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.

This country is one of the least densely populated in the Americas, with  only about 310,000 people on land about the size of Massachusetts.  It’s practically empty! But such a variety of people and such a complex mix of races, languages and backgrounds!

The capital, Belmopan, is barely a town of 12,000-15,000. Here’s the center of government as built by the British about 40 years ago, well inland, after yet another hurricane wreaked havoc on Belize City. But although the official seat of government moved, a lot of people prefer the funkier character of the coast. The British engineers were more interested in sturdy construction and good drains.

And here’s the American Embassy, only a couple years old, built for $80 million dollars, including two stories underground. There’s more around back. Even sturdier construction and better drains, I’d say. Also a sign forbidding photographs.

Wanting to go inland, we took the water taxi and public buses (BlueBird school buses) to Belmopan via the lovely Hummingbird Highway, one of four major paved roads in the country, then asked a taxi driver to show us the sights. These were: half a dozen embassies, the Chinese supermarkets, and the home of the richest man, whose fortune was based on telephone poles. We had lunch at the market across from the bus station and came back home.

The biggest groups are  Creole (“English”), descendants of slaves imported to work in the mahogany forests, ,  Mestizo (“Spanish” mixed Hispanic and Amerindian) ,  and Mayan, these days often refugees from Guatemala.  Unlike many former colonies, this one, ex-British Honduras, never had a large European population during colonial times.

Finally found our Belize courtesy flag, whose coat of arms bears symbols of the mahogany industry which was the economy in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s reminiscent of Maryland’s seal only instead of ‘strong deeds, soft words’ the Belize inscription means: In the shade, we thrive. The men are holding axes and saws, not fish and shovels. The picture is supposed to get bigger if you click on it.
We used to sew and paint our own courtesy flags, but this one, like Maryland, should be bought.

The Garifuna were originally from St. Vincent, descendants of African slaves with some intermarriage with Caribs, Arawaks and Europeans. As the Eastern Caribbean was exchanged between the British and French, they were in the way, and were shipped to Belize during the early 1800s. To this day, they have maintained their own cultural identity and account for about 7% of the population, and all the Rastas.

A small but distinct group are the Mennonites, who came en masse from Mexico in the late 1950s. “Mennonite farmers and businessmen are responsible for a major part of Belize food production. They produce a good portion of the country’s beef supply and most of the chicken, eggs, pasteurized milk and other dairy products. Mennonite farms also produce soybean for animal feed, red kidney beans, rice fruits and vegetables.” As they do elsewhere, they build furniture. They have been granted a certain autonomy in their communities, cannot vote and do not serve in the military. The same straw hats (not local!), the same black bonnets and overalls that they wear in Ohio, it appears.

You can read more here :http://www.reporter.bz/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2607&Itemid=2.

Then there are East Indians, Arabs, and Chinese, who have come in greater numbers lately from Hong Kong and Taiwan and settled into a mercantile niche, particularly groceries and restaurants .

I feel like I’m writing a school report, but probably, on the subject of Belize, many people draw a blank. I continue because I was surprised at how different the feel of this ex-British Caribbean colony is from those of the Eastern Caribbean. There don’t seem to be such extremes of wealth, or the antipathies between groups that you sometimes see.  Although the rhetoric for recent local elections was hot enough!

A good thing about this small population is the reduced pressure to deforest – Belize is trying hard to be an eco-tourist destination, and has apparently retained an impressive number of  the larger jungle animals like jaguar and tapir, and birds. This NY Times article is old but I thought interesting on the subject of sustainable forestry.    The gist of it is: Rainforest Action says       “Boycott Mahogany” but others say that if the forests aren’t valuable, there will be no reason to keep them. Belize is still covered with tropical forests and half of it is in preservation, so here’s an opportunity to provide economic incentive not to turn diverse forests into citrus groves.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03EEDC1F39F937A35755C0A960958260&n=Top/News/World/Countries%20and%20Territories/Belize