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.