I am literally covered in mosquito bites. This happened last time I traveled out of the country too - I was eaten alive in the Cook Islands. I came home from the Cook Islands with the skin burnt clean off (well, it was a little infected, but there was no skin there is my point) the inside of my right shin, the rest of my skin burnt from too much sun exposure, and bug bites covering my skin.
I don't have the sunburn (yet - still have the beach tomorrow), and I don't have the burned skin (yet - no motorbike riding in Belize), but I DO have bug bites in places I didn't know you could get them. My neck, for one. The insides of my feet, for two. A line of bites that looks like one big bite at the top of my left thigh/bottom of my left buttock for three. Wasn't that covered by shorts?
I always think to myself that mosquitos don't really like me because one time I went camping when I was a kid and I only got bitten once and everyone else got bitten way more times, but I guess my blood as sweetened over the years and also I'm probably the only one in the group NOT using insect repellant, so I am one big walking mosquito bite right now.
I did finally buy insect repellant, but I am just so itchy right now.
Our tour guide for cave tubing was a man named Amin, thus disproving once and for all my theory that all tour guides in Central America are named Louis.
Cave tubing was ostensibly the least educational activity I signed up for. However, under Amin (was was clearly very excited when I told him I wanted to learn more about Belize), I learned that the "street language" for Belizeans is Creole, which is English that is purposely broken. When the slaves spoke the broken English quickly, their slavemasters couldn't understand what they were saying. If they spoke it more slowly, it was easier to recognize the words as something close to English.
A typical meal in Belize is a johnny cake. It's a type of meat cake you can enjoy for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It was originally called a journey cake because it's portable and you can take it with you on your journey, but with the Creole the word ended up sounding like johnny.
When I was taking notes about slavemasters my phone autocorrected to space masters, which I think is something different. This is what we call a fun fact.
Belize used to be called British Honduras. If you already knew this, bully for you, but my ignorance about Belize is kind of embarrassing it turns out. So Amin was great.
The Spanish, with Christopher Columbus, were the first Europeans in Belize. The British came soon after, and a small battle, the Battle of St. George's Caye, the British took over the tiny territory of Belize while Spain went about conquering the rest of Central America.
Belize is in pretty good shape regarding its natural conservation because the only natural resource the British were interested in was the mahogany tree.
The flag for Belize is a white man and a black man. It's the only flag in the world with two men on it. The white man represents the slave master, and the black man represents the slave. There is a ship on the Belizean flag. That's the Pinta, of Christopher Columbus's fleet. There are 50 leaves on the flag. This represents the year 1950, when Belize first began to fight for independence from the UK.
In 1981, Belize became independent but was still part of the Commonwealth, sort of like Canada.
This is maybe the most educational trip I've ever been on. I was so ignorant about basically anything to do with Belize. I had just done some preliminary research on whether or not it was a safe enough place to travel alone, and if there would be new things for me to learn, and fun things for me to do, and then I just went with it. I'm so glad I'm here.
Amin got us to the main site for cave tubing and ziplining. I might try ziplining later, in Placencia, but Julie and Albert were doing just the cave tubing so I decided to also stick with that.
We applied our bug repellant and sunblock. We changed into our bathing suits. My bathing suit is hanging on by a thread. I had to tie two pieces together so it doesn't fall apart. This is a bummer, because I find bathing suit shopping to be up there with jean shopping in types of clothing I hate to shop for.
This time I rented water shoes because I was tired of having wet running shoes. It was a good choice.
Mad stylin'.
"I see you're all about to go cave tubing," a young Belizean man with an entrepreneurial spirit greeted us, "and I just want to offer you some of our coconuts, picked fresh this morning, more electrolytes than gatorade. You can drink the milk straight from the coconut, and when you're done, you can just throw the coconut away. It's tree dollars."
"From the coconut?" I was curious.
"Yes, baby girl, and you can add rum for two more dollars. Do you want to add rum, baby girl?"
What? Rum with the coconut? It's not even 11 in the morning. Who would-
Rum and coconut, straight from the source.
I again didn't bring my phone with me, because we were going tubing and I figured there was a 100% chance I was going to drop that thing in the river. Julie knew herself similarly well and also opted to keep her phone in the truck.
I do have some pictures of the walk over, though, because we did it a second time. I'll get to that in a bit.
We each grabbed an inner tube and a life vest (which only Albert ended up using) and began the 30 minute walk to the cave entrance. The walk again began with us wading through a river waist deep, this time with a swift current that boded well for our tubing adventure. We were walking across the part of the river we were going to end up at. Amin pointed to the rope and told us that if we were going to fast to stop, just grab a hold of it. Otherwise, he'd meet us in Belize City in a couple days.
As we walked I was struck again by how lucky I was to be here, in the middle of this beautiful jungle that was mostly untouched but still accessible enough for me to go cave tubing. I was grateful for the opportunity to experience something I wouldn't be able to experience back home.
Also the views were pretty dope.
People are so touchy.
Anyway, below is the cave we chilled at for a minute before we went cave tubing.
Oh hey! You can see the bumps on my arms from the stupid amount of mosquito bites I have.
Albert got stuck very quickly in a rock. When the current first took us, Albert's camera fell out of his pocket and he lost it. He had bought the camera specifically for this trip. Luckily he had uploaded his pictures from San Pedro, where he and Julie were first staying before coming to San Ignacio, and that's where he took the underwater pictures of himself scuba diving, but it's still a bummer. The current was too strong and they couldn't find it. We came back a second time, and that's when Julie and I took our phones, knowing we wouldn't be going in the water, and took as many pictures of the walk over as possible.
Outside of the unfortunate camera incident, cave tubing was great. Sometimes it felt like a real life version of that Disneyland ride Pirates of the Caribbean, only instead of fake pirates and singing there was real life caves and no drops. Sometimes it felt like Jungle Tours, only instead of a funny tour guide and fake jungle, our tour guide was Amin and also the jungle was real. Other times it felt like Indiana Jones, only not really as much because you're not in the water for that one.
For lunch we had curried chicken (Belizeans have their own version of curry that's very tasty) and I had a Belikin. For the road I got one more rum and coconut.
Jungle diet.
Our last stop before getting back to town was a shop called Hot Mama's, which makes hot sauce, honey (both regular and spicy), chocolate, and other knick knacks. I picked up a really solid sweet pepper sauce and chocolate with habaneros. I was going to give the chocolate with habaneros to my parents because they're into exotic chocolates but I've already started eating it.
Last night, for our collective last night in San Ignacio, Julie and Albert and I ate at Eva's. I got the curried chicken again, with a drink called the Pantie Ripper that was sweet and didn't taste all that alcoholic. We walked around town for a bit and and hit up that one club in town - Blue Angels I think - but we were there at 8:30 and nobody was there and the music was loud but sometimes you have to go to a club to remind yourself why you don't go to clubs (I CAN'T HEAR YOU).
We had an early night and I said goodbye to my new best friends. I went back to the restaurant, which had given me wifi on my phone for the first time since I've been here. I had uploaded pictures on instagram and it was very important for me to see how many likes I was getting. While I was on my phone, a couple of kids came up to me to sell me something.
"No thanks," I said.
"You don't even want to look at it?" one of the boys said. He was like 9 years old or something, and I am just the biggest sucker that ever suckered.
The boys pulled out two tablet things they made. Circles that represent the Mayan calendar. Zachariah made one with a butterfly in the center, and his little brother Zephediah made one with a Mayan pyramid. They looked like they had made them themselves, but the boys said they were going to use the money to go to school (all schools are private in Belize). They started asking me where I was from.
"Los Angeles," I said.
"Oh, I thought you were Canadian."
Um. Is that a compliment or, like, just a thing he thought?
They had a littler brother, who must have been 6 or something.
"Who's your basketball team?" the little guy asked.
"Clippers," I said. The little boy kept looking at me. "And Lakers."
"Lakers! That's my team. I love the Lakers."
"I like OKC," Zachariah said.
"OKC is a fun team to watch. They always get so close. It's fun to root for the underdog."
(Shut up ahead of time, basketball aficionados. I know a very little bit about basketball, and it is enough to get through a conversation with Belizean children, which is what I was doing.)
"Have you ever been to a basketball game?" they asked. I showed them a picture I took of when I was in row 6 of a Lakers game. They all three asked me to add them on Facebook. Zachariah wanted me to send him the picture of the game.
I overpaid for that tablet thing.
I'm headed out today to Placencia. This morning I'll peruse the Saturday market - it's supposed to have a ton of fresh fruit - and then I'm going to the Stann Creek district.
Goodbye San Ignacio! If anyone is going to Belize I will have to recommend you as a stop.
No comments:
Post a Comment