Back to Sea

If you keep up with our blog you know we said we needed to leave Belize because our time they allow you to be in their country with your boat was up, 90 days. It’s a hassle and they get money when you leave and when you come back and they make you pay for every day your there. You can leave and come back the next day long as you leave with your boat, have your stamp from another country and pay the money to come back in. We are back in Guatemala now and planning a road trip to Guatemala City. I need clothes and have a hard time finding what I need in Belize. Belize city is not a city. It’s really just a small town, not a village, a town but still with limited shopping. I bought some tee shirts in Belmopan at a market and payed all most 6 dollars US a piece for extra large cotton tee shirts and when Pam washed them (before I wore them) they drawled up above my belly button. Looks like they were for an 8 year old after they were washed. Cut them up and made nice rages. I need shoes and never have I ever wore flip flops and to tell the truth if I never hear another flip flop again, it wouldn’t bother me. Down here you can sometimes know who is coming up behind you by the sound of there flip flops or at least you know some one is coming and how many. There is two Walmarts in Guatemala City and they are not the same as the US but they have a lot of stuff like you see in the US. We tried to buy a computer there one time and have it changed to English and no one could do it. We put it on our credit card and they had to give us back cash because they could not take it back off our credit card. This left us walking around with a lot of cash. Something you never do in Central America. As I have always said Shopping is an adventure down here. When we left Belize we had to go to customs and they are at the port, this is laying there on the ground. No sign or any thing telling where it came from but it has been used.

Pam said if we had it we could build a bigger boat. I wonder some times what she would have me building if we had money but we don’t and our trip down we had motor trouble again (we need to spend some of the little money we do have and get some new parts)and we had to sail hard to get here. Stormy with rain and the wind kept changing causing us to make a slow trip down and left us having to anchor after dark. Anchoring after dark in the rain is bad and we try not to do it. Had a ship get too close to us and now Pam has said we are going to do some motor work before we leave again. If you are thinking about sailing around like the good old days of old with out a motor, remember Columbus never had a 1000 foot long rusty ship come out of a rain shower at 20 knots bearing down on them.

This is not the ship that was in the rain shower. But it is a lot like it. When you can feel the ship’s motor running you are “TOO!” close 

All in all it’s just the adventure of being here. Sometimes when things are going wrong we try to stop and remember all the long hours we worked building our boat and how long we dreamed of doing this. Maybe this is life’s normal way to make you realize life is not always stopping to smell the rose’s some times maybe all there is around you is just people drying fish.

Happiness?

This week has not been as hot as it has been. This bring happiness. We needed some pluming and went this week to what they call a hardware store here in Belize “getting there just as they opened the doors in the cool early morning air “and there on a shelf was a thermometer, a little cooler this morning as you can see.

Air conditioning is a luxury here. We needed a peace of pipe for our very own new commode we ordered and had sent in from the states at double what it would cost in the states but worth the money and the wait here.

IT’s so Pretty

The old one had been in service for most of 20 years and needed rebuilding again and Pam was in no mood for me to patch it up any more. Trying to talk to her was, “No! New!” After 53 years of us being married there is a few things arguing about just won’t help when she sets her head. When it arrived there was nothing but smiles as she opened the box to find it was one inch bigger than to old one. One inch ain’t much unless your on a boat. A boat commode doesn’t set directly on the floor like a house one does and the stand it sets on needed to be built one inch bigger or one inch father away from the wall. No problem, I could fix that and it would look good if we could only find some new ceramic tile that would match the old some how? Now the pluming didn’t match the new commode or the new floor stand that I need to build. No problem just go too the hardware store and buy a little piece of new pipe. You forget sometimes being down here how shopping in the Caribbean can be an adventure. Had some pipe there at the store they call a hardware store but not the fittings. Its common to want a bolt to find here they only have one and maybe you need two with no nuts for that size bolt that they do have and no plans to order any soon. Back to the boat to see if I could move the pipe just a little with out breaking a fitting. After a lot of prying and loosening clamps, I moved it some. Now the hose that hooked to the commode was just one half inch too short, we were getting closer and we knew there is no need to try and buy a boat commode hose here. One of the guys that works here at the marina found a used piece of hose and with socking it in boiling water to make it soft again we managed to get it hooked up temporally. We will be taking the boat back to Guatemala in a few days because we have run out of the time Belize will let us stay here so maybe we can get what we need down there. Happiness is some time found in what you need and forget sometimes how much you need it until it won’t work anymore. Setting a little crooked and not bolted down but working great is happiness. A lot of people here find their happiness in different ways I guess. Letting your hair grow may not be a way to stay cool down here but having long dread locks to some is being cool. Here this man’s dread locks do drag the ground. This is the longest I have ever seen. On a hot day they say it does not bother them wearing their dread locks up on there head most of the time packed in a tee shirt. He told Pam she could hold his hair and she said it felt soft.

Here a young women is walking around selling tamales trying to make a living.

You don’t need permits to sell food in Central America and she may have walked miles to get here caring her bucket of goodies because we are miles from the village here. All of this in a way makes life interesting here or maybe we are all caught up in our on happiness and don’t see how hard life can be sometimes. Remember we all call being here “Paradise”.

Keeping It Real

This week we have been really busy but we did find time to go to Belize Independence Day celebration in San Ignacio Belize. Belize is a diversified place with many cultures for a small country. Along the beach it’s getting whiter by the day as the gringos are coming down and buying up the beach front. There is large pockets of white Mennonites here that stay mostly to them selves and live the old way in there on community or compounds. Then there are the Garifunas, that is the black people that escaped from slavery or ship wrecks and set up their on culture here. There has always been Mayan and Indigenous people here so going to any event here is regional. San Ignacio is on the west side of the country near the Guatemala border. It’s a small town built on a river with two large Mayan ruins close by. There is a local market there where every one comes to sell and buy. We were invited to go with a cab driver and his wife that works here in Placencia Village on the ocean side of the country. We used his cab often because the marina we are in is out of town. They wanted to go. He said he was going if he could and we could go and maybe help with the gas. Gas is over 6 US dollars a gallon here. Remember when people say you can live here in the Caribbean cheaper than the US, it’s just not so. You can survive here on beans and rice but that not living well the way I see it. The ride cross country was great but with some difficulty. They don’t have red light here and in all of Central America they have speed bumps every where. Even out in the country, if you see two houses on the side of the road, you look for a speed bump. You’re rolling along then it’s another speed bump and you have to almost stop to make it across with some one running along beside your car trying to sell you something. Orange juice they squeezed along side the road or maybe corn on the cob with mayonnaise on it. When we got there it was after dark and still hot. We got a room with air condition but chose to walk around town and see what we could see. Supper was the restaurant special for the day, T bone steak, potato and salad and it was very reasonable, a clew it was local beef. I wasn’t thinking and I for got to ask if the steak was imported. Steak came to our table 1\4 inch thick and chew-able to say the least but being there with our friends in the night air, eating at and open air restaurant on the street was really good. By 11:00 the celebration was getting stared and if you have ever been in Central America you know there has never been a speaker big enough and they can and will crank it up. By midnight every one was happy the officials were through giving speeches and they were shooting fire works. They left the music playing so you could just seen and felt the fire works more that you could hear them. Another thing you will find in all of Central America is there is no police any where down here saying “I’m here to protect you” you have to stand where we tell you. They were setting the fire works off maybe a 100 feet away from the crowd and they were going off over our heads. Back at our room a fight broke out in the street under our window, another thing in Central America is if they’re fighting no one will break it up, they will just surround the fighters and start cheering them on. Some one hollered police coming, they never came, and the guy on top took off running leaving the other guy bloody and still looking for a fight. Here in Central America a man is respected if there is fight in him when what he is fighting for is worth the fight. If you come here show these people a little respect and you will have no problem. The next day the officials said the parade would start at 1:20 sharp. We were parked on the road in the hot sun about a 1\4 mile from where the parade was to start and about 4:00 it stared coming by us, another thing in all of Central America is if it happens at all, it on time. Remember going to there celebrate is not a touristy thing to do. It’s their day to celebrate and we were there and that is why “we are here to see it when it’s real.

A Backhoe Bucket Full of Beauties