Belize - Day the Rest

All of the entries prior to this one were written longhand during my trip in April. It took me all these months to transfer the scribbles into typeface. I stopped writing on that 6th day. The island was the island and I must have been all tapped out on new material. Months and months later, when I write today, I can hardly offer you the riveting observations you have gotten used to in my writing. Ha. What I can tell you today about my trip is a little summary of my last days there and offer you the answers to the practical questions I was asked on my return. Questions I never thought to include in my journal.



The last night on the island was a fun one. After dinner we had a huge bonfire and learned some Belizean folklore and a few smooth moves. A group of men that were working on the nearby resort joined us for the dancing. Only they didn’t dance. They stood in a circle around us and watched a bunch of white Americans & Canadians butcher their culture’s traditional dances. Mostly, they laughed at us. And we laughed at us. A few of us took turns on the handmade drums and set the beat for the rest of the travelers who were light on their feet.







The ride back to Dangriga had one unfortunate passenger, me. The water was choppier on the way back to the mainland. I had the frightful seat where the boat broke the waves. My right side was drenched; my left side remained reasonably dry. I was a sight to be seen. When I was seen, I usually got that half smile, slightly amused, pity face from people. Our luggage was getting thrown about from boat to van and it wasn’t really possible to find some dry clothes. A few of us scrounged for wet-naps to at least rid the salt from our skin for the rest of our travel. We were running to catch a tiny charter to fly us back to Belize City where we’d spend our last night close to the airport. The country of Belize is tiny, but the highways are structured (mostly pointed inland, nothing running north/south along the water) in a way that people will opt to hop on these charter flights to skip north or south.

People always ask about the toilets on the island. For some reason this is what people always want to know. There was a two stall structure that leaned left from a previous hurricane. There was a whole bathroom process that happened in that little room. Basically, it was an outhouse complete with composting toilets. The idea was every time you added your own waste, you would put a cup of cedar chips down the well too. Honestly, I wish all campgrounds used this method, rather than chemically treated. It smelled a lot better and was reusable for fertilizer. The trick was remembering to throw the paper goods in the trash, rather than down the hole. Then we all sterilized the seat after each sitting. It was a lot to think about , waking in the middle of the night with a sudden urge to pee.

Midnight runs to the bathroom followed this logic:

Crap I have to pee.
Find my shoes (our feet didn’t have the Belizean soles, we had to wear sandals at all times because of the coral mixed in with the sand, not to mention the hermit crabs).
Find my headlight (no electricity, remember?)
Relief.
Throw the paper in the TRASH.
Scoop a coconut cup worth of cedar chips in.
Sterilize the seat.
Lower the seat (this is an important one for the sake of bugs, I was on my way down one night and had a HUGE cockroach crawl out from under the seat, I had no choice I was on my way down and had to keep going, giant roach or no).
Lock the door from the outside.

Head to the wash bins. There was one bin full of clean water and one wash bin for the discarded soapy water, and one small bowl for the rinse process. So … Take the small bowl and fill it from the clean water bin, hit the soap, then move over to the discard bin. Pour the water from the bowl over your hands to rid them of the bubbles and let it fall into the soapy bin. That’s how we tried to be hygienic. I doubt this process.

The other question I got a lot was about the drinking water. Most places throughout our stay had filtered water. The island was also filtered, sort of. On a salt water island, if you dig a well a certain yardage from the waterfront you will have a self-filtered water reserve. There is a science to this; it has to be a certain distance from shore and a measured depth. A shallow well, the first few feet will be ‘fresh’ water, filtered from the surrounding sediment. Those few feet of water would be scooped out every few days and aged into our drinking water. It remained a little salty to the taste. Not a thirst quenching water, to be sure, but it kept us hydrated.

My it’s a small world story … One of the vacationers, Jen, was from Seattle, my sister’s city. The whole time we were on the island she kept talking about this fitness boot camp she was going to before we arrived in the Caribbean. When I got home, catching up with family, my sister started in on the same conversation. Turns out they were both in the same class. They later connected. Jen was surviving class with her sister. Since then, I’ve heard Jen has stopped going and now her sister and my sister have talked on occasion. Weird.

Lastly, people always ask if I’d do another REI adventure. My answer to that is yes but under specific circumstances. I would love to do it at the serious, crazy adventure level-scaling mountains and shit. My brain keeps circling the idea of backpacking the Grand Canyon. For something like that, I think it’s a great way to experience the outdoors. You have experienced guides, who are knowledgeable about the land, the gear is all there and waiting for your use, you don’t have to worry about food. For an adventure trip that is pushing your skill level, I think it’s a great way to do it. For leisure travel, I would say… not a chance. I would hate following a group through a city. All in all, this was a great way for someone who was traveling alone and for the first time beyond our borders (somehow Canada and Jamaica don’t count as international travel). At times I felt like I was giving up my own voice in my own vacation, but it was a compromise I was willing to make with my travel ignorance. I’m building my smarts. Really, now I just want to go everywhere and am learning more and more than I can do it - mentally, physically, and financially.

End of story.