders, and those weird wormy centipede things. nice.

i bought some chocolate pop tarts as a treat the other day, from belize city. i had 2 for breakfast and felt sick. i think 1 is my limit. this morning we had got up at 530 to go check the storm damage, and there was no power so no way to toast my pop tarts so i went without. robert had secured the hangar with steel wires to make the walls less blow away able. we were expecting at least a ton of flooding in there from the rain, but nothing actually happened at all. this was good news as there is a lot of stuff in there.

things i have learnt recently, mainly from watching a david attenborough show - i think it was planet earth, this is a pretty amazing show -

a whale eats 1 tonne of krill per day (krill is plankton basically)
krill is the most abundant species by weight, on the planet - good job too as those whales need to eat a lot of them
the himalayas were created when india crashed into tibet, they are still growing (this i can't quite believe, but sir attenborough wouldn't get a fact like that wrong)

some questions i still have:
why do pandas have black eyes?
why do whales have white on the underside of their fins?
how old is david attenborough these days?

and now i am watching an interview with george clooney on tv, talking about world democracy quite convincingly. i tried to watch seinfeld earlier, but the channel information list was wrong, and seinfeld wasn't on even though it said it was - this was pretty upsetting for me. we watched half of the jane austen book club on sunday, until the satellite signal went down due to the storm coming, this was also upsetting, but not too much. you have to get used to these upsets when living in belize, they are pretty constant. and now i have just heard the funny noises in the wall again - they are always worse when robert isn't here - he is on the island for a few days this week.

that's all for now, adios x

flying flying and more flying, and a tarantula

here's biggles ready to go flying!

a bird's eye view of some local cows with palm tree in foreground.

dam it. the latest in the 3 dams near us, this is the vaca dam. pretty mucky water, i think it's the time of year.

there goes mick over the green green fields of cayo.

me and mick flying into the sunset, followed by robert and belinda with the camera.

kim and biggles.

me and kim and the truck outside our house in cayo.

mick me and biggles and the 2 planes.

me and mick before takeoff.

the hills and clouds and sky and a bit of the windshield.

mick flying over succotz.

.

our wing and mick off in his plane in the distance

and again.

that's us to the left of the tree.

and last but not least, mr hairy tarantula and robert's hand in an attempt to show some perspective

cookies and spiders

for some strange reason my computer has gone all european, it keeps automatically redirecting google.com to google france all in french, and the yahoo page goes into german. i thought this might be some internet hacking by some angry non english speaking person who wants the international language of communication to be something other than english. but i think that was just my conspiracy theory paranoia getting the better of me. perhaps it's just a setting on the computer but je ne peux pas le figurer out....

so last monday me and robert were down in placencia - he was headed to the island for the week, and we were  doing some banking at belize bank before he went. there was a girl outside the bank, with braids in her hair and lots of homemade bracelets on. she was at the pay phone and had the phone in one hand and a piece of paper in the other, about to call somebody. it was my friend kim, and she was about to call me to say she was here! quel coincidence. i knew she was in the region, and was heading that way from livingston, guatemala, but i hadn't heard from her since my last email. she has been cycling from panama for the last 8 months, she started on a macmillan charity bike ride which went from panama to nicaragua, through costa rica, and from then on had been on her own. (we met on the mexico bike ride in march 2009). she is very cool, has been doing art projects with children along the way including 3 months painting a huge mural on a hostel wall in salvador. she is very chilled out and always smiling, which is pretty essential when you're doing such a huge ride on your own. she's met loads of nice people along the way and not had any trouble being a single female cyclist, and i think it's so inspiring that she's done all this on her own. kim, i salute you.

we hung out for the day in placencia and robert headed to the island to check on the work out there and supervise it. tuesday i took the bus back to cayo, with friends belinda (the yoga teacher) and jude (her husband) - they were headed to guatemela to look at tikal before heading back to canada. belinda was looking forward to eating sushi and other such things that don't exist in belize. kim set off on her bike towards dangriga, and from then to cayo to see us again. i hung out in cayo at the house there, did some cycling, spent most of my time at the lovely neighbours - len and cathy from canada. they are staying in belize for another 6 months, then maybe heading to uruguay. cathy makes the best cookies i have ever tasted anywhere in the world, i'm going to get the recipe from her. my baking tends not to be too successful, apart from that amazing loaf of brown bread i once made - remember helie? (helie was pretty upset as she was teaching me how to make bread and my loaf rose more than hers even though i'd been complaining the whole time what a procedure it was and couldn't we just go buy a loaf instead - i said it was beginner's luck - maybe it was reverse psychology and the bread wanted to prove me wrong by being amazing).

kim turned up again on the friday morning having cycled up the hummingbird and stayed with some interesting people along the way. friday i cycled to belmopan to meet robert who was headed back to cayo from the island. he got there before me, but fair enough he was in a car. it took me 1hr 45 mins, not too bad, it's 26 miles more or less. a little hilly but nothing serious. i had to stop to give my poor feet a break after an hour or so, they get really sore due to all their silly problems. i'm hoping this will sort out in the next 6 months and stop being a problem altogether then. 

we have had a tarantula in the house on 2 occasions recently. the first time he was sitting right by the toilet on the wall in the bathroom. we yelped a bit, and then robert put him a box and took him outside. we showed him to len and cathy first. tarantulas are pretty docile, they don't tend to run around really fast like little spiders do. for this reason i don't mind them too much. they really aren't aggressive, and will only bite you if they're really provoked apparently. i wouldn't want one in my house generally, but all in all i think they're cool. we found a really huge cricket type bug at the hangar which was pretty crazy too, he had bright red wings underneath when he flapped them, and long spindly legs. kind of like those praying mantis things.

in other news - we have eaten a lot of pancakes with orange and sugar; the climate has changed and got much cooler and less humid - this really really helps - we sleep with a blanket on now and no fan on; i have read a book called always a game - by a guy who made his living from gambling, and who len and cathy met through a house swap holiday thing, it's a really interesting book. i am now reading our man in havana by graham greene, and might carry on with it now with a pancake. we had an amazing ultralight flight yesterday morning. will post some pics on the next blog.

over and out x

first prize!

so we got a call the other day from the bank, saying we had won first prize in a raffle we had entered! imagine our delight. we went today to collect our prize, we had had some discussion about what it might be, i thought i had seen a toaster in there all wrapped up, alongside a casserole pot, but wasn't sure which would be ours. robert went to get it and came back with a blender all wrapped up in plastic with a large number 1 stapled to it, and some coloured bits of paper to make it look exciting. we have brought it with us to placencia.  we haven't tried it yet. robert had his photo taken in the bank when he picked it up, alongside a model from the bank. i think he found this pretty exciting but so far he hasn't made a big song and dance about it. we'll see if his picture makes it into the paper. the money from the raffle goes towards scotiabank's student scholarship fund, so that's nice.

there is a tropical storm on its way here, should be a category 1 hurricane by the time it reaches belize, which isn't too bad, winds of 70-90 miles per hour. probably quite hard to keep your umbrella up in those winds. it's currently down near nicaragua/honduras as i write this. we have no tv or internet at the house here in placencia so have gone to a nearby hotel to get online and watch tv. we should really have stayed in cayo which is much more hurricane proof but el jefe wanted to see his island so we came down here. hopefully all will be fine and we'll be back up north by the time it hits, due on saturday afternoon/evening.

i went cycling the other day and went up the hills on the way to the border 3 times. this wasn't fun, but it  made my legs a bit stronger, as i noticed the next time i went cycling i could go easier up the hills. i got a puncture on the ride earlier in the week, and fixed it with an inner tube of mick's, which the next day burst, and the one i fixed it with the valve broke, so i caved in and called our neighbours (as robert wasn't answering the phone) and they came to rescue me as they are very lovely. they baked us a banana bread too the other day, cathy makes THE best banana bread i've ever had. it has pineapple and nuts in too. that was on september 21st which is independence day in belize. from england. which interestingly enough was in 1981 the same year that sierra leone got independence from the uk. sierra leone also still has a british army presence just like belize. i wonder what happened in 1981 that made the uk get rid of its provinces. perhaps all that funny 80's music made the queen make some strong decisions concerning foreign policy.

we saw some really big bugs recently, i'll put photos on my next blog of them.

that's all from me from belize for today. bye from lucy pickles x

desert island discs

this little desert island is next door to our little bit bigger desert island. check out the water. just like you'd see in a swanky magazine, i never thought i'd be someone that appears in swanky magazines or has anything to do with swanky magazines. we had a swim here on our way back to the mainland, and saw the fleeting dolphins nearby.

today is belize national day - it is in memorial of the battle of st george's caye. i asked in the store if they did a reenactment of it. this would involve spanish and english and belizeans fighting each other with cannon balls and large galleons and bottles of rum tiddly pum pum. they don't. they just close the shops and banks and have parades and other such festive things. probably a few people will get killed in the city, but that's just a normal day.

last night there was loads of lightning swarming around - i was on my own as robert had gone to the city to do a load of manly things like pick up lumber and drive a trailer around (which came off in the middle of the road as some man hadn't connected it properly at the lumber shop - robert was mortified as the traffic all had to drive round him standing there trying to reattach truck to trailer). anyway the lightning and thunder just rumbled around for most of the night and never actually struck the house or turned into a storm.

i'm drinking a cup of hot milk as it helps you sleep. there is something in milk called melatonin which is also released by the brain while it sleeps, thus the connection between milk and sleeping. robert said hot milk makes him feel sick as it reminds him of when he was little and his uncle milked a cow straight into his mouth and it was all warm and gross. i don't like my milk anymore now actually either.

continental carrots and flying cows

hi everyone

so a few weeks ago i flew up to california, to sacramento, to be exact, to do some work with KT on the accounts. i had been getting in a real old mess with my accounting, primarily because i am not an accountant, nor do i wish to ever be one, so it's a combination of not being able to do it, and not wanting to do it. hmm interesting situation. anyway, we solved a lots of the problems and i felt a lot better after the 3 day trip. on the first flight from belize city to houston (which i pronounce who-ston, and robert tells me is hugh-ston), they brought round the snack. it was turkey or ham sandwich, i asked if there was a vegetarian option. she glared at me and in silence removed the sandwich from its little tray and passed me the tray complete with just a bag of ruffles and a sachet of mayonnaise. thank you, i said, frowning. the next snack from who-ston to sacramento was the same, but she was much smilier and more apologetic about my vegetarianism. i got a small bag of carrots and a sachet of mustard that time.

going through customs in america is so little fun. i think they try to make you really stressed out so that you will inadvertently blurt out that you are a terrorist when they ask you what the purpose of your visit is to their country. my customs man asked me what i was doing in belize for so long. i said oh just hanging out you know. right on, he said, i wish i could just hang out in belize. i thought you probably couldn't fit on the plane to get there you big fatty. but smiled and said yeah it's pretty nice. so how do you afford to do that? oh i saved up some money in the uk before i left, i answered breezily. right on he said. great fishing there. oh yeah it's amazing the fishing i said, thinking of that trip robert had videod for me with the fish having their eyeballs smashed out with a hammer and writhing around on the bottom of the boat. i didn't bother telling him about that. right on. so, lucy pickles, he said looking at my passport. yes that's me i said. ok. cute name. yeah, real cute. oh. thanks, i said. thinking this is weird first he's trying to catch me out now he's trying to flirt with me. they have really strange tactics those customs officers. well that was that, then you get herded along and screamed at by highly stressed and totally jobsworth airport workers, who tell you to take your laptop out of its bag and your shoes off and your belt off and your shoes don't go in a plastic box but your other things do. everyone asks why the heck that is, everywhere else you have to put your shoes in a box.they shout some shouty answers at you and roll their eyes. i drop my laptop on the floor in an apathetic protest against all the orders, and go as slowly as possible through the scanners to annoy them.

KT's daughter hayley had recently auditioned for american idol, she's into singing and playing the piano. i thought this was pretty cool. on the audition panel was russell brand, can you believe it. she didn't get through but he had said nice things about her singing. they had had to sit there all day waiting their turn, there were so many people there. KT's son kevin was also there, he is making the website for hatchet. he was planning on cycling to san diego the following week, which is pretty far but a really nice ride, down highway 1 like me and robert had driven last year in monty the motorhome. 

we went on a brief shopping trip to walmart to get some things (knickers being one of them, i don't need luxurious knickers - you get 6 for 4 dollars at walmart). we went to barnes and noble too, the bookshop, but didn't have much time to browse as we still had work to do. i got a book for my neighbour in cayo, called eat pray love. it's a film featuring julia roberts, out in the states i guess not in uk yet. i read the whole book on the way home, it's really good i loved it. she basically is going through a divorce and depression and goes away for a year to figure things out, and spends time in italy eating pizza, then india doing yoga and meditation, then bali doing other nice things. that makes it sound pretty vacuous which it really isn't, it's a real journey and interesting insight into a whole load of things. i also got 2 more graham greene books, the comedians which is set in haiti - the only novel i know of which is set in haiti, and our man in havana, which is of course set in cuba.

up in cayo we have been doing some really nice early morning flights in the ultralight, i like flying low over the cows and watching them look up dumbly at us as we whizz past. they are really cute, and i hope they know i'm their friend and don't eat them. robert got a cool new high definition camera and we got some cool video and pictures. in other news in cayo, our shower set on fire one night - it's one of those that has an electric heater attached to it as we don't have hot water, and it had just got all old and shady and the next thing there were these sparks flying out of the shower and flames. robert said i think we pour water on it. i said i don't think we do if it's an electrical fire, so we flapped at it with a towel which put it out without electrocuting us.

and here i am in placencia today, where it's the height of the low and slow season, so not much is happening of any note apart from lots of languishing around and sweating and melting. i am trying to write the business plan for the island, for the owner's next visit next week. i am not a business person so this is one big large hassle and stress. all i really want to do is cycle and do some yoga. i got some great new pedals for my bike the other day in cayo and had some really good rides. i rode the hummingbird on sunday on our way down south, then we jumped in a river and had a picnic. on that ride i was going down a hill, quite fast, and a bee flew right into my groin and stung me. i haven't ever been stung by a bee before, so i didn't mind as i now had an interesting first bee sting story. it hurt a little, and i had to get the sting-y bit out myself as it was still there. i still like bees. did you know the colour of honey depends on the type of flower used to make it?


we went to the island on monday which was pretty cool, the 3 cabins are finished out there now, and the restaurant is nearly done. the boat ride was really smooth and we saw a few dolphins at one point, but only fleetingly. they are still doing lots of construction out there (not the dolphins, the workers i mean), but a lot has been done since my last trip. i'll put some pictures up soon.

that's all my updates for now, i'm going home to eat some beans and eggs for breakfast now and try to figure out the payroll for friday which is payday. i have to make a special mention of sarah bullock and rod and nick and john who are cycling to italy, all the way to brindisi, they finish on saturday i believe, they will have done 3 weeks by then. totally amazing and cool, and all for macmillan cancer support - you can sponsor them on their website here: http://www.justgiving.com/rodnickjonsarahdotiptotoe

thanks and goodbye for now from extremely hot and languid belize. xx

the doldrums

it has been very hot and still here the last few days, with no wind or rain, perhaps some in the night but that’s no use as it’s then hot and still again during the day. we have mainly been staying inside with the air conditioning on, i’ve been doing my accounting (the numbers add up even less in this kind of weather). this is what it must be like when you are on a boat and go into the doldrums where there’s no wind. robert once sailed back from hawaii to the mainland, los angeles, which took 21 days, on a sailboat that had just raced the same route but the other way and much quicker. they went through 4 days of storms, where they had to strap themselves onto the boat so they didn’t get swept overboard when the waves hit. then they had 4 days of doldrums, where they didn’t move at all as it was totally windless. they ran out of food nearing the end of the journey, and all got a huge craving for ice cream which they indulged when they go on shore, apart from one boy who by that time had gone a bit mad apparently, and didn’t want ice cream.

this reminds me of the area called the horse latitudes. this is a particular latitude where the wind is always very calm, so much so that the sailors used to have to throw their horses overboard as they didn’t have enough food to keep them alive on board ship. i guess they didn’t kill them to eat them as they didn’t have freezer space to keep the meat fresh.

it was around this time last year that we left belize to go up to montana and spent those 3 months in monty the motorhome. she is still parked in mexico waiting for us to come back one day. how i loved getting off the plane in to the drizzle and grey skies and huge mountainous scenery, it was truly amazing after the belizean weather and lifestyle.

last night we watched the hurt locker, the film that won the best picture at the oscars, to the disgust of james cameron who thought his avatar would win. well it’s quite obvious that the hurt locker is a more important film in lots of ways, dealing as it does with the iraq war and war in general and what it does to people.

here is a quote that actually referred to a powerpoint presentation:

some problems in the world are not bullet-izable. H.R. McMaster, Brigadier General, US Army, Iraq War veteran (b. 1962)

this week we met a girl called steph, she come to yoga sometimes but we’ve never really met her. she used to have probably the most interesting job i’ve ever heard of and is really cool. she is here in placencia doing volunteer work and teaching and doing fire dancing and things like that. i asked her if she used to  be a teacher in the states. no way, she used to train surgeons to use bio-medical surgical robotic equipment. ie the robots that go in and do the operations instead of the surgeon, so she had to re train surgeons to do the same operations they’d been doing for years, but by directing the robots to do them. robots don’t drink and therefore wouldn’t have shaky hands, so it removes the chance of human error and makes the operations much quicker and safer. she used to demonstrate the equipment on live pigs (anaesthetised), she once saw a person having brain surgery and felt pretty sick, but other than that she is totally not squeamish, you could hardly do that job if you were. she said they are going to be using nano bots soon, which are like tiny weeny robots, so she might go back to work for them again as that’s pretty exciting.

america's got talent

so, one of the things i have always hoped wouldn't happen to me has happened. a few days ago i was putting on my sandals, with bare feet, and my right toe touched something soft in there. maybe it's a leaf, i thought, and squirmed my foot back out. on shaking my shoe upside down, i found a large dead spider, it's legs all bent back, like it had folded its arms, or was doing a yoga move. ugh yuk, that made me do a little dance around my shoe for a while and feel really squeamish. i brushed him outside with the broom and thought well it could have been worse, it could've been a scorpion, or a snake, or an alive spider.

we are in the city tonight, trying to find which channel america's got talent is on (like the x factor but of all kinds of 'talent', not just singing - sharon osbourne is one of the judges, i like her. piers morgan is one of them, he's a total wally, i think he's going for the simon cowell style, but it doesn't work. anyway,  we took robert's son tim to the airport today to fly home to albuquerque. this was sad, as it was really nice to have him here, he's been here 6 weeks. he likes playing computer games, and is doing computer animation at college. when he arrived here in june, they asked him where are you staying in belize, and he said i don't know, because he didn't know where we live. they made him sit there until he knew, and he saw a van saying radisson hotel, so he said oh i'm staying at the radisson. when we went to mick's to swim in the pool tim swam a whole length under water. robert gets a little bit competitive dad syndrome when tim does things like that, so he did it too. they had a push up contest one night too after some drinks, which was very amusing. they were going to carry it on with a sprint down the road, but i warned them it was pitch black, the road was potholed, and they had had some drinks, so maybe it wasn't the best idea.

last week we moved house again. we're now living back in cayo in the west near the guatemala border, where we used to live last year. we are renting a place from luz, the lady from columbia. this is because the plan is to fly the planes there from the runway and hangar that robert built. there isn't a hangar in placencia we can use otherwise we would stay there. the ultralights arrived from australia the other day, which robert was very excited about - it took them about 5 weeks to get here on a ship. he has flown one of them so far, it has a white wing and goes really fast, they flew over me while i was sleeping yesterday morning, it sounded like they were going about 100 miles an hour. i like living in cayo as i can cycle, there's some good hills, and our friend mick lives there down the road, who i cycle with. the house we're renting is actually for sale, and some people came to look round it with a view to buying it. we told them it was awful and they'd hate living there, because we don't want them to buy it. it is a lovely house in a really nice place, with tons of nice trees and flowers, and birds, it's a really nice place to wake up in the morning.

while in the city last week we went for some ice cream at the western dairies shop. there was a little sign up saying no samples. after tasting the ice cream i now realise that if they were to give out samples, they would not actually sell any ice cream, as it was disgusting. mine was chocolate chip, but actually they should have called it salt and small hard blobs. i gave mine to tim who ate it after his first one, even though he hated both of them. there were a bunch of 10 year old kids lingering around outside passing the school holiday time kicking the pavement and stuff, robert shouted to them all the come in. the ringleader kid for a second looked all defensive as he thought he was getting a telling off, then the communal penny dropped all at once, and they all pegged it in to the ice cream shop and straight to the counter, shouting their orders out. this cheered us right up after our let down of an ice cream, and was worth every penny to see a bunch of temporarily happy belizean kids. they all said thank you very politely, which really impressed me too.

i have finished reading the quiet american by graham greene. he's really a genius, all the books i've read by him have been amazing. sometimes i feel my intelligence level doesn't quite match his, as i have to read some paragraphs a few times and i'm still not sure what he's saying, it's so profound. this book is set during the vietnam war and is also a love/murder story and is really very good as both a novel about the vietnam war and about love and jealousy and innocence. i'm now reading a book of essays by a a gill, that english journalist who writes about food in the times, and other things too. he's really a great writer, very acerbic and harsh though, and like someone on the back of the book says, much as i admire him, i really don't think i'd like to meet him. there are lots of travel essays in there, one about haiti, before the earthquake - it sounded like absolute hell on earth then so imagine it now. and one about a man who looks after the beetle collection in the natural history museum. another man that works there, his job is to take the little pins out of the beetles that keep them lined up in their glass cases, and replace them with new pins. this is because the old pins are made of brass which contains copper, and the copper was reacting with the fatty tissue in the beetles' bodies and making a gas which was making the beetles explode! this book was written a few years ago but i'm sure that man is still replacing those pins as there are 12 million beetle samples there.

[we have found america's got talent - it's debatable - at the moment it's an old hippy singing with his guitar and his dog is there, and i think the dog is somehow meant to be acting out the song words, but all he's doing is sitting looking at his owner, not knowing what to do, poor little puppy. he's probably never been on stage before in front of all those people. before that was a 12 year old who was amazing at skipping, and after that was a man juggling burning pizza dough].

here are some other things we've seen recently:
* a white london hackney cab in belmopan. weird. we peered through the window, it was all like a cab inside too.
* a meteorite! i didn't see it. we were out on southwater caye, an island about 14 miles from dangriga (see map on previous blog for location). it was robert's birthday, and we'd had dinner and went to look at the stars, which were incredible out there, with no light pollution nearby. anyway i was looking for the plough, or big dipper, or small dipper, whatever they call it, and robert and tim suddenly screamed as they had seen a big ball of light going across the sky with red flames coming off behind it and it lasted for ages. i told robert i'd arranged it for his birthday. i think it must have been a meteorite burning up on entering the atmosphere. i kept looking for another one as i felt a bit left out, but all i saw was some lightning behind a cloud.
* some spider monkeys in a tree at xunantunich - how much nicer it always is to see animals in their natural habitat rather than in a cage at a zoo. i also thought this when snorkelling at southwater caye - i felt like i was in a cartoon film, like finding nemo. you wouldn't believe the amount and variety and colour and size of fish down there. a whole school of black fish with blue electricity swirling round their fins went past - robert swam down into them and they moved apart then swarmed back together again. i saw a spotty sting ray at a distance which was pretty cool too.
* a black snake, seen by tim, when we were in toledo. apparently there is a rhyme which goes - red and yellow will kill a fellow, then something else about other colours which the person telling us couldn't remember. i guess this black one was safe as it isn't red or yellow.
* us eating yoghurt with plastic forks, as we didn't have any spoons. we had tried to buy some plastic spoons but they only sold tiny little ones by the sack of 10000 load, so we grabbed a few forks instead. it worked ok as we had put granola in the yoghurt to give it more structure.

well that is today's update. tomorrow we are back to placencia to get the rest of our stuff for living in cayo, after doing some work related things in the beauty that is belize city, we'll spend a few days in placencia and do some yoga classes, then head back to cayo at the weekend. hope everyone is well. i'll let you know if it turns out america has any talent. xx

national perspective

just to add a bit of contextualisation i have put a map of belize above. at the very moment of writing, i am in belize city which used to be the capital. the capital is now belmopan, a boring town full of government offices full of unsmiling government officials ready to stamp government forms with rubber stamps. belmopan is higher up and further inland than belize city and thus more hurricane resistant. today it rained for an hour in belize city and the streets were totally flooded, little children waded around in murky dirty water, sewers were spewing up through the depths, it was pretty unhealthy, but nobody really minded it seemed. it's just part of life here, these things happen and they just sit around and deal with it. they don't bother making the sewerage or drainage any better, through lack of money or lack of initiative who knows.  there is currently quite a lot of dengue fever around, it is caused by stagnant water producing a bacteria which mosquitoes then pick up and transmit. we have been covering ourselves in deet to keep the mozzies away. the symptoms you get come out worse at night, the same time the mozzies come out. weird huh.

you will also see placencia further south, which is where we mainly live. it is a long peninsula, quite vulnerable really. if a tsunami came along we could start running to the other side of town but there is a lagoon there so it wouldn't help much. i would probably just run to the amazing ice cream shop, run by an italian couple, on the main street.

north of placencia is dangriga, which is one of the first places the garifuna people settled. they came over originally from africa as slaves to work in venezuela and colombia on the sugar plantations. then they revolted and ran away to san vicente, an island in the lesser antilles (what are antilles does anyone know?), where they were then chased off, and they eventually came up the coast of central america to belize and honduras and the mosquito coast of nicaragua. we bought a nice table in dangriga, and lots of lumber to build a new stairway in placencia with, and also some pirated dvds - one was the michael jackson this is it film, but with russian subtitles, and filmed a bit wonkily in the cinema. also in dangriga they have a garifuna settlement day in november where they do some really cool drumming and dancing.

south of placencia is a place called monkey river which we tried to get to on a boat the other day but the waves got all wavy and we had to abandon the trip. this was the one where i thought it would have been nice if jesus had appeared and calmed the waves, but no such luck. robert said if it had got worse we would have put our life jackets on. tim said we'd just swim to the nearest desert island for the night. i said humph i really don't like this boat ride. i'm not sure why monkey river appears on this map, as i don't think there's much there, other than a man who has an engine for sale. big creek, which is marked next to it, is also nothing other than a port really. there are 4 places round there - big creek, monkey river, mango creek, and independence, and they are all basically the same place. if someone says big creek and you don't know where they mean, they just say well it's the same as monkey river, which is the same as mango creek or independence. oh, you say, i'm truly enlightened now.

to the left (also known as west) you will see san ignacio where we spent the last weekend. this is where we lived last year, it's a few miles from guatemala as you can see. it is in the district of cayo. i like cayo a lot, it is very pretty and has good little hills for cycling, and an amazing cake shop. it is also inland far enough for hurricanes not to be a real threat, and it is our hurricane escape plan destination. there is a ruin there called xunantunich, me and tim rode horses to it yesterday. my horse was called jack, and went pretty slowly and a bit sideways. he liked stopping to eat grass. tim's horse was dutch, that was his name not his nationality, he went fast, and one of his stirrups broke near the end of the ride, so then he went slow again in case tim fell off. he wanted to go fast all the time, he was that kind of horse. i think all horses like running, it's what they would do if they could just do whatever they wanted all the time. mick was telling us you have to file down horses' teeth every so often otherwise they get too big and they can't eat the grass. i asked him what they do if there's no vets around to file them, do they just stop eating grass and die. he said i was a trip.

half moon caye is the shape of a half moon, and lighthouse reef has a lighthouse on it. the blue hole is a large blue hole, a sink hole in the ocean, a very famous diving spot. i hear that it isn't actually that beautiful it's just quite unusual. there isn't much to see the deeper you go they say, the fish are all higher up. jacques costeau dived there back in the day, in fact was maybe the first person to dive there. 

our island is somewhere between the y of monkey river and the e of placencia, in the gulf of honduras. it's pretty far out, but there are other islands around not too far from it. in the north of this map you will see a large cruise ship in the sea there. there is a beach in placencia in town that is full of trash, apparently the cruise ships just dump their trash overboard, and this could be the result of it. they get fined robert says, but the 3rd time they're caught they get shut down, so they say, but i bet they just pay them off and keep dumping their trash. this is all speculation by the way and might be incorrect but doesn't it make interesting reading. who needs true facts when you can just make things up. or perhaps not, as it might be true. who could possibly know in a country like this.....

well i hope you feel geographically educated now. if you have any questions about my map please let me know. that's all for now from belize city.

toledo pictures

this bicycle clearly cannot read.

action shot at jaguar lanes. we got better as the night progressed, thanks to a lesson from dale who owns the place. robert got over 100 on one of the 2 games, the highest score you can get is 300, so that's not bad. we all got a few strikes (where you get all 10 skittles down). we ate the worst onion rings i've ever had, there was no onion in them at all.

the beautiful swimming hole at tranquility lodge in toledo. that's robert swimming, tim got in next and i was last as i needed to see if they got eaten by any monsters.

a very cool chocolate / pizza outlet in pg (punta gorda).

me outside out cabin at tranquility lodge. the rain had dripped through the thatch in the night, it was huge rain. those thatches are really strong and so well made, i love them. it's like being in a little fairytale house, like hansel and gretel.

some local jipijapa baskets and wooden jewellery for sale.

indiana jones climbing up a dynamite exploded pile of old rocks at lubaantum. we got to the top and said isn't it funny you're allowed to climb up these wobbly old ruins, you'd think they'd not let you. then we got down and saw the sign that said no climbing on the ruins. phew lucky we hadn't broken our legs as we wouldn't be able to sue them.

check out the roots on that massive tree.

pondering the jungle. i was probably checking for hurricanes in the distance.

a house with very long hair, it's gone in his eyes.

a traditional mayan red rooster.

the view from machaca hill lodge. funny hills in the distance. i think these hills are known as karst, which is: a landscape shaped by the dissolution of a layer or layers of soluble bedrock, usually carbonate rock such as limestone or dolomite. interesting huh. not sure i understand but they are cool hills. i think dolomite would be a good name for a pet dog.

this is a ceiba tree, also known as a cotton wood. this is the national tree of guatemala. belize's national tree is the mahogany. the british came here to log it, and also they logged a tree called logwood, a very tree like name if ever there was one. they started logging the trees for their dye in fact, during the textile revolution. i hear a rumour that they british army will maybe not be continuing to have a base here in belize for training. but i also hear a rumour that the us army will come instead, they are doing some kind of pilotless helicopter training over the thick jungle here for some no doubt top secret thing somewhere. that is probably top secret information i've just divulged so keep it to yourselves please.

a very old stone with mayan carvings on it. these are really well preserved, but i couldn't tell you what they say. those bits with vertical lines and dots to their left are numbers, the lines are 5s and the dots are 1s, so that one at the bottom is 18, it's 3 lines and 3 dots. there are lots of different mayan calendars, and there is a very important date coming up which is when 3 of these calendars all end on the same day. they are all of different durations the calendars, and intricately linked, and many mayans believe something huge will happen when they all meet up, it is around december 20th 2012. put the date in your diaries and make sure you've done all the things on your to do list by the 19th in case the world ends.

these are cocoa beans, they have been shelled as you can see, having been roasted. they don't taste very nice in this format.

robert grinding up the cocoa beans. this is done using volcanic stone, i guess it's very strong. we ground them quite a few times, it's a good workout for your arms.

me with a bag of cocoa paste, on the tour bus back to our resort. i haven't used the cocoa yet, it's still in the freezer, i have a recipe for brownies from mum and helie so i will see how that goes this week.

a large spikey round plant. you wouldn't want to fall on this plant.

abelina the chocolate queen

we just got back from a trip to punta gorda, down in the toledo district, further south than where we are in placencia. i have always wanted to go down there as it's all rural mayan villages and more traditional and less touristy etc. we took a little ice chest with us, mainly so we could take the chocolate brownie supply without it melting. one of the 3 brownies got some water in it when the ice melted, but the other 3 were fine, you'll be pleased to hear.

we passed through lots of villages with thatched roofs, and washing hanging out, and little children hanging out, standing looking at us or just standing around, pigs wandering around, and chickens with skinny legs. we quickly noticed that toledo is the district with the most well mowed lawns in belize. they are not mowed actually, they are chopped with machetes, you wouldn't believe how short they get that grass it's amazing. we had a few discussions about where to go and what to do, we had a moon guidebook and 2 maps, like proper tourists, even though we do in fact live here. we stopped for lunch (i have re-become vegetarian so i just ate the rice beans fried plantain and beans - no stewed chicken for me anymore: i will still eat fish as it doesn't have arms and legs, that's the rules). we bought a few little baskets, these baskets are made from a palm called jipijapa, they boil the leaves, dry them out, and then weave them into baskets/place mats/tortoises etc. i have become obsessed with these baskets and can't stop buying them. i figure that's fine as it's all supporting the local mayan families that make them, and there is a lot of skill involved.

the southern highway that you take down through toledo is a really nice newly paved road, built with help from the kuwait arab economic fund, weirdly enough. i wonder about these strange alliances you seem to find here in belize. i hear rumours that the road is supposed to carry on and go to guatemala, thus making a 2nd road border crossing - the only one currently is up in cayo in the north west. this would be pretty cool, but would potentially hugely affect the largely untouched beauty and ruralism of the toledo district, and perhaps not be a good thing in that respect. we shall see - i hugely doubt it will happen anytime soon, with this being belize and all that.

after a few wrong turnings and bad signpost experiences and finding the first place we tried to stay at was closed, we found tranquility lodge. this appeared closed too, so we sulked a bit then wandered around and found a swimming hole. the water was murky so it took me about 15 minutes to actually get all the way in after checking all around for monsters. as we had been standing there reviewing the situation there was a big rustling across the other bank of the river and an iguana going about 40mph flew out of the jungle and did a spectacular dive into the river. see robert, THAT is why i don't want to get in there, all sorts of things could be swimming around or about to attack us from above. you have to consider what that iguana was running so fast away from - there could be a jaguar right behind it. there wasn't, but you do have to be constantly on guard, there can be danger all around you if you just look for it you know. anyway, it was pretty nice to swim although a few fish nibbled my legs and some suspicious looking twigs floated past.

we discovered tranquility lodge was in fact open, the owners were sleeping. they awoke and came to find us at the river. turns out that i thought i had found 2 pretty unusual names recently - kitty fox and candy powers, as mentioned on last blog. the owners of this place are called the nales. what else would you name your son if you were mr and mrs nale, other than rusty. yes it was rusty nale. and his wife sheila, which isn't funny. they were very lovely people, and full of information of how to run a resort as they had used to run a hotel in san pedro. they do some work with the villagers there and had a good gift shop supply of jipijapa baskets, which i was pretty excited about.

that night we went to punta gorda for dinner. it is known in belize as pg. you will remember i had found a large tanker in big creek called lucy pg, well i guess it was from punta gorda. we ate some fish and rice and looked at the sea, and also at guatemala and honduras over the other side of the sea. we talked to teresa our waitress, who has 9 brothers and sisters. this is quite common here to have huge families like that. i guess it's a safer bet that they'll all be able to help look after the parents if there's more of them. pg is a cool little seaside fisherman town, like placencia but a lot less touristy and americanised and developed. we liked what we saw of it. friendly people.

on arrival back at tranquility lodge we encountered a local man brandishing a machete on our little road, which was a bit unnerving to see in the dark, he was just standing there... sheila and rusty had gone out so the caretaker was there at the lodge - he had his crazy guatemalan marimba music on at such full blast that robert had to scream at him to get him to turn it down. suddenly tranquility lodge felt a little bit horror film esque. this wasn't helped by a huge thunder and lightning storm which lasted most of the night, complete with rain coming in through the thatch and dripping on our heads. all was fine in the morning, and it was a really nice place to stay apart from that strange little interlude. we got some good ideas for our resort and some good info from sheila and rusty. i love the whole thatched roof rustic cabin style, but unfortunately that isn't going to be the look of the cabins on the island. i hope to one day live in a thatched cabin, but don't think it'd work so well in england where you need central heating and insulation etc.

after breakfast we bought some more baskets, and then went to lubantuum, a local maya ruin site. it means 'place of the fallen stone'. you have to drive to san pedro, a mayan village off the main road, through some dirty pot holed roads. lubantuum was first discovered/excavated in the late 1800s, by a man called william gann, who brought his dynamite and blew the top of the temple, presumably to see what was inside. i'm pretty sure whatever was inside got blown up too. he wasn't what you'd call an actual archeologist, and people must have got pretty cross with him about that dynamite incident. we climbed on the rubbly piles of stones, commenting on how wobbly they are, and how surprising there were no signs saying don't climb on the ruins. when we got down we saw a sign saying don't climb on the ruins. oops. nobody saw us though. we spoke to the ticket man on the way out, who was full of information about the site. we bought some clay whistles he'd made, based on original clay whistles from that area. he played one for us, he was pretty good. he told us about a crystal skull they'd found there, which was quite a mystery as to what it was and why it was there. there is one in guatemala too apparently. the lady who found it there was the daughter of the next archeologist who worked there, and perhaps they planted it there for her to find as it was her 16th birthday. she is dead now, but it has been passed on to her son i believe.

after all this we went to machaca hill lodge down the road, which is a swanky resort by a river, in the jungle. it has a pool and a nice restaurant, and they brought some garifuna drummers up for the evening which was very impressive. the main drummer guy was doing workshops for kids over the summer and there were 2 young kids with him who had only been learning for 2 months and were amazing. then we ate dinner and then went to sleep, to be woken up by a whole load of howler monkeys outside in the jungle. robert told tim the noise was jaguars fighting, and tim believed him as he has never heard howler monkeys before. i told robert he was pretty mean to do this, but he said that when he first got to belize that's what some people had told him that noise was so it was fine to tell tim too. it was quite funny but then we had to tell tim they weren't jaguars, i think he was a bit disappointed.

so this morning we did a little tour from machaca lodge. it was to a maya ruin called nim li punnit, which is up the road from lubantuum, and is pretty cool too. it was discovered in 1976 when they were doing some oil exploration in the area. it means big hat, as the king of that site, as depicted on the carvings there, has a big hat on all the time. there were some really well preserved stelae (carved stones) there, with lots of still undeciphered mayan glyphs. i guess maybe they'll never decipher them, which is pretty crazy. we saw some leaf cutter ants, and an avocado tree, a guava tree, and a tree that grows a red fruit known locally as knife and fork.

after this we went to see how they make chocolate in a local village called san felipe. first we had to shell the cocoa beans, that abelina had previously roasted in the oven. then you winnow the shelled beans away from the bits of shell remaining, by throwing them in a bowl in a special way so the bits of shell fall on the floor. when we tried it the beans fell on the floor too. then you grind the beans on a metate, which is a volcanic rock stone. abelina said her metate had been in the family for over 100 years. you have to grind them 6 times to get them very fine, we just did it 3 times as it takes a while. then you have ground up cocoa paste, which you can dry out through cheese cloth to make cocoa butter, and cocoa powder. we bought some chocolate wine (around 8%, very sweet, like pudding wine) and i got a recipe for chocolate brownies to make with our chocolate paste. this was all really interesting. we will buy her chocolate to sell on our island.

after all that we went back for lunch at machaca then a swim then had to leave to come back home and get back on with all the work we have to do for the resort. it was very interesting to see a whole new part of belize, and especially to see it as a tourist with a guide, it made a nice change to do something like that with a guide rather than to just drive around and discover things for yourself, and it was all good research to see how different resorts work and run and what activities they offer and prices and food etc. there is a lot to think about now, and we really have to get on with it. we have to do a business plan, and think about hiring staff and furnishing the place and what prices to offer and what activities and how to advertise and market it. eeek all a bit serious and responsible, but hopefully fun.

anyway, aside from all that excitement, when we got back to placencia tonight we bumped into a really cool couple we had bumped into on our way out of town on saturday morning. they are cycling from san diego to santiago, and writing a blog about it (www.ericandmerilee.blogspot.com). they are brother and sister - me and tim thought they were, but robert said they had to be a couple. wow they must be really good friends as well as brother and sister to do that journey together, i think if i did that with my brother we would last about 2 days before we'd fall out, even though we like each other. they are going to pg next, then on the boat to guatemala and further south. i was jealous, as usual, as that is what i really want to do. one day it will happen, you can't always do what you want the whole time i guess, and at least for now i can save up some money with this job to buy a really good touring bike....

i got totally bitten by mosquitoes in toledo and have been itching constantly for the last 2 days. going to do my hurricane check now before bed. pictures to come of all our adventures the last few days. bye for now xx

dinner in the dark

last night the power went off just as i had started cooking penne pasta with garlic courgettes (am trying to be vegetarian again, which generally is going well other than the sausage pizza i recently ate - it wasn't that good either). i carried on cooking in the dark with my headtorch on, which made me feel like i was camping, but in a house. we ate it with our headtorches, out on the balcony, and it was really tasty, like camping food always is. the power stayed off for about an hour. we've had lots of stormy weather recently, the internet tower over in guatemala was hit by lightning so our internet went down for a few days.

i am currently at this moment also doing the accounting for the last few days, this is known as multi-tasking. i'm hoping the numbers will add up but they never quite seem to, naughty numbers. i even bought a bigger calculator with a bigger screen and bigger numbers, but it didn't help.

tim (robert's son) is painting a wooden carving we bought. we have a few of them and will decorate the island with them, once they're painted. i'll put a before and after picture of them once done. if we prefer the before version i guess we can sand off all the paint.

animal related news:
we found a few sea horses (caballitos de mar) the other day, and kept them in a bucket to put in an aquarium, but the aquarium never materialised so we freed them back into the water where they were much happier than in the bucket.

we watched kevin the fisherman chop up and gut and fillet a 90 pound grouper, down on the pier. we bought some snapper fillets from him and cooked them, super fresh, they were really good. frozen fish is so rubbish by comparison. robert went fishing with doug and chris and they all caught a few barracudas. robert videod part of the trip, and it turns out not only do you have to hook the poor little fish but once it's lying on the floor of the boat you have to smash its head in with a hammer to give it a nicer quicker death. this made me feel a bit sick, i'm very glad i didn't go with them that day. kevin the fisherman said that the fishermen eat the eyeballs and brains of fish, to make them think and see like fish. i said yuk that's gross. it's kind of like eating carrots to make you see in the dark but not quite.

a gekko went in my guitar for a while, so i didn't play it. tim plays guitar better than me, so i let him play it until i was sure the gekko wasn't in there anymore. i haven't been playing guitar much, but when we went bowling the bowling alley lady was playing her guitar which reminded me to play mine so i did a bit. i haven't learnt any new songs or chords, streets of london is still my favourite.

a spotty manta ray swam really close to us when we went out to the island the other day and had gone for a swim. i was freaked out in case it was a little shark, it's hard to tell when you don't have your glasses on. so i swam/stumbled back to shore through the prickly sea bed and sat up on a fallen palm tree in safety. i didn't want to meet a steve irwin style death.

we watched big fish, by tim burton, with ewan mcgregor. this film is very cool. technically this isn't animal related news, but it almost is. 

boat related news:
i saw a massive tanker over in big creek called lucy pg

we went on a really rough boat ride to try to get to a place called monkey river, where we were supposed to be buying an engine for a boat. we couldn't find monkey river in the end, then the waves got big and it was getting dark and i got scared and started yelping. carlos the boat driver did really well navigating the waves and robert was good at telling me everything was really fine. i still thought that was the end though. it made me think of that bible story when jesus comes out and calms the waves. where is jesus when you need him?

name related news:
we spoke to a lady called kitty fox, at the insurance department. she should be in a bond film with a name like that.
we met a lady called candy powers at a place where we bought a trailer for the new truck. this is also a pretty cool name. she had 10 cats, one was fat and had one eye only and was half blind in it, he did heavy cat breathing too. she had founded the placencia humane society 10 years ago.

sports related news:
well we didn't win the world cup, and lance is not doing well in the tour de france. he's somewhere like 22nd, 17 minutes behind andy schleck the leader. this is quite sad, as this is his last year of cycling. he has had bad luck for sure, i'm convinced he could still win it otherwise. if all the other riders ahead of him crashed or died then he could still win it this year.

random piece of news:
after the big storm we had (tropical storm alex), we could see honduras, which we hadn't been able to see before. the storm must have blown away the moisture in the air and made things clearer. we saw it for a few days over the water: we are in the bay of honduras here.

black books

i was going to write a proper blog update this weekend, but i have spent all day doing accounting and filing for the business, which was exhausting and it still isn't finished. i watched the tour de france during the morning, today chavanel won, which is nice as he's from france. lance is 18th i think currently because of getting a flat tire on the cobbles the other day. i am determined to go to watch it in real life next year in a campervan.

i am still reading my book called i, rigoberta menchu, an indian woman in guatemala. on further research i found a damning article on the internet which claims it is a fictitious communist propaganda document. she describes in detail the torture by the army of her brother and mother, and their deaths, and her father's death in the spanish embassy seige in guatemela city. she won a nobel peace prize in 1992 and lives in exile in mexico continuing to support the indigenous mayans in guatemala. i figured that even if it is a largely fictitious document, there is still the truth which is that the guatemalan army, supported by the american cia, and led by crazed military dictators, massacred most of the mayan indians for 30 years until 1996.

anyway, on a happier note, we went out the other night and had some drinks and swam in the sea with dire straits playing on full blast in the car, how retro. i haven't drunk lots for a while so was consequently very sick the next day.  a new bar has opened in placencia, called the barefoot bar, it's all bright colours and right on the main street. we kind of watched the uruguay germany match today, but those horns are too annoying so we zoned out, plus i was in an accounting frenzy so couldn't concentrate.

i will write more soon sorry for the boring update for today. i hear there is a heatwave in the uk. here there has been lots of rain and wind, there are lots of what they call tropical waves happening out in the caribbean sea, which sometimes turn into hurricanes, but often just bring a ton of rain and wind and thunder and lightning. i do a daily hurricane check which involves checking 4 different weather websites.

ok over and out for now. early night so i can cycle in the morning.

the weatherman

the other day at the market at maya beach we bought some dvds, one of them was the weatherman with nicolas cage. we haven't watched it yet, but for the last 12 hours i've been obsessing about satellite pictures on the belize weather bureau website, and the tv is staying on the weather channel all night long. there is a tropical storm/depression 270 miles away, south east, heading north west. robert says a tropical storm is really nothing to worry about, it's not even a category 1 hurricane. robert was in a category 5 hurricane in north carolina once, and was fine. but robert is like that he has all these stories like his life is one big action movie, starring tom selleck. i'm just not used to this extreme weather nonsense. i prefer category 5 drizzle or fog or just plain old grey skies then sunny a bit then rainy again then who knows what it's english weather ooo isn't it weird and unpredictable, but at least it doesn't keep you awake at night worrying about your roof flying off or a tsunami going through your kitchen.

anyway isn't that ironic nicolas cage. and did you know that nicolas cage is the nephew of francis ford coppola, who owns some swanky resorts out here. apparently coppola first came to belize to try to persuade belize to become a high tech communications hub. i don't know what that really means, i imagine lots of phone boxes everywhere and phone lines. i read it in my new moon handbook to belize, which incidentally is a pretty good guide book, full of interesting facts. 

we're in belize city today as we came up to collect robert's son timothy. i have met him before in new mexico where he lives - last year when we drove monty the motorhome through the states - and he had swine flu so we couldn't hang out with him. he is quite like robert, he's the same size and shape. we went to watch his plane land at the airport and then tried to spot him getting off it. i don't normally watch planes land because i don't like them, but it's actually quite good fun and a bit weird as they are so large and just appear out of the clouds and plop down onto the ground without the world ending. it does amaze me quite a lot. i think if i watch enough of them landing it'll act like a vaccination against being scared of them.

so anyway we are watching the weather channel as i mentioned. it's showing some parts of the states where there are always tornadoes - tornado alley i think they call it. why would you live there, knowing that tornadoes go there all the time? why? why? it must be really cheap rent is all we could think of. our tropical storm is apparently going to affect honduras, nicaragua, cuba, jamaica, and the cayman islands. so i think we'll be fine.it's headed towards the yucatan peninsula in mexico, to check out some of the mayan ruins probably. i wrote a hurricane survival kit list today, we need to get lots of water and tins of beans and a tin opener, and some blankets. i said we should get wellies and socks too, but they laughed at that. we would go west to chaa creek near the guatemala border and we'd be fine there. they're predicting a really active hurricane season this year but they always say things like that don't they.

in other news i am now reading a book called i, rigoberta menchu, which is a book about a guatemalan lady who survived the genocide there in the 70s/80s, and is kind of a political activist about it all now. it's making me want to go back to guatemala and do something useful, in a kind of i want to save the world type way. i am still also reading the italo calvino book, and that vietnam book.

in work related news, the workers have finished fixing the dock in placencia. we got the shopping list from the cook out on the island and we sent him the vegetables already, which he complained about, he said they were there too early. jeez there is no pleasing some people. so we ordered the chickens for monday, but they arrived today, so i guess he'll complain about that too.

i cycled yesterday morning, and knocked a good few minutes off my previous time. last night i dreamt about scorpions scurrying around all night, not sure what that means. i had eaten some cheese with my dinner which probably didn't help.

ok well that's all my updates for today. will be watching england lose to germany on sunday. adios x