Why we went...

Why we went to Belize in the first place.

Short answer: Molly thought that she might get a book out of it.

Long answer: A year or so ago, Molly got an email from David Campbell. David had been a graduate student of her father’s years ago and is now a botanist and professor at Grinnell College. For the last 15 years, he has been doing research in Belize. His email said that he’d be in Belize with a student for the month of June doing on his own research and that he thought Molly might be interested in meeting this guy, a Maya, who was a gardener of the forest, whatever that meant, who knew the uses of every plant that grew there.

Molly loved the idea. I thought that Belize sounded cool, but I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t get loony spending a month following a gardener around in the jungle. So, with the understanding that Molly might or might not get a book out of the visit, that I would have the freedom to wander around on my own, and that Ben and Rachel would spend a week with us sometime during the month, we went.

The forest gardener is Don Heriberto Cocom. Don Berto is a well known (in Belize) expert on the medicinal uses of native plants and is the proprietor of Masewal Forest Garden in Bullet Tree Falls, not far from San Ignacio. Thirty years ago he cleared and farmed this land, but there was a problem – with the land cleared for farming, he had no source for building materials and medicinal plants. So, he let the forest take over, sort of.

Here things get a bit unclear and obscured, possibly, by arguments among Mayanists. The issue is, how did the Maya of the classical period feed themselves? Cities like Tikal and Caracol may have had 40,000 people and to feed that many people, you have to have a pretty sophisticated system of agriculture. We know that the classical Maya grew corn, squash, beans, and chilies. And we know that they had only stone tools (no metal) and that they didn’t have draught animals. That means that chopping down trees for slash and burn agriculture would have been an exhausting challenge and plowing fields like good European and Asian peasants would have been impossible.

So, one theory suggests that they supplemented their small house gardens of corn, beans, etc. with forest gardens. The idea is that in these forest gardens the Maya selectively encouraged the growth of trees and plants that they found useful and discouraged the growth of trees and plants that they didn’t find useful. The forest gardens would have looked like plain old jungles to us, but what grew there would have been shaped by the choices that the Maya gardeners made.

So we have a couple of questions. A) Did the classical Maya supplement their diets with the products of forest gardens? B) Would that have been enough to sustain their cities? and C) Is Sr. Cocom a modern forest gardener, following the many thousand years old traditions of his people?

David’s research is related to question A. He’s done a study that showed that there was a higher percentage of trees useful to the Maya in plots that were probably once forest gardens than in plots that were probably not forest gardens. (I’m over-simplifying here.) While we were there, he had a student and an assistant measuring the diameter of trees in the pastures owned by modern Maya farmers. They’d measure the trees and record the kind of tree it was and will now somehow crunch the data to determine if there are more “useful” trees growing in those pastures than one would expect. In other words, are contemporary Maya farmers still selecting which plants grow and which ones don’t?

Given the heat and the humidity and the fact that there were bulls in some pastures and thousands of ticks in others, this was grueling work. But it’s all for science, right?

So a variety of people, including David, are working on the answer to question A, no one seems to know the answer to question B, and I’m not sure I ever got a straight answer to question C. I asked Sr. Cocom if he selects the trees to grow in his forest and he says no, he just let’s things grow. David says that Cocom says that he doesn’t do anything, but that he’s seen Cocom kicking rocks into a circle around the base of certain trees to protect them from fire (periodic burning was one of the selection processes that ancient – and modern – Maya may have used). While we were there Sr. Cocom was planting cedar seeds in a special bed intending to raise seedlings that he would later transplant to other places in his forest.

In any case, Sr. Cocom is a very nice man, who, as advertised, knows a huge amount about almost every plant in his forest, including their uses and their names in Latin, English, Spanish, and Mayan, and who is incredibly patient and willing to explain what he knows to anyone who is interested and willing to listen.

Molly listened for three days and found that that was enough. She spent most of the rest of the time wandering around in ruins with me and doing drawings for a possible book about the Maya. When we got back, she went to the library and found that there are already several very adequate books about the Maya, so her book probably won’t happen. Often things don’t go as planned.

Four weeks

Four weeks was too long in Belize. I’m not sure what the critical variable is here. It could be that four weeks is too long for Belize, but wouldn’t be to long for, say, China. It might be that four weeks is too long for anywhere if the temperatures are in the mid-eighties and the humidity is at 90 percent. It might be that four weeks is too long when you’re living in hotels and on the move everyday. It might not have been too long if we had ever had a really good, bug-free verandah to sit on and do nothing for a day or two. Or it might have just been us.

I know other folks who have spent far longer than four weeks on the road and they seem to have enjoyed it. Obviously, there are too many variables here – we’re going to have to experiment.

All work and no play

On the one hand, I enjoy teasing Molly about the fact that we can’t just go someplace “on vacation.” We went to Bali because she had a job in Jarkarta and an idea for a book about rice. We went to Bolivia because she had a job in La Paz and an idea for a book about potatoes. We went to Peru to find out more about potatoes. We went to Belize because we had been invited by a friend of Molly’s, a botanist who had been doing research in the forest in Belize for the last 15 years and who thought there was the possibility of a book.

On the other hand, these diversions make for interesting vacations. In Bali, we went charging around rice paddies asking farmers questions about what kind of rice they were growing and why. In Bolivia we saw both Tiwanaku, an ancient city near Lake Titicaca, and the remains nearby of the raised beds that the locals used to grow potatoes (very efficiently) a thousand years ago. (The farmer that we talked to us said that no one uses raised beds any more because you can’t get a tractor into them.)

In Peru, we talked to potato farmers and visited pest management stations in places that ordinary tourists would never go, and we hung out at the Potato Institute and listened to lectures about the difficulties of creating disease resistant potatoes. This may not sound like fun, but given that I consider laying on the beach and similar activities a close approximation of torture, lectures about potatoes can be pretty cool. At least, Molly and I enjoyed them, but I also might point out that it is now five years later and there’s still no book.

(Doing tourist stuff.)

In Belize, we did tourist stuff – we visited ruins and climbed to the top of temples, we snorkeled along the barrier reef, we saw monkeys, iguanas, parrots, and bats, we rode buses, and we bought Guatemalan cloth. But we also got to clamber around in the woods with a bunch of crazy botanists who were determined to re-measure the diameters of some trees that they had measured and tagged 10 years ago, we got to visit the homes of some Maya farmers, we got an idea of some issues that archeologists and others who study the Maya are arguing about and of the level of passion (high) that they bring to the arguments. And we got a personal tour of one of the lost Maya cities guided by the woman (an American) who has been responsible for preserving and uncovering it. It makes for an interesting vacation.

Ruins and other old stuff

For me, there’s something awesome about ruins. I grew up in Chicago where “old” meant having survived the Chicago Fire (1871) – e.g., the old Water Tower on Michigan Avenue. Even back east in Massachusetts during my college years, I never grasped the “oldness” of Revolutionary buildings. (There were a lot of things I never quite grasped during those years. Draw your own conclusions.)

For the last 35 years or so I’ve lived in California where old means the Gold Rush and the Missions. For a while we even lived two or three blocks away from the Mission Dolores. But history in San Francisco sort of dribbles into the present at best. It never blows one away. Or, at least, it never blew me away.

But I was blown away when I went to France and felt history pour into the present. I saw not only thousand-year-old Renaissance churches and medieval paintings, but also two thousand year old Roman arenas and aqueducts, and 2500-year-old Greek statues and vases. I had been a Classics major in college, and was aware of others’ enthusiasm for Greek art. All I had seen, however, had been photos, and it was hard to get very enthusiastic about photos. Seeing multiple examples of the real thing, it was clear how incredible they really are.

My only experience of age and history as a presence in this country has been in New Mexico where what amazed me was not just the existence of “old,” but of the continued existence of all the historic layers – there were, in order, the disappeared Anasazi, the still present Hopi, Zuni, and Pueblo peoples, the Navaho (relative latecomers), the remnants of the original Spanish settlers (We saw the courthouse that Reies-Tijerina took over in 1967.), and the rest of us.

In Belize (and Guatemala) we saw lots of ruins. Near San Ignacio we saw Xunantunich, Cahal Pech, El Pilar, and Caracol; we went to Tikal in Guatemala (twice); and we went north in Belize to ride up the New River to Lamanai. In all of these places, some structures, at least, had been dug out of the jungle and restored. So we climbed to the tops of temples (which, if you’ve ever done it, you know is the easy part. The hard part is coming down) and were boggled by the view from the top and at the thought of all of the work and hours it must have taken to move the materials that were used to build them.

More striking though was the mix of the seen and the unseen. At each site there were not only the temples that had been dug out and restored, but mounds of earth that were clearly other structures that had not (or not yet) been dug out and restored. In some places, we could walk from the front of an incredible restored temple around to the back of the same structure, and find it still buried under jungle and earth.

Dozens of buildings have been restored at Tikal, while just a few have at Caracol or El Pilar, even though Caracol was, they say, as big a city as Tikal and El Pilar was nearly as big. The temples are spectacular, but the uncovered mounds are spectacular, too, in a very different way.

When we went back to Tikal with Ben and Rachel (Molly and I spent three days there and then went back for two more days with Ben and Rachel.) I had a chance to revisit places while Ben and Rachel explored and Molly drew. Instead of moving quickly from place to place in order to see everything, I got to hang out at some smaller, unrestored sites, and just quietly look.

The mounds were covered with brush and trees, and not little trees either, huge trees. I was struck by the thought that the trees, even the biggest and oldest, weren’t the first to grow on those mounds. Most of the Maya cities were abandoned by 1000 AD – a thousand years ago – so even if the trees I was looking at were 100 or 200 years old, they were the third, fourth, fifth, or maybe even tenth generation of trees to have grown on those mounds. Others must have grown and fallen and decayed – all of which happens pretty fast in a tropical rain forest – to produce the soil that covered the mound and that supported the jungle that grew there now.

I don’t know. Maybe that doesn’t impress anyone else. Maybe the rest of you are quicker to grasp thousand-year gaps in time. It takes me a while, but, when it hit, it sure impressed me.

(The photo is of a partially excavated mound at Cahal Pech, not Tikal, but you can see what I mean about the mix of the restored and the still buried.)

(One of my favorite photos from the trip – a tree in the process of taking over some steps.)

Visiting TIkal

Advice about visiting Tikal. Most visitors to Tikal seem to spend the night in Flores or in San Ignacio (or even further away) and come in by bus in the morning. They arrive about 10 AM, see what they can see over the next several hours, and then get back on their buses at about 3 PM and head home.

We spent the night in the park, and, if you can swing it, we’d recommend it highly. There are three hotels in the park and one of them even offers hammocks, so that staying can be very inexpensive. Spending the night means, first, that, during the hottest part of the day, you can eat lunch and relax. Second, it means that you get to wander around in the park from 7 to 10 in the morning and from 3 to 6 in the afternoon, when almost no one else is around.

The first time we were there, we got up at 4:00 AM for a sunrise tour. The mist that morning meant that we didn’t actually get to see the sun rise, but it didn’t matter. We were happy anyway. Waiting for the sun, we sat at the top of Temple IV, listening to the howler monkeys (very spooky) and the parrots (very, very noisy, raucous even).

When we went back to Tikal with Ben and Rachel, we all hung out at the top of Temple IV for a sunset. Because of clouds, we didn’t get to see that either, but again it was a joy to sit quietly above the tops of the trees, looking out over miles of jungle and nothing else, and listening to the forest sounds. Just us and a guard and only one or two other people around.

Animals

Howler monkeys. Our first night in Tikal, I woke up in the dark to the sound of howlers, only I didn’t know that it was howlers at the time. I was expecting something like the whoops of the gibbons at the SF Zoo, but the sound that howlers make is more like the roar of a lion. (Molly can do a fair good imitation if you ask.) In the middle of the night, it was very, very spooky. We saw howlers in the trees around several ruins and heard them again several times, mostly notably at sunrise as we sat at the top of Temple IV. At El Pilar, a howler decided that we didn’t belong there and began throwing shit at us.

Spider monkeys, especially at Tikal. The spider monkeys have white bellies, longer, more spindly arms, and move more quickly through the trees than the howlers. Both the howlers and the spiders seem to move in family groups and to make a fair amount of noise as they move through the trees, so they’re easy to spot. And if you find one, there are usually others close by. Yes, the babies are very, very cute.

A huge wasp. On the sunrise hike in TIkal, we are staggering down the trail at 4:00 in the morning. At one point, our guide, stops and points to a small hole in the ground. He takes a stalk of grass and pokes it into the hole. Nothing. He pokes again and a huge, black wasp crawls out. It seems, like us, not to be especially used to early morning hours, and crawls slowly away. Later someone explains that the wasp was probably a tarantula hawk and that a tarantula lived in the hole. Tarantula hawks lay their egss on a tarantula. The larva hatches out and proceeds to eat the tarantula from the inside out, eating all the non-essential organs first, so the tarantula stays alive, and waiting until the very end, just before it pupates, to eat the heart. Very clever. Not like the incredibly stupid scarabs. (See below.)

Also in Tikal we saw several grey foxes – small, somewhat bigger than house cats, but not much. They would walk calmly through clearings, paying little attention to us. We saw a coatimundi which is similar to a raccoon, but slower and less threatening, and we saw several wild turkeys. These turkeys are much more colorful than our turkeys with incredible blue feathers on their tails and little yellow polka-dots on their heads.

Various centipedes, millipedes, butterflies, and caterpillars.

Green iguanas and black iguanas. We went horseback riding one day in San Ignacio and the stable yard was full of iguanas, feeding, apparently, on what the horses left behind.

There were geckos everywhere and I saw a Jesus Christ lizard on the lawn outside our room at the San Ignacio Hotel. It’s called a Jesus Christ lizard because it runs across the surface of the water. Most of the time, they move around slowly on all fours. Then a crest goes up on the tops of their heads and they stand up on their hind legs and run like crazy. I remembered them running like that from some ancient Walt Disney nature movie.

A Jesus Christ bird (it also walks on water, or, at least, on lily pads on the water) on the river on the trip to Lamanai. Before the rain began. And bats, also on the river on the way to Lamanai. (We’re riding up the river on this boat and the guide pulls over to the side, points at a tree and says, “Bats!” We look. Can’t see bats. “Where?” “There.” He points. Someone says, “Oh, there.” I still see nothing but bark. Then someone takes a picture with a flash and suddenly there are the bats peeling themselves away from the tree and disappearing in flight.)

Scarab beetles. Thousands and thousands of scarab beetles, many of them dead, mostly in and around San Ignacio. Apparently this happens every June. Thousands of these fairly large (inch and a half long) beetles are attracted to the streetlights. They apparently hit the lights and fall to the pavements underneath the lights. Many land on their backs and lie there waving their legs helplessly in the air, unable to turn over. Then they die or are crushed by passing cars. In the morning, shopkeepers sweep the dead bodies off the sidewalks in front of their stores. Now I can understand that they might be confused by electric lights – in terms of their evolutionary history, after all, electric lights are a very recent innovation. But why have these creatures not evolved the ability to turn over when they happen to land on their backs?

Leaf-cutter ants. I kept trying to take photos of these incredible insects, but wasn’t able to figure out how to focus the camera in macro mode until almost the end of the trip. The one here is the best I could do. It doesn’t do them justice. We’d come across lines of leaf-cutters marching across the forest floor, each carrying a piece of leaf like a tiny sail. (They take the pieces into their nests and use them to grow fungus gardens that they use for food.) In Tikal, where someone had planted grass in many of the plazas, the leaf cutters had such dependable routes between their nests and the leaves they wanted that they had cut grooves through the grass. Other places, there were trails, sometimes running hundreds of feet, over and around obstacles, up trees.

This last photo is not an animal. It's a predacious plant. Strangler figs wrap themselves around other trees – sometimes two trees at once – and use their support to climb towards the light. Eventually they do strangle them. We saw some that seemed just to have begun the process and others that had just about totally encased the tree they were swallowing. This one seems to be about half-way done.

It wasn't all wonderful

In the interest of full disclosure, there were things I hated about the trip. June is the beginning of the rainy season, so, big surprise, we had quite a few days of rain. That was both a good things and a bad thing.

For example, rain interrupted our visit to Xunantunich, but that turned out to be a good thing. To get to Xunantunich, we had taken a bus, then a ferry across the river, and then walked a half a mile or more up from the river to the site. We had a few minutes to look around, and then it started to rain. When the rain started, all the other visitors who were there got back in their cars or buses and left. We would have had to walk back down in the rain and gotten totally drenched and that didn’t make much sense, so we hung out in a covered visitor center. An hour later the rain stopped and we were the only visitors left, so we had Xunantunich all to ourselves. The same thing happened again a few days later at Cahal Pech. By the time the rain there ended, it was just us and a bunch of students working on a dig and getting credit from Ole Miss.

On other days, the rain, if not beneficial, was benign. For example, when we went north to Orange Walk, there was a torrent as we were sitting at lunch. The restaurant was open, but covered, so we moved away from the edges and sat a little longer and waited for the rain to end. It did.

The next day, however, we took a boat up the New River to Lamanai, another Maya site, and ran into another torrent. We were with ten other tourists and a guide on a 15 foot boat with a canopy that provided some shelter, but not much. The torrent ended, but the rain didn’t. It followed us up the river, stopped while we toured the ruins, and then came with us all the way back home. Fortunately, the rain is warm rain, so you get wet and you’re not comfortable, but you’re not miserable either.

The rain didn’t completely spoil that trip, but instead of a river cruise that was a chance to see birds and crocodiles, we had a river cruise that was a chance to huddle in wet misery. Similarly, it rained during our hour-long water taxi ride to Caye Caulker and it rained the following day on Caye Caulker which meant that there was nothing to do.

But the rain wasn’t the worst part. Every day, every day, was hot and humid. Sometimes here the rain cools things off. That didn’t happen in Belize. It would rain and after the rain it would be as hot and humid as it had been before. I don’t think I’ve ever sweated as much as I did in Belize. Walking down the block – walking, not doing anything strenuous – I’d have sweat running down my body. I tried cotton t-shirts to soak it up, but they would just get wet and stay wet forever. Nylon worked best.

And I oozed oil. By the end of each day, I would be covered with a waxy film that I’d scrape off in the shower before bed. Not that the nights were much cooler. Here on the Cape, we have occasionally have days that are hot and humid. But that’s occasionally, not every day. And in Livermore we have hot, hot days, but even on the hottest days, the nights cool off. Not so Belize.

(Molly didn’t sweat and she didn’t ooze oil. That doesn’t mean that she was any cooler or more comfortable than I was, just a bit drier.)

For relief, we’d position ourselves under fans at restaurants or in front of a fan in our room. Or for one glorious hour each day, we’d check email and the news at air conditioned Internet cafes and be cool.

Then there were the bugs. We got special clothes for the trip and I sprayed our high-tech pants and shirts with pyrethrin, wore my sleeves rolled down when we were in the woods, even in the heat, and sprayed the few remaining exposed body parts with DEET. Even so, we got bitten. Not a lot. Not nearly as badly as we would have without all the chemicals, but still we got bitten. Mostly ankles for me, I’m not sure why, and I never saw what bit me.

On Caye Caulker, the first day we were there, it had just stopped raining and Molly, Ben, Rachel, and I were all attacked by little, silent, mosquito-y things, that moved like lightening and bit like hell. Again, they seemed to especially like ankles. Ben, who attracts mosquitoes wherever he goes, was particularly brutalized. Fortunately, the next day there was wind and not rain, and most of the mosquitoes got blown away. I had my DEET with me everywhere on Caye Caulker.

In San Ignacio, Molly was attacked by chiggers in addition to mosquitoes. Unlike mosquitoes, which, in Belize, can carry malaria and dengue fever, the chiggers apparently don’t spread disease, but, once they get on you, they crawl around until the find a place they like and then burrow in and die. That’s what we were told. Doesn’t make any sense to me. What we do know is that whatever else they do, they make you itch like crazy. Molly had them all over her thighs and was saved only by some friends who gave her a mixture of mashed up leaves from marigold and mother of cacao. Stopped the itching dead.

We did not see a snake. Having been warned about snakes, we each brought great, high rubber boots. Mine were an inelegant but practical brown, Molly’s a very dashing white. (She wore them on the plane and was complimented on her boots more than once in various airports as we made our way back and forth.) And we wore them several times into areas where there might have been snakes. No snakes. Molly was very disappointed. I was happy. There are many harmless snakes in Belize, but there are also coral snakes (rare) and fer-de-lance (quite common). Both are poisonous and dangerous. Fer-de-lance, we were also told, hibernate during the dry season and come out again when it starts to rain. They come out feeling very grouchy and aggressive. We were there when it had just started to rain. I had no desire to meet a grouchy fer-de-lance.

The boots were useful nonetheless. In spite of their clunkiness, I wore them one day in Tikal to protect my tender ankles, not from snakes, but from insects. No bites that day.

Sweet Faces

Belize is a diverse place. There are the Maya who have lived there forever. In the 1700’s it was settled by the Baymen, ex-pirates who decided that they could make more money, more safely by logging than they could by hijacking Spanish ships in the Caribbean. Many of the Baymen were Brits and after some fussing by the Spanish, who had never gotten a secure hold on Belize anyway, Spain and Britain signed a treaty giving the Baymen the right to log in Belize. The descendants of the Baymen are still around in Belize City, on the Cayes, and in the north of the country as Creoles.

In the 1830’s the Garifuna arrived. The Garifuna are a mix of African and Carib peoples who had originated on the island of St. Vincent but had been driven out of there in the 1700’s. A significant Garifuna population still exists in southern Belize. In the 1850’s a flood of Maya, mestizos, and others moved into northern Belize from Mexico, fleeing from the disruptions caused by the War of the Castes. More recently, there has been an influx of Spanish speakers from both Mexico and Guatemala. There are also East Indians, Chinese, Arabs, and Mennonites.

In short, the ethnic mix of the people around you in Belize can vary tremendously depending on where you are in the country. (Until independence in 1981 Belize was British Honduras, so most people speak English, although many also speak Creole, Spanish, or one of several Mayan languages.)

All of that is a preface to what I am about to say and a warning that one shouldn’t generalize too broadly…

In San Ignacio – in the far west of Belize, so therefore mostly Maya, mestizo, and recent immigrants from Guatemala – there were many men with sweet faces and the most wonderful smiles, very different from what I am used to seeing here in the States.

The gentlest face was Mison, a breakfast-time waiter at the San Ignacio Hotel. (His father’s name, he explained, was Simon.) He had an absolutely lovely smile. Alas, he was only marginally competent as a waiter.

Army Guards

At many of the sites we were at in Belize there were soldiers with automatic weapons. In Tikal, the guards carried shotguns. A few days before we had come, bandits had stopped a tourist bus and taken money and valuables from the passengers and a week before that a well organized group had held up some tourists on the road to Caracol and then invaded a resort nearby. No one had gotten hurt, everyone was convinced that the bad guys were Guatemalans who had slipped across the border, and everyone wanted to reassure tourists. So there were police checkpoints on the roads and soldiers at tourist destinations.

We heard about the holdup, but we wanted to go to Caracol so we asked around and were assured that the road was being patrolled and that we’d be safe. Caracol is an hour out of town, isolated, off in the boonies, so the road to Caracol had been a good place to ambush tourists, but the barn door, as they say, had been closed. When we went, we got an army escort.

We had a truck with four guys with automatic weapons drive with us for most of the way out, wait for us at the site and then accompany us back. Our own escort for our van with five tourists and a guide. And there were additional guards at the site.

Caracol, as I mentioned elsewhere, was a competitor of Tikal and may have been as big as Tikal, but much less of it has been excavated and restored. The main temple, 141 feet tall, as tall as the tallest temples at Tikal has been restored and, of course, since we were there we had to climb to the top. The view was spectacular.

While we were at the top, one of the guards came huffing up, hauling what looked at first like a suitcase. When he got it up there, I realized that what he had was a portable TV and that he had brought it to the top hoping to get good enough reception so that he could watch the first round World Cup match between Brazil and Croatia.

It was a sweet moment and I would have loved to have taken his picture up there at the top of a Maya temple, caught up in Ronaldinho, but I was worried that he’d be worried about getting in trouble, so I didn’t. Moment lost.

Caye Caulker

Belize has the second longest barrier reef in the world, so, the diving is incredible and many, many tourists come to Belize just for that. We didn’t. We came for the ruins and for the forest gardens, but it seemed crazy to be in Belize and not see the reef. So, we spent three nights (four days) with Ben and Rachel in Caye Caukler, a tiny island right next to the reef. (BTW, Caye is pronounced key, as in Key West.) The plan was to spend a day arriving, a day departing, and two days in the water. It didn’t quite work out that way. The first day, we had rain. The second day, we had sun briefly in the morning, and then rain. The third day, we got to snorkel on the reef. The fourth day, we left.

Ben reminds me that, at some point, probably on the second day, I said that, if I got three hours in the water I’d be happy. Well, I got three hours in the water and I was very happy for those three hours, but very unhappy most of the rest of the time. That was probably due to a variety of circumstances.

• I was past ready to go home.
• We were in rooms that were dark and uncomfortable. Our room had an air conditioner, but to use the air conditioner you had to close the windows. Since the windows were louvers and the louvers were opaque, not glass, closing the louvers meant plunging the room into darkness. Yes, there were lights in the room, but, since the only electricity on the island was from a generator and therefore expensive, the lights in the room were a) few and b) weak.
• There was sand everywhere.
• The first day especially, there were small, vicious, flying, biting bugs everywhere.
• When we couldn’t snorkel, there was nothing else to do. The first afternoon we were there, we walked around the island. The next day, we walked around the island again. There’s just not very much island to walk around. The street facing the dock is Front Street, the next street over is Middle Street, and the street after that is Back Street. End of island. There are a few cross streets and that’s it. So we couldn’t be inside because it was dark and uncomfortable. We couldn’t sit outside because we’d get eaten by mosquitoes. We could walk, but we’d already walked everywhere.

So I was grumpy.

On the other hand, there were good things.

• There were few cars on the island, so everyone walked or rode bikes or drove golf carts.
• Almost everything happened on Front Street, so, walking up and back on Front Street we ran into various people whom we had met in other places and who wound up on Caye Caulker at the same time we did.
• The vibe was all Creole and Rasta, very different from San Ignacio.
• We got some good food, although at US prices.
• Ben and Rachel were with us.
• The snorkeling was awesome.

I don’t know what to say more about the snorkeling. We got driven out to the reef. The boat stopped. We jumped in the water with our guide. He led us in a big circle through the reef and back to the boat. Then we did it again in another spot. Then he took us to a spot where he through bait in the water to attract s swarm of rays and nurse sharks and we got to swim with the rays and sharks. Awesome.

The day we went – the day after a storm – the waves on the other side of the reef were fairly high and the currents on our side were fairly strong. Swimming or even staying in one place was a challenge.

I didn’t dive. I swam or just hung in the water, breathing through my snorkel, watching. The view was awesome, amazing, spectacular. Corals I can’t describe. Fish I can’t describe. Urchins and other creatures I can’t name or describe. It was like an Imax movie, only it wasn’t a movie. I lack words. I got my three hours and, even though I hated Caye Caulker, I’m glad we went.

Animals

There were the howler monkeys. Our first night in Tikal, I woke up in the dark to the sound of howlers, only I didn’t know that it was howlers at the time. I was expecting something like the whoops of the gibbons at the SF Zoo, but the sound that howlers make is more like the roar of a lion. (Molly can do a fair good imitation if you ask.) In the middle of the night, it was very, very spooky. We saw howlers in the trees around several ruins. At El Pilar, a howler decided that we didn’t belong there and began throwing shit at us.

There were also spider monkeys, especially at TIkal. The spider monkeys have white bellies, longer, more spindly arms, and move more quickly through the trees than the howlers. Both the howlers and the spiders seem to move in family groups and to make a fair amount of noise as they move through the trees, so they’re easy to spot. And if you find one, there are usually others close by. Yes, the babies are very, very cute.

We saw green iguanas and black iguanas. We went horseback riding one day in San Ignacio and the stable yard was full of iguanas, feeding, apparently, on what the horses left behind. There were geckos everywhere and I saw a Jesus Christ lizard on the lawn outside our room at the San Ignacio Hotel. It’s called a Jesus Christ lizard because it runs across the surface of the water. Most of the time, they move around slowly on all fours. Then a crest goes up on the tops of their heads and they stand up on their hind legs and run like crazy. I remembered them running like that from some ancient Walt Disney nature movie.

We also saw a Jesus Christ bird (it also walks on water, or, at least, on lily pads on the water) on the river on the trip to Lamanai. Before the rain began.

Still to come...
Scarab beetles. Huge wasp. Long-tailed grackles. Grey fox. Coatimundi. Wild turkeys.