shoes on a wire

current location- caye caulker, an island off belize. very beautiful. really taking advantage of being on a beautiful caribbean island, by umm, hanging out in our air conditioned room, reading our books, writing this blog. basically we are english and it is hot, not a good combination. we are going to venture out this afternoon and go snorkelling or something when it's non the midday sun and mad dogs and englishmen etc etc

so after our night out in guatemala, and consequent missing of the bus the next day (nb not our fault as explained in last blog.... clearly nothing to do with hangovers and lack of sleep..), we got the same bus the next day, by a clever technique of arriving at the bus station an hour before scheduled departure time. good learning curve. bus took a while to cross the border due to high percentage of israelis on it who had to get taxis to the bank and get photos for their visas which they needed to enter belize. people in belize are very very friendly, this is quite unnerving at first, as you automatically assume that if someone is that friendly then they have ulterior motives, or are trying to con you. generally this isn't the case, though i'm sure that does happen too. so we were suitably on guard against this. checked into martha's guest house in san ignacio (small town 10 miles from guatemalan border), no sign of martha, lots of ants though. they had formed a long line in our bathroom and were marching around the place. we ignored them by watching tv; i seem to have developed a weird obsession with the cartoon channels so we watched some yogi bear, transformers, and pink panther. must be part of my extreme escapism from real life plan. then we went out for some food but via a bar called faya wata (fire water). faya wata is i think a local and very strong and crude version of rum. we had some guinness, it was vaguely similar to real guinness, but not as good. then some local beers called light house.

then we met some americans who are living here, robert and victor. they are opening their own business here flying people around belize in their ultralight plane (robert was in last month's national geographic adventure magazine, he has flown pierce brosnan and ben stiller in his plane, and an american astronaut called peggy something). they were very hospitable and friendly and took us out for dinner to a place up the road, and bought us drinks. then they offered to drive us to some mayan ruins via a river we could swim in on the way. given we had drunk a bit by now, and it was late, and we didn't want to get axe murdered, me and ab went to have a meeting about their proposition, and decided there was a small chance they could be axe murderers, so we politely declined. we told them it was because we didn't want to get axe murdered, and they agreed that that was fair enough of us to be so sensible. given their measured reaction to this, we went for another meeting and decided that they couldn't possibly be axe murderers as they wouldn't have reacted so calmly to being accused of being axe murderers if they were, plus lots of people seemed to know them, so if there was blood on their hands they'd find it hard to get away safely. so we did a u-turn and agreed to their offer and went off to be axe murdered in their jeep. in the meantime some man we had also met whose name we didn't catch as he was a bit hard to understand, had dropped off some ice cream for us at our hotel, one portion of 100% chocolate, and one of sweet corn. we had in fact requested this, but didn't think he'd seriously do it, so we told the hotel man he could have it as we were going out to be axe murdered.

we went to their ranch in the fields outside san ignacio. (en route we saw the ultralight plane in its hangar which was coo)l. it's a really beautiful wooden house, with stables and horses and a man called ali who looks after them (the horses), and a dog called whiskey. the little horse called picasso tried to bite me but it was ok, i think he was just hungry, so i gave him some oats. then we looked at loads of photos taken from robert's ultralight, which were amazing. they were taken by someone called marius who takes photos for national geographic, and has done a photo book of lithuania, and is making a book with them of photos of belize. then they decided there wasn't enough petrol to drive to where we were going to go, so we just stayed at theirs drinking beer and looking at pictures of flying.

the next day we drove to the river and swam in it. think it would be nicer there when it's not been raining, as it was a bit muddy, but it was good for the hangover to have a swim in a proper river in the rain. en route we kept seeing shoes hanging from electricity wires over the road, apparently this means drugs for sale. interesting fact i thought. on the way back we stopped for lunch at a place that is owned by francis ford coppola, robert is friends with him too.... other things of interest were: we saw a bright green fluorescent snake crossing the road, and we had a smoothie with an amazing pink fruit in it called a pitahaya i think (siobhan you really should look into importing this for innocent, it's totally amazing). that evening we did more hangover recovery by eating burger and fries and watching cartoons..

friday
got the chicken bus (so called as it's the cheapest way of travelling around and thus sometimes has chickens on, they are old school buses from america, so not good for leg room or air conditioning etc, but was only 7 belize dollars for 2 hour journey = about 1.25 pounds) to belize city. en route ab checked her camera and the photo memory card that she'd taken to be converted to cd that morning was broken which would have meant losing all the photos of antigua, tikal, the volcano, panajachel, harim and willy etc etc, so we jumped off the bus in belmopan to formulate a plan. luckily we found another branch of the same photo shop and a nice man helped us sort it all out. the photos were in fact still on the card but hiding in the recycle bin, and when we had called the photo man in san ignacio he had deleted them from his computer, so it was all very nearly a disaster. when ab discovered they were still there, she was very happy and we went for rice and beans to celebrate. then got back on another chicken bus to belize, then taxi to the boat, then boat to the island.

saturday
independence day, but nothing seems to be happening. we're a bit over other countrys' independence days, plus maybe it's not politically correct for us to celebrate it, when surely it was independence from the english? will investigate this, as i might be wrong and it might be something to do with a battle for belize between spain and england or something. got to go watch more cartoons now...