vive la revolution

hello all and happy belated valentines day from big fat fatty pickles. sorry for what i think has been the longest blog gap in blog writing history. our internet broke as some horses had wandered into the satellite dish and broken the connection, but it is mended now.

life is gibnutting along here in belize. bert is still finalising the ultralight business, and until that starts and the money starts rolling in - which it will as there are lots of rich tourists here who will want to spend their money on going on an ultralight tour – we have been watching dvds and going on walks and eating cake from our favourite cake shop. i have spotted quite a lot of gibnuts, they are always running away from the camera though so no award winning photos so far.

i have also done a lot of bike riding on my new bike, today’s was 2 hours – in the midday sun with no suncream, typical english person sun-related mistake (i didn’t learn from the mexico beach sun-related mistake obviously, and now have red arms and legs like a half lobster). the road surfaces here are very hard, and the proliferation of speed bumps in towns and general holes in the road makes the cycling experience a bit bumpy and painful at times, and i wonder how long until a crack appears in my bike. there are dogs and other cyclists to dodge and for some reason lots of belizeans cycle on the wrong side of the road which is a bit unnerving and a whole new obstacle to look out for. once you are out of the towns though, the road just goes and goes until the next town and you can really go for it – no traffic lights or roundabouts to speak of (there is one police stop but they don’t care about cyclists). one thing that definitely slowed me down today was the huge headwind i was riding into for the first hour. i have come to take the importance of the wind very seriously these days, bert lives his life by it as it controls how much flying you can do per day. he is constantly spying on the windsock on the airstrip with his binoculaurs.

anyway cycling is a big thing in belize, they take it very seriously. they have their version of the tour de france, the tour of belize. admittedly not quite as long (err maybe just 150 miles in fact), and won’t be featuring lance any time soon, but it’s pretty cool to be in a cycling inclined country. i have seen lots of lycra-d men, and one woman, on nice looking bikes, and one day we saw the whole santino team out training. you get lots of friendly waves and nods while riding, and a van delivering water threw me an extra bottle when i stopped to do some stretching today. i propose we build a velodrome here to support the habit, but i’m not sure how much this would cost to make or whether i’d be allowed to call it the picklodrome.

we have watched a lot of films, and below are my opinions and percentages:

in bruges: totally cool and bizarre english film about not very good hitmen, drugs, dwarves and belgium. colin farrell does quite a lot of crying in it. 78%

fidel: the untold story: hugely enlightening and fascinating documentary about castro made by a big castro fan. as someone who didn’t know anything much at all about castro, other than that he has a brother called raul, and lives in cuba, i now know a lot more. and am very much on his side. it’s amazing what cuba has achieved considering their total independence from most of the world – amongst other things they have produced artists, writers, musicians (buena vista social club), they are regularly top 10 olympic medal winners, they have 100% literacy rate. [obviously i am a fickle pickle and if i was to see a castro documentary by someone that did not love him then i would probably be just as much anti him as i am now pro him] [actually i’m not sure i would but all i mean is i’m sure there are reasons to not like him too] . 95%

the curious tale of benjamin button: too long, and not particularly convincing. interesting idea though and i liked the clock that ticked backwards. wasn’t sure of the relevance of placing it during the new orleans hurricane, other than was it to do with things not being everlasting, or the fluidity of time or something? 56%

21: entertaining film about a bunch of clever m.i.t maths geeks who learn how to count cards and play the blackjack tables in vegas and win hundreds of thousands of dollars on the weekends, and how this impacts on their normal geeky maths lives in boston during the week. in typical bert style, turns out he used to hang out with these guys in cabo san lucas, and they asked him to join their gambling team. you have to have a really good memory to succeed at this, and be good at maths. i pointed this out to bert, but he stated moral issues as the reason he hadn’t agreed to it. whatever the reason, it’s a good job he didn’t as he would no doubt have ended up with all his teeth smashed up with a hammer by the vegas security guards who would have spotted him counting the cards quite quickly.65%

love in the time of cholera: beautifully filmed (set in cartagena, northern columbia, not sure if filmed there or elsewhere in south america) and acted (javier bardem) adaptation of garcia marquez novel. i haven’t read the book so can’t comment on how faithful the film is to it, but will do. can somebody post it to me? 96%

burn after reading: recent coen brothers’ film, a mixture of funny and ridiculous. best scene was the last one where the cia are analyzing what had happened: let’s make sure that never happens again then – yes sir, good idea – what exactly did just happen – i have no idea sir - ok, good. apparently this film was not a satire against the cia, but i don’t believe that. 68%

a time to kill: although i really don’t like sandra bullock, this film is so good that even her presence couldn’t ruin it. court room drama about a black man who murdered the 2 white men that raped and left for dead his 10 year old daughter. it is in mississippi, and all the jury are white, so he hasn’t got much chance of being acquitted. matthew maconohi (phonetic spelling as i can’t spell his stupid surname) makes an amazing summation speech asking the jury to imagine how they would feel if the girl had been white. 90%

the queen: i had watched some of this on a mexican bus in spanish last month, but hadn’t understood it. i found it really interesting and very sympathetic towards the queen, who i now like a lot. my granny on mama pepinillo’s side used to look so similar to the queen that someone once asked her for her autograph. i can’t remember the outcome of this, what was it mum? 91%

revolutionary road: by sam mendes of american beauty fame. similar in the sense of strangling suburban claustrophobia, this time in 1950’s southern america. kate winslet and leo dicaprio play the leads, and not on a sinking ship this time. really disturbingly good portrayal by kate winslet of hopelessness and emptiness. won’t spoil it by telling you what happens but you should watch it. 90%

the wrestler: i wasn’t properly watching this at first as i was busy writing this blog update, but i became more engrossed in it as it went on. peculiar film and i would never have thought i would find a film about wrestling interesting, nor have i ever wondered about wwf wrestlers’ private lives, or their health. did not enjoy the bit where he had big staples in him. mickey rourke is amazing, i think he won an award for this? what else has he been in, me and bert couldn’t remember? 90%

the kite runner: wasn’t kabul beautiful back in the days, what a shame. very interesting we thought, and sad too. 85%

on friday we got up at 6am – quite an achievement for me – to go for an early morning ultralight flight. there is lots of fog here in the early mornings, called convection fog – which is made because the dampness from the rains last week is made to rise up from the ground by the temperature difference between night and day, and it stays low in the valleys because of a temperature inversion – (i hope that is clear) – and we flew up through the fog to the blue sky on the other side, which was a bit eery being in a cloud of fog for nearly a whole minute. bert knew where the sun was and flew towards that, like icarus but not as high and without the wax. we flew up to blancenaux lodge (francis ford coppola’s), past a house that bert said belongs to icolas cage, who is francis ford coppola’s nephew apparently. i tried to see if he was in but we were too high up. we had some breakfast at the lodge, there is a runway there. some little bugs bit us, they are called something like bataliss, they are tiny and you get a little injection mark from them. a man in the foyer was asking where the famous fan was. i didn’t understand this question so we followed him and he pointed out a ceiling fan which ffc used in apocalypse now, in the first scene where there’s a man in bed and the fan is swooshing round and it becomes the noise of the helicopter above. i took a photo. we flew back through some bumpy wind that had appeared. and then i went on my lobster bike ride.

my parcels of clothes from mama pepinillo arrived safely. one had been sitting in the post office for a while for some reason. i had thought this was missing forever so it was a relief to find it – 2 parcels on one day – we celebrated with some cake. all my clothes from pre leaving england still fit! slightly too well (post cake) but there you go. very exciting.

the little wooden house is sinking into the ground, so that now when we need to lock the door, we have to prize it up with a screwdriver underneath it to make it reach the lock. there are little geckos that live in the house, they eat the spiders and flies inside. we think there is one per room, they are territorial. sometimes you see them scuttling around, but mainly you just hear them occasionally making a little quacking clicking noise to say hello. i don’t think they are related to the sinking of the house. i would more likely be suspicious of the teeny tiny ants.

we went to a town called spanish lookout, where lots of mennonites live. it is very hilly so will be good cycling training. the mennonites speak a strange german based creole. they have long beards (the men), and hats, and wear clothes like in little house on the prairie – dungarees, braces, flowery dresses (the women), sensible shoes. they have a good supermarket there - i bought some special k and found a cadburys dairy milk bar, which tasted quite good, almost like a real one you’d get in england. we are going to go back for a jigsaw puzzle this week, good for keeping away alzheimers, as are sudokus which i have taught bert how to do. he is getting better at them. last shop-based comment: apparently there is a shop in belize city called brodys where they might sell ribena. we are going on a pilgrimage there soon.

we met a man in a big house near our yoga place called mr hobbs, he is from england, from lewisham, so he liked that i had lived in crystal palace as it is nearby. he has been in the british army all his life, and now lives here with his belizean wife. he makes lime juice and after we’d walked around his property he gave us some lime juice, it was really good.

i am halfway through midnight’s children by salman rushdie. bert is reading 7 years in tibet. i would have loved to see tibet as it was before the chinese massacred it and the dalai lama left to india. apparently the chinese have proposed they find the next lama and it is a chinese one. i don’t think that will work very well. i saw the dalai lama in the royal albert hall before i left, someone asked him what makes him laugh, and he told a story about a really small boy with really big feet and how that had really made him laugh; and about somebody doing hail marys with rosary beads, and the rosary beads broke and spilled all over the floor but they carried on hail marying. heinrich harrer who wrote 7 years in tibet died in 2006 which is a shame as bert would like to have met him. incidentally bert was the first person to hanglide off mount everest in 1981, from basecamp, 18,000feet, with oxygen. he was going to write a book about all the mountains he has been the first person to fly off – mount fuji, and mount cook too, and the first person to cross the alps in a hanglider, and the gulf of mexico in an open cockpit plane. ok this is my blog so that’s enough of bert and his firsts, i don’t know why he hasn’t contacted norris mcwhirter yet to get in his record book.

there is a lake in nicaragua which is the only lake in the world to have sharks in it, this is because it was part of the ocean originally, i suppose then the sea levels dropped and it became a lake and nicaragua got a bit more coast line. i mention this because we bought a very cool map of central america from the ffc lodge (it has the best gift shop which is also where i once bought the amazing write-on-anything-and-upside-down-and-on-the-moon-too-if-you-can-get-there biro) for our collection of central-america-abilia, and it has lots of interesting facts on the back of it. i will keep throwing these facts in to the blog randomly just to add some spice and unpredictability.

in around 3 weeks time i am doing my macmillan cancer support bike ride from one coast of mexico to the other (thankfully the thin bit). i don’t feel very prepared for this, despite the bike rides i’ve done recently. if you would like to sponsor me though you still can, my website is www.justgiving.com/picklesmexico i have made my target amount of 3000 pounds already. i am planning on doing their central america ride in november, so if you want you can wait and sponsor me for that.

yesterday we went swimming in a river. it gave me the fear because it was a bit murky and i don’t like not knowing what is underneath my feet. the bottom was really muddy and the mud stuck to your feet, and there were trees and branches lying in it, which spooks me out like shipwrecks do. one of the branches hit my arm underwater which made me scream. there were little fish which nibble you too. all in all i didn’t enjoy the experience and was a real cry baby about it all (according to bert anyway). we had a picnic there too but on the river bank. i pointed out that the bank on the other side was much prettier, and then realized that was a living example of me always thinking the grass is greener on the other side. in this case i’m pretty sure it was though. typically it was much harder to get to.

this is all my updating for now, i hope you have found it both entertaining and informative. i think overall i would give it 70%.