More About Belize

We are still in Belize and having a good time waiting on hurricane season to be over before we head back to the US. Belize is a country of great diversity. It’s hot here but a lot of the black people here have dreadlocks and speak Garifuna. Garifuna is English spoken with a slur so white people couldn’t understand what they were saying in the past. It works well because I can’t understand a word they are saying. Here is one of my Garifuna specking friends that is working here doing fiberglass. He puts his hair up in a tee shirt he wears on his head to work.

He is really proud of his hair.

He has promised us that when his work slows down here he wants us to come to his village to spend the night and let him show us his village. We may have to take a tent, he says they have monkeys that come in to the village and they have cashew trees there. We have found that if you get invited to these places, they show you a good time and you get to see the real people. Their friends become your friends and you become part of their life for and hour or two, sometimes a day. People most tourist never get to see. There is another worker here that is just 5 feet tall, possibly of Maya descent and that’s in his work boots. He wants us to go with him to see his favorite park. Were working on that. Why are we working on that? We need to see if we can rent a motor bike to be able to go. That’s the only way he has to travel. Pam and I love bike trips. Problem is can we rent one and can we afford it? He is a licensed park guide and works in the parks giving guided tours when work is slow here in the boat yard. I been showing him how to set the timing and valves on small engines here that run every thing from pumps to generators. There is a lot here that is not working that well at best. I been giving a hand at getting some of these things going. One of the workers that is working on a large barge thing here they are building that will be taken out somewhere here and anchored to used as a dive shop, restaurant, gift shop and I don’t know what else but they want it built and in service before the tourist season starts in late November. His grinder quit and he brought it to me saying, they have another one coming but I need this one now. Having one coming doesn’t mean much. Could be with in the hour or days. I checked it out and the switch was bad. He said “Any way to make that run?” I told him, it’s wrong, it’s dangerous and anywhere else I would not do this but if it’s that important I’ll straight wire it and I did. He went back to work plugging it in to get it stared and unplugging it to get it stopped. Happy to keep on working. Here you just can’t go buy something just anywhere and when you do find something, it cost. All of this making do is in some ways just part of the adventure of being here. When we do go to town we try to get a ride. Cab’s cost a lot here. They have a work truck here we drive sometimes that is and adventure in it’s self. The windshield is busted with a hole bigger than a softball all the way through. One of the tail lights is just missing and the governor on the diesel pump is bad. This makes it run like your patting the foot-feet when you stop. I go sometimes to get stuff or pick up somebody for them.

Yard truck

Driving after dark here is just crazy, (did that, don’t want to do that again). When we are in town in the mornings they sell a bread here they fill with everything from meat to jelly. It’s called “Fried Jacks”. Here a women is cooking Fried Jacks and you can get two for 50 cents US without anything in side and they are, I guess I can say, different. It’s like a dull flat bread that blows up when they cook it. It separates and that what they fill. It looks like it going to blow up sometimes.

Fried Jacks

I could learn to like it I think. I think people everywhere learn to like the food they eat. We have friends that didn’t eat grits until they stared hanging with us. Now they pile it in their plate when Pam is cooking. Pam and I usually end up in some little boat yard some where along the way as we travel and love being there. Here the only thing is the size. This place is big but the people here are treating us great and we are loving being here what ever they call a place like this. Marina, boatyard or maybe shipyard if you see this things they are building here. One thing that is not missing here is “Characters”. Now we are here adding our part to the mix I guess.

Big floating shops, Diving, souvenir shop, Restaurant and more.

Rat, Cat and Lobster

This week has been a great week. The kind you remember when something triggers something in your mind and you think back. First we caught a rat that has been living with us for a week on the boat.

We left him at the airport so he can go anywhere he wants.

The locals here are basely lawless and a local fisher man traded with some more locals here we know now some lobster and fresh conk. Lobster too small to be taken and the conk is out of season. Traded a big bag of this fresh treasure of the sea for 4 packs of cigarettes. You can buy cigarettes here in a small 10 pack so it was just a couple of packs if you look at it that way. They gave us 4 lobster tails and 4 big peaces of conk. Conk is like alligator to me, it’s taste is in the seasoning and incredibility tough if you don’t “beat your conk”. At supper I had a go at the conk with a cubing hammer. Beat it until I was putting holes in it. Remember it can be so tough you can’t chew it. I have had it in soup where they cut in in to little pieces and you just couldn’t chew it. It’s like a soup made with pencil erasers. Pam battered it like fish and it was good but taste like the batter.

Small but good

Beat the Conk

Pam loves lobster and if in the states we order surf and turf in a restaurant, I will have pieces of my lobster go missing. Pam my offer to share her steak but never her lobster. So eating well and catching the rat has made for a good week. We have been waiting for a better time to tell the people that know us and flow our blog our cat, Rusty past away almost two years ago. It was peaceful. We took him to a very good Vet and had him put down. He was so sick he could not get up the companionway steps. The Vet said there was no way to help him, he was old and hard to doctor. The end was near so why make it hard for him. We buried him on a hillside in Guatemala, a long way from where we found him. We found him on Jabbertown Road where we built the boat. He was in the grass with another kitten covered in fleas. I gave him to Pam and she headed to the Vet. There he said cats are hardy things and if you bottle fed him he my make it. The nurses there washed him and got the fleas off. The Vet said to feed him cat formula milk and to my total surprise they sell it in most grocery stores in the US in the spring. His eyes were not open and maybe 3 inches long. I was told by Pam to go get the other one but it was dead when I went back. Maybe old Rusty was lucky we came by when we did. Our boat is steel so we named him Rusty. Now our routine was set on his feeding time. Pam carried him for weeks in a fanny pack or at times in her coat pocket. We were leaving Southport, NC to go see what we had built, heading maybe to the Chesapeake if it would make it that far. We not only built our boat we designed it too. We were in Walmart stocking up on our final supplies and I ask who had Rusty. Our son and his wife were walking up. There was no one left on the boat. Pam pulled Rusty out of her coat pocket looking like we had disturbed him from some deep sleep. He lived a long life and if you can believe a good life with Pam taking care of him. He was not a brave cat in so his favorite place to be was under the set at the wheel if things stared to get a little sideways. Before long I had to make the opening under the seat bigger so his fat butt could get in there. There are 3 storage lockers under the set and one has a bigger opening like everything on our boat there’s a reason and a story to go with it. I miss him most on the long nights out to sea. It’s lonely out there. Our boat is still going and the story are adding up. Maybe now the most important thing in life is who we share our life with are maybe what we share our life with. We caught the rat in a live trap and let it go a long way from the boat. If Rusty had caught that rat he would not have been so kind. Everyone here was saying kill that rat but the way I see it, it was no different than a opossum are a raccoon. Just a creature wondering around and ended up in the wrong place. Pam and I are still wondering around ourselves and hope we can go on, we are getting old but still determined to see more of the world. Leave as much as we can the way we found it. Maybe all we really have is memory, the rest we will leave behind some day. Rusty will always be in our memories A boat cat, not so brave, not so smart( he feel in the water a lot) but loved.

Rusty beside his scratching box.

Ship’s Cat “Rusty”

Another Good Day in Belize

This week we have enjoyed being here but it is the little thing that makes our day in places like this. As the days go by Pam watches the weather and monitors the storms out there. Maybe we should have worked harder to have left sooner and we could be back in the US now eating a real steaks, not setting here watching out for hurricanes. We didn’t so here we are. I miss shopping in the US. Down here it’s an adventure to shop. I like grapefruit in the morning. We found some. They just don’t have then anywhere here for sale. They were cheap. Very unusual for here but small. Look at how much smaller they are to my tea cup. I love Earl Gray hot tea in the morning.

Small grapefruit but good.

Every one that comes down, I ask for them to bring me tea. Can’t get that down here ether. Shopping at a fruit stand is fun and most of what is there, I don’t know what I’m looking at. The banana looking thing hanging all black are plantains and are best when they look like they are spoiled. We eat plantains now but there a lot of trouble waiting on them to get ripe and us waiting to long and they just do spoiled.

These plantains are just about ready

You don’t have to have any permits to sell cooked food here so a lot of people cook at home and sell what they cook. Here at the marina a man that works here, his wife cooks lunch for about 20 people. It’s to go and they send a truck to her house to pick it up so you just call her and tell her, beef, pork or chicken. You get rice and beans with every thing you buy here, every meal it’s rice and beans, everyday, it’s rice and beans. If you think you love rice and bean, here you will be tested as to how many meals you can eat with just rice and beans. Pam loves this women, she sell donuts fresh cooked every day. We look for her if we go to town.

Donut Lady

We love lobster but down here its about the most expensive thing you can eat. We have been working some and wanted to treat ourselves but with what little money we have, we need to stretch it so we derided we would just spend a little and just buy two small lobster tails. As we were walking up to the    co-op, it was early, we saw the local boats coming in. We walked down to make pictures and Pam went straight to the fisher men seeing if we could buy something off them and not the expensive co-op. One of the men had 8 lobster tails in a bucket and Pam bought them all for 12 dollars US. We think now they may have been too small to sell legally, one was soft. Even a little small, 8 is better than two for what they would have cost us. Back on the boat for supper Pam cooked them all even the soft one. We found out the soft one was shedding its shell and even the meat was soft. Didn’t like it but I eat it anyway. Not going to let it go to waste. We were eating lobster tonight. We were going to make two meals off the lobster but we only had one left when we decided to just stop eating. Just couldn’t go on. The next day at lunch Pam made lobster soup and the last lobster was gone. We had rice with our lobster but it was white rice cooked like Pam cooks it. Here they use coconut milk to cook rice. I don’t like that ether but it been good trying it.

Lobster Boats at Town Dock

Pam buying Lobster

Thinking back on how much and how long we dreamed of some day doing this, make this even more specials. We will be back in the US before Christmas but for now, The Western Caribbean is still just fine.

Land Trip

As It has been in most of our blogs lately, it’s hot here. This week there has been on rain or clouds,very little wind, even the locals are complaining. We took another road trip that was to be a little vacation back to Belize city. Left before daylight. Used a man’s rental car, he paid for the car and gas. Gas is $4.85 US a gallon here. He needed for us to take something to be welded near Belize City. Before we left he added a generator to take up that needed to be fixed. We spent the hold day running from one place to another. As you my have guessed it didn’t turn out like we planned. We did do a little shopping. I bought some, “Fruit of the Loom” tee shirts. Have not been able to find any tee shirts here. Have you ever heard people say you can live like a king in Central America on very little and you hear me say you can live much cheaper in the US. Maybe the king of a goat farm, every thing down here is much higher than the US. If you live in Key West it will cost you but if you live in small town America and shop around you can live cheap. That is why poor people still have cars and air conditioning in the US, something only the rich have here. I paid 10 dollars US a peace for just a tee shirts and they were long tail. It was all we could find. I look like I’m wearing a night gown but it’s the coolest thing I can wear down here. On the way back he ask us if we could go by Spanish Lookout and pick up something. It was a piece of roofing. A piece of clear fiber glass that makes a cheap sky light in a metal roof. It was very hard to tie down being so flimsy. Now we’re riding around in a foreign country with crap tied on top in a rental car and it’s getting dark. The last call we got from them was to see if we would go on to San Ignacio since we were so close and pick up some fish. When you’re carrying a friend along with you we made down here and he is not happy with all this riding and now with fish it becomes more of a need to just drive on back. Easier said than done. The roads in Belize are few and what is here are not keep up to well. There are no lines painted on the road to San Ignacio or most of the roads, even the Hummingbird Highway. Hummingbird Highway sounds a lot better than it is. It two lane with one lane bridges. There is very few red light in Belize but the hold country is covered with speed bumps. I think if there are three houses near the road there is a speed bump. Some have signs and some don’t but the ones that do have a little sign that says, “ Speed Hump” maybe hanging up side down because some one needed the bolt or maybe that is why there is no sign just a post on a lot of them some one needed the bolts. As I have said before in a society of thieves the only sin is getting caught. No one seems the care if some one steels the bolts out of a road sign. As I age and the fact I haven’t driven a car in over a year, now I was being tested to see if we could just make it back alive. The rental car was old and the head lights were yellow with age. We were now referring to this as a candle light drive. The windshield wipers worked but the blades were shot. It rains. Most people that come down here have told me after our episode that they don’t drive here after dark. They say if you run over some one you will go to jail. Maybe it’s true, that another thing about being down here, what is the truth. Is the law here as bad and corrupt as they say they are. How would you find out. I know I don’t want to find out the hard way. After something happen. The coast of Belize is being developed by white people and the white Mennonites are farming, the rest of the people here seem to be living the way they have for years. In small town’s the Chinese own the grocery stores. They build nice stores and even if the small town’s are poor they have a church that is always the finest building in town. Remember the doors on the Vatican are real gold. I have never seen a preacher down here that looked like he had missed a meal or needs one. On our way from Belize City/ Belmopan we saw a sign “3 miles to Spanish Lookout” so we took it. It turned out to be a dirt/gravel road. About 2 miles of bouncing around we came up on a river. There is a hand crank ferry there. The ferry will hold 2 maybe 3 cars if they are small.  When we got there it was making a crossing.

The Ferry coming to us. There is no charge.

We pulled on to the ferry as soon as the other car departed. It was only us and one motorcycle on the trip across the river. While we were crossing two young boy were trying to sell us some stuff. They  had a good sales pitch but we did not buy anything from them.

Hand craning us across the river. The boys were making fun of Tim’s earring and had one they had found so they show us.

“This will keep you young and healthy.”

The ferry crossing was one of the good things that happened on our trip.