Customs and Immigration, Belize Style

This is the actual customs and immigration office in Belize when you leave for Guatemala. The guy in the photo is also the immigration official. He did put down his Sunday comics long enough to stamp our passports and wave us through.

The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round

All buses in Belize are old American school buses and while you´re on them you have plenty of time to think "hmmm... this could actually be my old school bus, if only school buses could last that long..."

5 Golden Rings

Modeling a necklace of thousands of tiny silver beads bought in Taxco, Mexico.

¡Special Matt Agard Guest Author Rant [with some editorial comments]!

Five Golden Rings, four copper bracelets, three pairs of earrings, two silver necklaces, and a Tarramura belt on an REI backpack.

Of course golden rings are frequently wedding rings, and before wedding rings come engagement rings, and that´s where our trouble starts. As many of you know, Mary and I became pseudo-engaged (engaged to be engaged) shortly before this trip with some pressure from one of my friends. (A seismologist in Seattle has a lot of explaining to do.)

Anyway, we couldn´t get engaged because we didn´t have a ring yet, and Mary didn´t trust me to buy a ring. (From the rest of this blog I´ve gathered she doesn´t think highly of my taste). [Ed Note: Not true, he asked me to shop with him. Possibly because he doesn´t think highly of his taste.] So we agreed to shop together for an engagement ring.

Biggest mistake of my life? That might be an exaggeration, but I would estimate that we have been to almost one hundred jewelry stores on our trip, Mary has bought at least a dozen pieces of jewelry, and there is no engagement ring in sight. Now she does have very exacting standards on rings, but this goes beyond that. There have been several times where she has seen something that seems perfect, only to want to sleep on it and then not make it back in time for the store to be open [Ed Note: I am not responsible for the haphazard shop keeping hours and/or the frequent holiday´s scheduled in Mexico].

I am fairly certain this is not accidental, Mary doesn´t want to find a ring. She has realized that once we find one, I won´t be as willing to do an hour or two of jewelry shopping every day, so she is trying her best to delay the inevitable. However what she doesn´t know is that if she doesn´t hurry up I am going to propose to her with a ring I find in a Cracker Jack box. [Ed note: There are no Cracker Jacks in Latin America.]

Beautiful Belize

I highly recommend that you buy a ticket to Belize City and then take a commuter flight to Dangriga Town and then take a little boat out to Tobacco Caye, a five-acre island in the middle of the Caribbean. It´s an amazing experience, and honestly can be done on the cheap. Commuter flights are $30 and lodging in a cabin on the water including 3 meals is $30 a day.

Then, once you arrive on the island you only do a few things... You snorkle, you talk to the thirty other people on the small island, you eat meals prepared for you and served cafeteria style at 7am, 12 and 6pm, you sleep, you can read if you´re feeling ambitious and you stare at beautiful blue water. It´s not all paradise, however, as there is a serious risk of a coconut falling on your head. Start expedia searching for tickets now. You´ll be happy you did.

Fun fact: The Belize Great Barrier Reef is second only to THE Great Barrier Reef in Australia in terms of fish and corral species. Here´s a photo of the Caye in case you need more inspiration.

Just What the Doctor Ordered

So, it had to happen sometime.

The scene: Romantic lakes that can only be reached via a circuitous route including travelling via bus, van and a 1962 VW beattle up a dirt road. Remote, romantic lakes. So remote, in fact, that they lacked food. They also lacked water. What they did have, in large quantities, were hairy spiders slightly smaller than the palm of my hand.

And, of course, that´s when I got sick. Really, really sick without running water. Oy. By the next morning some of my illness had subsided so we hitched a ride to another town in a pickup truck where we got a room that featured a bed that was 2X4 slats spaced 5 inches apart with an inch of foam for a mattress. And, of course, that´s when Matt got sick too.

The next day, feeling better and optimistic, we took an eight hour van ride to Palenque where Matt came down with a fever of 103 degrees... That´s when we went to the doctor, who put us on a course of antibiotics and gave us some lovely coco flavored pedialite. I wonder if coconut flavored pedialite is specific to Latin America and the US features cherry and orange flavors?

On the bright side, in cabin number two, the woman who owned the cabins made me and her whole family soup since I was sick. It was very touching.

Mexican Justice

¡Special Matt Agard guest author appearance!

Thinking we were over a bout of food poisoning, Mary and I embarked on an eight hour van journey through the part of Chiapas that borders Guatemala to get from Lagos de Montebello to Palenque.

The first five hours were relatively uneventful, multiple van changes, beautiful forests, mountains, and rivers intermixed with burned out fields, random men in camouflage with machine guns searching our bags and asking us where we were from, the usual. However, after about five hours, the Pepto I had taken started interacting with the still present food poisoning, and I started feeling nauseous and my temperature started rising. At this point, a different branch of the military (I knew this even in my feverish mind because they were wearing black instead of camouflage) pulled over the van.

After a brief conversation with the driver, the captain of the group asks the kids in front of us where they were from. When he hears Honduras he orders them out of the van. He allows our answer of being from the US to stand, but tosses out three more passengers when they can´t substantiate the fact that they are from DF (Mexico City). About a minute later he tells our driver to leave without the five passengers, but our driver says they haven't paid yet, and forces all of them to pay for the lift he gave them to their execution, exportation or whatever it is that the Mexican military does with people that it considers undesirable in Chiapas.

(Ed Note: This photo doesn´t have much to do with anything, I just thought it was cute.)

Lost in Translation

My last job kept me up nights thinking about typo´s (which is why I have excused this blog from such scruitiny). On a campaign I was working on, we had a Spanish language handout on its way to print when we discovered a typo that changed the meaning of a sentence from "Measure G will REPAIR our roads" to "Measure G will RAPE our roads." Thankfully it was caught in time and I laugh about it today.

Not so with this sign, which should have read Dangerous, Do Not Swim. It´s positioned next to a 50 foot waterfall that doesn´t look very inviting for a swim and no one seems to have an interest in repairing the sign.

Fashion First

Those of us who know Matt have always appreciated his fashion sense... and that´s something I´ve particularly come to love on this trip as he packed three tee-shirts, two of which have the word Elvis printed on them.

This is probably why everyone knows we´re Americans.

Chapulines

So grasshoppers are a standard food item in Oaxaca... Matt claims to like them, I am not such a fan. Anyone else try them? Opinions?

A Breath of Fresh Air

After two weeks in Mexico City and its environs, we were ready to breathe oxygen in our air and see blue sky again. They really aren´t kidding about the smog in Mexico City... it´s intense. We´ve been holed up for the past 4 days in Mazunte on the Oaxaca coast where the weather is hot and so is the ocean. We´ve watched turtles in the act of "copulando," birds flying within arms reach, fish flying through the air and picturesque sunsets.

Modern Romance

Oaxaca state has so many breathtakingly beautiful sights... we took a camioneta (truck) up and around and down a mountain to arrive here at Agua al Hierve, where there are naturally created infinity pools that are filled with spring water.

This couple, perched on the edge of one of the pools, was beautiful. While the father held their baby on his back, the mother angled her cell phone and text messaged.

Districto Federal

I´m having a hard time wrapping my mind around what to say about the incredible spectacle that is Mexico City.

From Lucha Libre to the Ballet Folklorico, from braving the subway to taking canal boats through Xochimilco, from climbing 294 steps to the top of the pyramid of the sun (second largest pyramid in the world) at Teotihuacan, to trying pulque (a very old fashioned drink made of fermented Agave plant and a symbol of peasant Mexico), from eating a fancy dinner overlooking a fresco in a swimming pool that had been installed by Diego Rivera to eating amazing street tacos of Al Pastor with pineapple, to randomly running into friends from San Francisco on a street corner in downtown Mexico City to being lost in a city of 18 million, to the zoo and the national anthropology museum, to learning about the Aztecs and the many different ways you can and should offer the gods human sacrifices... Mexico City defies neat little packaged blog entries. Lets just say that we both really liked Mexico City. A lot.

Trying New Food

We like to think of ourselves as adventurous eaters... so when Matt suggested ordering something that sounded a lot like "little hands of pigs" we thought, ´How bad can it be?´ It turns out that little hands of pigs were the cold, gelled, fatty parts of pigs feet. And some tomatos and orange slices for decoration. Yum.

Take Him Out to the Ball Game

1. 
   
   We see hundred year old frescos, pyramids built before Christ, murals by Diego Rivera depicting the struggle of workers in Mexico, guilded churches, Buroque architecture, stained glass, painted tile, Volcanos and lakes and oceans and parks, but nothing has made Matt´s face light up more than this headline. Go Sox.