Now that we’ve decided to spend the hurricane season in the Rio Dulce, we’ve come back to Belize to spend some time out on the reefs diving and snorkeling and other things we just didn’t get to this winter, for various reasons.

Things are still a little discombobulated with the blog. So right now I’m going to just post a bunch of photos of signs. Nobody gets excited when I take pictures of them!

And all the pictures should expand if you click on them.

We’ll be away from the Internet for a couple weeks. In theory I can send posts, no pictures though, via HF radio. But in practice, like lots of this technological stuff, it’s one step forward and two steps back. Maybe it will work.
(or like the missing pictures now, maybe not!

And, thank you for reading!

SEWING MACHINE SETUP

While I’m cranking away (the machine is on the V-berth, just downwind of the blessedly wind-scooping hatch, I watch the birds.

We spend several days moored upstream of the one and only bridge across the Rio Dulce, at Fronteras. It’s been wonderful to jump off the boat at will into fresh water, and in this heat it’s a remedy taken regularly!

Upstream is a fort, San Felipe, which had something to do with protecting warehouses of Spanish gold further upstream in Lake Izabel. More information is needed about that – what kind of boats could have made it up, or down the river with treasure without getting picked off?

Downstream is a modern, concrete, 85’tall bridge which carries almost all the vehicular traffic that’s anywhere near the river. All the time we’ve been here there has been what I thought was road work in one spot near the top. There’s a striped umbrella and a truck and usually a couple cars, or an 18-wheeler stopped there. (I just Googled the bridge to see if I could find out when it was actually built, and couldn’t. I did learn that last year during Semana Santa (Holy Week, just passed!) which is apparently a major party time particularly on the Rio, the bridge was used for bungee jumping. I copied this photo from a travelpod user claudia favre)

We’d heard how wild and crazy things can get during this week, and by the looks of Claudia’s picture, we didn’t miss a thing by slipping downstream. The Rio Dulce, at least near Fronteras, is gradually becoming a destination for city Guatemalans on vacation. They build nice houses and buy Sea Rays and Silvertons and other floating palaces, then roar up and down, dragging wakes which probably haven’t been equalled since the last earthquake, and aren’t very kind to docks and river’s edge residences.

I made a comment about the striped umbrella on the bridge to a locally-connected gringo who’s been on the Rio for almost 20 years and here’s what he told me.

“This bridge is a real big deal. It’s the biggest bridge in the country. It took a long time and a lot of money to build, and the entire country, not just the people around here, are very proud of it. What you’re seeing is a booth where people stop to look around, get their picture taken, and a food stand. Yes, it’s a two-lane bridge, with lots of trucks, but people want to stop, and it’s accepted. The other traffic just goes around, or it stops too!!

“Things have changed a lot. There’s more electric, and cell phones, of course. Lots more outboard motors. Even fifteen years ago there was none of that. You wouldn’t have believed this place. An engine in your boat, that was a big deal.

“I know a man down in Livingston. Someone had given him an old engine which he used for a while, until he got a bad batch of fuel and couldn’t make it run any more. Luckily he had the sense to cover it with a tarp, but it sat there for quite some time. I was down there one day and saw it and said that maybe we could get this thing going again. So I cleaned it up, changed out a few things, and it started to run again.

“I got in my boat and came straight home. And you know, when I got back up the river to Fronteras, the first thing I heard was ‘Hey, how you put the spirit back in that man’s engine?”

“There was no way anyone could have come here faster, and there were no phones, no roads, nothing. So I’m still wondering, how did they put the spirit in the news?”

Then I realized that we were on a highway after all, but the other vehicles were mainly cayugas, paddling or fishing under the overhanging branches. When I say cayuga, I mean dugout canoes with freeboard measured in single-digit inches. They move surprisingly fast, up the shaded edges.

When we got to the gorge part of the river, green and sometimes cliff-walled, hills of varying hues marching off beyond, we just kept saying Wow, this is neat, or some such mundane exclamations of surprise and pleasure, bend after bend. It wound on for five or six miles, mostly deep (50′) water, full of white herons and other birds.

After the cliff section, scattered houses appeared, many of them, despite their palm frond roofs, clearly not built for local residents. Sometimes the mouth of a stream,a small store, a restaurant, or pentecostal church (solid concrete).

Eventually we came to a shallower and wider ‘lake’, the Golfete, rimmed by mountains a bit farther off. It was absolutely still, beyond the sweet song of frogs and birds. I had the eerie sensation of having climbed to a plateau in the clouds, and can’t shake the feeling that I’m not at sea level any more. But we didn’t have that much current against us, and water seeks its own level, doesn’t it?

It’s such a different world that I can see why people (other than insurance agents) have no concern about hurricanes here. I hadn’t visualized the scale of the place – our destination was still another ten miles off, and beyond that lies a 30-mile long fresh water lake, Izabel, largest in Guatemala.

When people talk about the Rio Dulce, their comments are always prefaced by “You’ll love it. It’s so beautiful, and the people are so nice.” Spending the hurricane season here clearly won’t be a hardship!

As I said, we’ve come to Guatemala to look for a place to hide during hurricane season. People do stay in the Caribbean through hurricane season, keeping an eye on the weather. But I don’t want to be looking over my shoulder all the time, especially when there’s new adventure to be had inland.

The mere idea of a commodious fresh water inland highway is plenty attractive and the reality doesn’t disappoint.

But of course, for this to be a good story, there must be some struggle or danger, so let me now mention the famous bar that runs across the mouth of the Rio Dulce. Its controlling depth is about five and a half feet, and there’s a tidal range of a foot and a half. So, pick the right time and our six feet,and beyond, can come in, if of course, we also pick the right place!

There is one sea buoy, which may or may not have been moved in the last decade. There are scraps of paper handed from boat to boat listing GPS waypoints that have worked for them. But the best advice we got was not to slow down too much or we’d find pushing through the mud more difficult. And it was nice to have a boat ahead of us, even if it was shallow draft, just for scale.

So we plowed on through, dodging fish trap floats made of soda and outboard oil bottles. Wood smoke, and the smell of drying fish, scented the air, and the binocular tour revealed a pleasantly ramshackle waterfront and a small town rising up the hill. There are cars here, but not many, since there isn’t a road to Livingston and all its business (mainly fishing and tourism by the looks of it) is done by lancha and cayuga.

Here, the customs, immigration, port captain, health, etc come aboard. There’s an agent, Raoul, who organizes it all, including the boat to bring them, so it’s quite expeditious. The health officer noted that we showed no signs of fever, vomiting or diarrhea. The customs officer was busy on his cell phone, and immigration wore high heels. The boatman noted that we did not have a courtesy flag, and undertook to provide us with one, for a fee, when we went ashore to pick up our papers. His English was good because he’d worked in a New York car wash, until he got deported.