animal vegetable mineral

hello and happy may 22nd blog readers

there are 3 new blogs below (into the wild part 4; the old man and the sea; annual report) so if you read them you will officially be fully up to date with events in my life in belize. i promise i am going to put photos on my blog very soon. i started to do this today but the computer was being strange so i gave up. i ate 3 ginger nut biscuits instead.

i hope you are all well wherever you may be reading my blog from.

annual report

update as of friday 22 may of recent events, in no particular chronological order

given my recent upgrading from not-particularly-important-person, to director and 20% shareholder in the company ultralight adventures belize ltd (see below for further information), i feel it would be appropriate to write today’s blog update in a rather more formal manner, as is befitting of a director. hencetoforth herewith whither whence points as follows in alphabetical order notwithstanding:

work permit paperwork
continuing. as part of above, business name was unregistered due to technical matters as follows: bert requiring sole proprietorship as a non-belizean was not possible, nor could a willing belizean or otherwise with belizean citizenship be found, thus creating a what shall be called catch-22 position. consequently, the hithertofor registered business of ultralight adventures belize became deregistered and incorporated as a company with mr robert combs and ms lucy pickles as co-directors and shareholders. ms pickles currently confused as to what is involved in holding such an intangible object as a share. money and time wasted: considerable. though on one of the trips to belmopan, a delightful coffee selling establishment (aka café) was found and approved of. herein was found a national geographic magazine with a fascinating article about the andes in south america, which at the adjacent establishment, a stationers, was photocopied and stapled and taken home for further perusal. outcome: aforementioned coffee and magazine article compensated for frustration involved in business/company related nonsense. further actions arising: both ms pickles and mr combs to practice and perfect their business related behavior. at the moment this consists of using a huge effort to appear professional whilst in a meeting at international services limited in order to register the newly formed company (which incidentally seems to mainly consist of handing over fairly large sum of money in an envelope whilst wearing posh clothes to posh lady in an office, and signing a form and waiting for an incorporation certificate to arrive by courier), and then as soon as leaving the building changing immediately into old denim shorts and flip flops and having some inane argument about what type of pasta sauce should be purchased for dinner. status: ongoing. outlook: hoping to hand in actual work permit paperwork this wednesday in belmopan and with the help of people in high places (not god himself, though this is another contentious topic in the pickles/combs partnership) have it hurried through the laboriously slow belizean administrative system and be legally working at soonest convenience. any other business: it was commented (via the means of electronic communication) between ms pickles and mr pickles her brother, he being of the same parentage, that wasn’t it a most unpredictable and peculiar situation that both should now be directors and share holders in their own companies, given that 2 years ago they were part of what is colloquially known as ‘the rat race’, and spent their evenings sitting eating mashed potatoes and baked beans and wondering if there was more to life than a desk, a spreadsheet, 3 letter business acronyms and middle managers who were so uninspiring and intellectually lacking that it made one want to shove biros into one’s eyeballs, and furthermore, brain. conclusion: yes there is.

long multiplication
ms pickles has recently taken to doing some volunteer work 2 mornings a week for a local charity called cornerstone. it is suspected that this is part of the ongoing campaign to acquire enough points to get into heaven (see earlier blog where she gave a lift to some local people who were going to church). this is confusing given ms pickles’s intransigent atheism, but can be perhaps put down to having had a good moral upbringing bashed into her. the volunteering entails tutoring 4 children (siblings), of differing ages and abilities, whose father is not around and who were found with their younger sister and mother in belize city and are now being sheltered by a charity in san ignacio called mary open doors (nb: this charity is run by the wife of david the fish shop man referred to in an earlier blog who talked to us for a long time one day in the fish shop and had been a policeman in yorkshire). the children are alexis, 4, shane, 8, michael, 10 and monique, 12. they are doing reading and maths and other arbitrary topics such as the solar system. (did you know that jupiter is the biggest planet, and that saturn, if a suitably large body of water should exist , would float as it is so light). it was discovered by ms pickles that her long multiplication leaves a lot to be desired, and she is strongly hoping that long division is not on the syllabus or she may have to hand in her notice. they will continue to be tutored until they can re-enter the school system in september. they are very sweet but i am glad i am not a primary school teacher as i certainly wouldn’t have the patience full-time. on tuesday we took them to swim in the river after class which they loved and would do all day if it was up to them, which is generally why children do not make high powered decisions about educational policy. it is hard to know if they are getting fed properly at home, which is a big factor in concentration levels, acquisition of knowledge, and general intellect. talia, one of the other volunteers who organizes this particular project was going to investigate this matter, as mary open doors supposedly gives them a chicken each day i think, but there was general wonderment as to whether it was being eaten or sold on etc.

baked goods
it was decided to use some of the treacle to make some flapjacks. given the lack of suitable measuring equipment for baking ingredients (ie there is only a measuring jug in the house which is perfect for measuring half a pint of milk for example, but not 4 ounces of flour or butter or sugar), some of the ingredients were, it can only be concluded, incorrectly measured. outcome: inedible concrete like flapjacks that on falling accidentally out of the fridge managed only by sheer good fortune and divine intervention not to smash the kitchen floor tiles. further comments of note: mr combs for some reason enjoyed the challenge of attempting to eat these flapjacks and intimated that he actually liked them. it was agreed by ms pickles and mr fleming who was visiting at the time that this was a blatant lie to protect ms pickles’s feelings.

the second attempt at baking was equally dubious. whilst having made many a worthy orange drizzle cake in the united kingdom, it seems baking obeys different rules here in the caribbean. the orange cake immediately overflowed the baking tray, which was potentially very much the wrong size, shape and consistency for cake construction. on removing the cake from the oven after the passing of the allotted time, the cake was approximately 5mm thick, way below acceptable thickness, but hitherto nonetheless and despite appearances it did taste like an orange cake should. it was iced with drizzle icing and taken to cornerstone for monique’s birthday which is the same as mama pepinillo’s who i had rung the day before to say happy birthday. (aside to mama p: monique was very excited that she had a happy birthday greeting all the way from england). on eating the cake, michael promptly ran out of the room and vomited on the street, and his tooth fell out. ms pickles has never experienced a reaction like this to her baking before. on further investigation it seems michael is prone to vomiting, for example on buses and in cars. as to the tooth it is to be supposed that this is normal for someone of his age? further action: no more baking shall take place until further notice and until appropriate baking equipment has been procured.

[i have decided to continue in normal non director-of-a-company style as it is very hard work]

bicycle riding
there has been lots of riding of bicycles going on with mr mick fleming of chaa creek resort up the road from our house (www.chaacreek.com). mick is a very nice man, who is originally from england too but has lived here for 30 or so years now with his american wife whose name is also lucy. bert has been teaching mick to fly and he has his own ultralight and a hangar which is where bert stores his ultralight too. he has an old dog called mzungo and a little new dog from guatemala, a pomeranian, called foxy. foxy is the cutest dog i’ve ever seen, just like a huge ball of fluff with a face, he’s tiny and has tiny little feet. mick and foxy got stung by millions of bees recently, and mick had to go on a drip in the doctors in town. mick picks me up in his truck and we drive out to the main road – the road we live on is very bumpy and not good at all for cycling on with a road bike – this is the hardest part of the whole procedure for me, balancing in the back of the truck and hanging on with our 2 bikes rolling around and trying not to fly out as we go round the corners and over the bumps. we get to the road and cycle to the guatemalan border then back and into town and then back to where we leave the truck on the bumpy road. this is around 18.5miles altogether, and is very hilly, nothing too steep but quite long annoying hills. i seem to have improved a bit in my hill climbing, maybe thanks to the ridiculous mexican bike ride making the hills here seem like nothing in comparison to what they were there. along the way we normally catch up with a nice man called hernan who cycles the same route every day too, he has really strong legs and never seems to change gear. some days there are loads of other professional looking cyclists out too, one of them cycled with me a bit one day, he’s on a team and he asked me when my next race was, ha ha i said i’m just doing this for fun, then he said belize needs more women cyclists on its teams – perhaps i should investigate. on yesterday’s ride mick got a puncture and then his bike computer flew off his bike and we had to cycle slowly up and down the same bit of road for a while looking for it in the litter-filled hedgerows, just when mick had decided to give up and it wasn’t worth bothering about it appeared right there next to us. weird.

last weekend bert and i drove down to the hummingbird highway which is a very beautiful road that goes from dangriga on the coast back up to Belmopan, which is roughly halfway between cayo and belize city. compared to the other few roads in belize, this one is very imaginatively named – the others are western highway, southern highway, northern highway, and coastal road. they are quite self-explanatory names, but let me know if you can’t figure them out. i presume there are hummingbirds on the hummingbird highway though we didn’t see any. it is very hilly in the middle and less so at either end, and it is considered the most beautiful road in belize, which it definitely is – there are rivers, mountains you can see in the distance, jungles, citrus groves etc. we stopped at the blue hole national park – a small swimming hole just off the road, and had a picnic on a picnic table, then drove on to the sibun river and had a swim there. bert told me there was an alligator at the other side but it turned out it was a man snorkeling along by the river bank – it definitely had me fooled for a long time though. i cycled back from the river to belmopan and bert followed as a support team in the car. i did 27k in 1 hour which is pretty good going given the hills, and when i checked the cycling results of the recent female cross country, the winner’s average speed was 28.5k, but this was sustained over 4 hours 6 minutes which i don’t quite think i could manage. anyway i am very much enjoying all the cycling i’m doing and also it allows me to eat lots of chocolate cake from the sweet shop without feeling guilty.

any other business
last week the 2 australian alaska-patagonia cyclists max and mike that we met in mexico came to stay on their way through to guatemala. they had been to cuba since meeting us in chiapas and then back to cancun then carried on down the coast past tulum and through northern belize, down the coast a bit here, then back up the hummingbird highway to cayo. they stayed with us for a few days and enjoyed being able to do their washing and not having to camp at the side of the road for a while. they had been cycling through the night in mexico to avoid the heat. it was really cool to have them to stay and me and bert are considering joining them down in peru for some of their cycling in september this year. all depends on how our business is going, i suppose you can’t just take a big holiday or phone in sick for a month when you are self-employed…

i have finished love in the time of the cholera, and started the baymen of belize, which is written by one of the original english (well scottish actually) settlers in belize, and the battle of st george’s caye which was when the spaniards attempted to get belize back off the english. the english government didn’t send any help at all, so if it hadn’t been for those baymen defending it, belize would most certainly now be spanish. i will keep you updated on any other facts that come from the book.

i learnt that caye (as in caye caulker etc), means small island (kind of obvious), and that the reason that the area we live in which is san ignacio, is also called cayo, is because the mopan and the macal river go round it kind of creating an island, thus they call it cayo.

we watched these films:
the devil’s miner: a documentary about 2 little bolivian boys who work in the mines in potosi, where me and abi and laura had visited last year at the beginning of our trip. the boys are 12 and 14, and they work in appalling conditions down the mines, as do all the miners but it is so terrible for them being so young. they don’t have a father which is why they have to go to work, the 14 year old has been working there since he was 10. he earns i think $3 per day, which after a while goes up to $4 as he gets a new job in a much bigger but much more dangerous mine. they also go to school (only part time i think), which is a long walk down the mountain they live on and work in, but at school if people know that they work in the mines they get picked on. the film follows the older of the 2 boys mainly, and he talks about how he dreams of getting out of the mines and being a teacher, and travelling the world and seeing other places and countries. they have to save and save to afford school uniform, without which they will not be allowed to start school – altogether it costs $45 for the 2 of them, and they have to eat only bread for months to save enough for this. they also need to get a specific haircut, called a semi-mushroom, to be allowed to school. they aren’t allowed in if they have a full-mushroom cut. the mountain (cerro rico) has been mined so much that there isn’t much left there, potosi was a city once richer than both london and paris, where all the money was minted. it is now one of the poorest places in one of the poorest countries in south america. each year there is a festival of the miners and they dance their way down the mountain doing a dance based on mining. they are really proud to be miners, although they live in constant fear too – of dying when the explosions go off, or of silicosis, a lung disease, there is asbestos all along the mining tunnels, and so much dust you can hardly see. most miners have a life expectancy of 35 years old. they pray to a mining god called tio, and there are effigies of him in all the mines to which they take offerings of coca leaves and alcohol and cigarettes – they have to keep him happy or he will take their lives. the little boys are so scared of him they can’t look him directly in the face. they do regular llama sacrifices and splatter the blood all over the entrance to the mines. all in all it’s an amazing documentary for which the cameraman must have got awards for risking his life down in the mines. i only spent a few days in bolivia but did find it fascinating and beautiful and will definitely go back there in the future.

we also watched paris, texas by wim wenders, which is brilliant and strange, and australia, but i slept through most of it. it is by baz luhrman and is cartoony and features nicole kidman and hugh jackman who are both really good.

i learn that a league is the distance a man or horse can walk in an hour – ie around 3.5miles or 5k. 20,000 leagues under the sea therefore is a very long way. a fathom is the distance between a man’s outstretched fingers, around 6 feet, it comes from old english fathm, which means arms outstretched in an embracing position. and furlong means a furrow's length long, which i can't remember the distance now, i think around 660feet, which would be 220yards if i am not mistaken? an acre was originally a furlong by a chain. a chain is 22 yards. i don't know the etymology behind it, perhaps it was the length of a chain of people or horses that could walk a league within a fathom's distance, whilst under the sea.

i found a radio channel here that broadcasts spelling bees, this is pretty dull listening but sometimes i tune in if i’m driving in the car. we had the air conditioning in the car fixed which broke when we were in the guatemalan western highlands, possibly due to the altitude, or possibly due to the great wall wingle being not the best or most reliable car in the world. it is nice to have the aircon back but you really don’t need all these luxuries in your life – we have rivers nearby that we can jump in to cool down, and aircon means you use more fuel when driving. we are quite good at being environmentally conscious in our house here as we don’t have a washing machine (it broke and we don’t know how to mend it), so we do all our washing by hand and hang it out on the line on the deck; we don’t have tv connection, but do use the tv to watch dvds sometimes; we don’t have a dishwasher or hoover etc, and we buy local fruit and veg at the market in town, and from mick’s vegetable garden which is the best vegetable garden ever. this should be quite a few heaven points we are saving up.

and finally my last announcement is that we handed in bert’s work permit application yesterday in belmopan and had a celebratory lunch at the nice café we had found there with the stash of old national geographic magazines. we are picking up our posters and business cards today from the printers, and we have tidied and improved the office in the spare room in our house, it just needs a filing cabinet and the internet and printer to work again and it will be almost professional. we are working on a website and generally are ready to go once the permit is approved. this is a relief as it has been a long time sorting it all out and it is very exciting thinking about it actually becoming a reality and me being a director – ha ha – and us earning some money and my overdrafts being paid off and being able to save up for more exciting adventures. especially for bert it is exciting as he has been here over a year trying to make a living and things being up and down and relying on other people who turn out to be non reliable etc. watch this space for further business updates.

over and out – happy queen’s birthday on monday – here it is a public holiday, is it in england too i can’t remember? xx

the old man and the sea

tuesday april 14 onwards
we spent a few days recovering from the road trip, and doing washing and sampling the new various different coffee beans we had bought along the way in the new coffee press. we looked at the atlas and i learnt there are 82 million people in vietnam, which is a hell of a lot. i rode my bike a little bit. on the friday we went off on a flight to san pedro on ambergris caye to visit john mcafee for the weekend, which i wrote about already – i went jet ski-ing, we ate really nice food at the restaurant next door, the dog got ill and its nose bled everywhere, i asked john if he’d read all the books that adorn his house (he said most of them). john’s cousins were staying with him, one was called darrell and he had been living in nicaragua for a few years and had made a newspaper there, and he told me about nicaraguan politics. his other cousin was called suzi and lived in india and she was interested in hypnosis and was going to learn to hypnotise herself. i didn’t know before but john is actually half english, the other half is american, but he now has belizean citizenship too. anyway bert took a few people flying and made a few bob out of that which was nice and i bought a new bikini with it. we learnt there had been some murders recently on the north of the island related to drugs. we heard that as part of the drug route from south and central america to north america, the sea off this island (which is just below mexico) is littered with un-collected bags of cocaine, or bags of money gone astray, and that there is a separate drug trade going on in these unofficial bags of drugs. like if you found one and you knew the people to contact you could sell it on for a nice bit of pocket money, or you could try selling it to tourists etc, but you are basically playing with fire, as there are various gangs who patrol the reef and sea picking up the bags and basically have a monopoly on profiting from what is dropped there due to being violent and scary. this was what the murders were related to, some local fishermen getting on the wrong side of the gangs. flying over the sea we did see lots of square white shapes in the water, and after a while realized that they must be bags of cocaine, and having seen them, quickly looked away and pretended we hadn’t seen them as it is all just too scary and dangerous.

monday april 20
from san pedro we flew down the coast to placencia in the south of belize to see denis, an old friend of bert’s from montana who he happened to bump into when he was last in placencia. they were hang glider pilots back in the good old days when hang gliding was just starting. early hang gliders were basically swing seats suspended from a big kite, they look hilarious in the photos i’ve seen. before knowing all this, i said were you a hang glider too denis? he said don’t be ridiculous, i was a hang glider pilot, a hang glider is the machine you fly in, not the person that does the flying, that is the pilot, good god why can nobody get things right anymore. i thought gosh someone who is as pedantic as me. he is cool though and has long white hair and looks like he’s been at sea for a long time (he has), and knows loads of things about different places on earth and islands i’ve never heard of and wars that have happened, and how all the colonies that the english own or owned are nowhere near as nice or organized as ones that belong to the french or dutch for example. him and bert, the americans, enjoyed outnumbering me, the english person, and telling me how stupid all the english pronunciations and words for things are. obviously i vehemently disagreed and defended my lexical honour accordingly – like how dumb that they should call a pavement a sidewalk – they need everything spelling right out for them, it is at the side and you walk on it, so let’s call it a sidewalk. surprising they don’t call a road a middledrive by that rationale. and why call jam jelly? or a bum bag a fanny pack? anyway, denis now mainly sails around on his nice sailboat, and he was planning on leaving in the next few weeks to sail down to cartagena in columbia, via the leeward islands (i think that’s right, basically via all the caribbean islands that go down to columbia, and also there are lots around venezuela). i renamed denis captain bird’s eye like on the fish finger boxes.

so we stayed with denis on the boat for a few nights. previous to these few days i knew absolutely nothing about sailing, possibly even minus nothing if that is possible. after a few hours on the boat i had learnt the sailing names for things – like the bedrooms aren’t called front or back bedrooms, but aft and foreward cabins; right and left is starboard and port; closing the windows is called battening down the hatches; a toilet is a head; a rope is a line or a howyerd or a sheet; something else is an arched davet, there is a bimini, a soft dodger, a jib sail and so on and so on. all very strange and foreign to me, and very interesting. there was no walking the plank or pirate raids. denis obviously was the captain, bert was first mate, and i was either second mate or galley slave (what an affront). being on the boat reminded me of when i was little and we used to go on camping holidays, and everything was neatly stashed away in cupboards that have secure popper type opening and closing mechanisms, and everything has to be stowed away neatly in its proper place when you are on the move so it doesn’t fall out or tip over or create mayhem in other ways. after one night in the harbor we drew up the anchor (which creeped me out as it was all covered in mud and dirt and imagining the bottom of the deep sea always creeps me out) and set sail out to one of the cayes which their friend kerry rogers owns. kerry rogers invented internet gambling and is very very rich. his island is called mosquito caye, and it was hit by a hurricane about a year after he bought it, and the house there was destroyed and the palm trees were all ripped out of the ground. what a bummer, but it’s the risk you take when you own a caribbean island i guess. we sailed off with the engine going for a while, then you put the sails up once you’re a certain distance from land. i don’t understand how the sails and the wind and the rudder and the steering work, but that doesn’t matter really, they did work which is the main thing. i had tons of questions for denis – what is a keel, what keeps a boat in the water and makes it not sink, what if you run aground, can it tip up, what happens if it does, why is a caye called a caye, why is it called a jib sail, why does the jib sail roll up on to the mast but the main sail you unfurl it and pull it up to the top with ropes and pulleys, what happens if the gps breaks, do you have an alarm bell which means a coastguard will find you if there’s a problem, what is the sail made of, is it mandatory to fly a belize flag when in belize waters (yes it’s sailing etiquette), where did you get your belize flag, do you have a honduras flag too, ….. after a while he probably wished he had put a plank there and forced me to walk it into some shark infested waters. my question that caused most amusement was what happens at night if you are sailing a long way and you are far from land, do you just drop the anchor in the middle of the sea and all go to sleep? i think this is a valid question for a novice sailor. apparently no, you carry on sailing all night, in shifts. like ellen mcarthur must have done round the world on her own, jesus that would be such hard work and you would go mad. there is a disease that sailors get that have been at sea for ages, which is that they hallucinate that the waves waving are sheaves of grass blowing in a field and they just step off the boat, believing they are back on land. they die. this is mentioned in the rime of the ancient mariner, i can’t remember the name for it. as an aside did you know that a marine, ie an american soldier, is actually a foot soldier not somebody who goes on a boat.

we sailed for a few hours which was pretty exciting, the boat tips right up so you’re nearly touching the water, this is called healing over, not tipping over. denis shouted commands relating to undoing or doing up certain ropes that controlled the sails. i kept the place ship shape and tidied up the ropes after we’d used them, and sat on deck reading and watching the sea and the horizon and wondered what was in the water underneath us and how deep it was. we got to kerry’s island and docked, kerry wasn’t there but his workers were so they helped us. we snorkeled around for a bit and found some really big starfishes one of which bert took out of the water and we put on the island to look at later, but then forgot about until the next day by which time it had deflated and its legs had gone all bent and deformed and i felt really bad especially when denis called us starfish killers. we put the starfish back in the water and hopefully it revived it, it’s fairly hard to tell whether a starfish is alive or dead as they don’t do anything other than lie there in the shape of a star. we cooked some dinner on the boat – denis had lots of surprisingly tasty packaged food like potato from a box, and a cheesecake you make from a box by adding water/milk/butter to various sachets of powdered things. the workers brought us fry jacks for breakfast which were really tasty, they are kind of puffed up doughy things and you can put butter and honey on them or beans and cheese etc. we dove in from the boat and stood on the front bit of it (i can’t be bothered now using the correct sailing terms, i guess this would be something like the bow or the hull or the aft foreground deck area), like they do in titanic. incidentally bert recently took someone flying who is a caribbean island broker and had sold an island to leonardo dicaprio, just behind ambergris caye the one where the cocaine bags are.

being on the boat made me really really tired, we tried to watch a dvd in the evening but i couldn’t stay awake, it must be the wavy motion of it perhaps. we sailed back to the mainland after 2 days at the island. the gps system had stopped working for some reason so it was a bit stressful, you have to be really careful going near the cayes as the water is so much shallower there – luckily the depth reader was still working. a whole school of dolphins came and swam around the boat which was amazing as i’ve never seen dolphins in real life, they go really fast it’s amazing they never crash into each other as they weave around and under the boat, sometimes they swim on their backs and you see their tummys. they stayed a while but as suddenly as they had appeared they disappeared which made me sad. i wondered howcome god or whoever it was that designed dolphins, made them live in the sea but have to breathe air not water. perhaps he got in a muddle. we got back to shore and anchored and went ashore in the little dinghy that hangs off the end of the boat. we rushed to get the ultralight all packed up and ready to go before the clouds came and got us, and we told denis we’d hopefully be back for his trip down to venezuela – which unfortunately we had to decide against due to having no money and having to knuckle down and be realistic and sort out the work permit and get the business off the ground (ha ha pardon the pun). this was definitely the right decision, but how boring to have to do that instead of a caribbean island sailing trip… sigh… my life is so hard…

we managed to set off from placencia before the winds got us, and were off back to cayo. we had to fly at 7500 feet, right above the clouds, where it was cold and beautiful, you are right there amongst the huge fluffy cumulo nimbus clouds, you can’t see the ground, you can just see clouds all around you. you don’t actually fly inside them as you wouldn’t be able to so bert was always on the lookout for how to fly around them and sometimes we had to go even higher to go over them. it’s kind of mind blowing, both scary and amazing at the same time. i asked bert what would happen if a plane was up there too, he said what do you mean what if there’s a plane – well, what if there’s a plane – so what if there is – well what if it flies right into us through a cloud – well of course it won’t we’ll see it first won’t we – i don’t know – well don’t be so silly of course we will, jeez will you please just let me fly and stop asking me questions. i had told bert on a previous flight that from now on i wanted him to inform me every time he was about to do something like change altitude or speed, but he was disobeying orders and was just flying without telling me what he was doing. this was because on our flight from cayo to san pedro on ambergris caye we had flown over the sea (obviously) and suddenly right when we were about halfway from the mainland to san pedro bert abruptly turns round and starts looking at the propeller/engine area at the back of the plane and his foot came off the accelerator pedal, so we suddenly were going really slowly. i screamed what the hell is happening help help – nothing honey – help help what are you doing robert we’re right in the middle of the sea – nothing i’m just checking the fuel – what the hell do you mean just checking the fuel what do you mean is there a problem with the fuel what will we do we’re in the middle of the sea help help why are we going so slowly all of a sudden – nothing is wrong calm down and shush – help help what’s happening – well we’re flying into a headwind and i’m checking that we have enough fuel to get us to san pedro but we might have to go back to belize city and refuel – what help help how will we have enough to get back to the mainland though help help – well honey we’ll be going downwind so of course we’ll have enough to get back – oh god we’re going to die aren’t we – please shush and let me fly my aeroplane lucy. anyway we did have enough fuel but still refueled on caye caulker to be on the safe side.

into the wild part 4: homeward bound

back in time to: saturday april 10 – last part of our holiday to mexico and guatemala
so the lucybert roadtrip continued on from antigua in guatemala back towards belize. our first and totally unwanted stop was guatemala city. we were supposed to just bypass the city by getting on the ring road, the anillo periferico. there was one sign, oh good we thought, things are going to plan, and we got on the periferico. the road suddenly divided, we forked left, into some godforsaken zone of the city, from whence we couldn’t leave for an hour. this was exactly what we didn’t want to happen. we stopped literally on every corner to ask one of the ubiquitous policemen how to get out and on towards rio dulce. we went round in circles following directions partially remembered in our stressed brains, and the next hour was a hellish repetition of asking, trying to understand answers, stopping, looking at our inadequate map, reversing back down the street, asking again, driving off, immediately getting lost again. you get the picture. it wasn’t fun. we eventually extricated ourselves from the city thanking god we were still alive. guatemala city has a bad reputation, and lots of it is very slummy, there are policemen everywhere – thankfully for us, but who knows how trustworthy they are in matters bigger than direction-asking – and there are no street names, just numbers, and a distinct lack of signage. i have heard from one person that it can be a cool place to visit if you know someone there and know where to go and what to see. this remains to be seen, so i am not writing it off completely yet.

en route to our next destination, el castillo san felipe, just next to rio dulce, there were lots of guatemalans bathing and having fun in the rivers, there were a whole load of cyclists with bikes covered in tinsel and decorations heading towards guatemala city – perhaps it was a national easter ride or a pilgrimage of some sort. the numerous already jazzed up old buses also had tinsel on their bonnets. this cheered us up from our lost in translation frustration, and we bought some coronas and limes and put them in the ice box for later. we arrived at rio dulce and went swimming in the lake and looked at the castle, which interestingly had some cannons with english and french coats of arms on them, something to do with pirates from england, but i couldn’t understand the guide properly. rio dulce is a large river that comes in from the sea and turns into a lake too called lake izabal – i had stayed here last year with abi, it is a fairly nice place, but not as nice as the guidebook suggests. the town is busy and dirty and merely a place to get off the bus and get on a boat to one of the places on the water. we had dinner in town and an ice cream, neither of which were worth writing home about, even though that is what i am now doing.

the next day, easter sunday, we left and headed up to poptun to stay at finca ixobel again. this was my 3rd time there. you may remember it from earlier blogs – i saw a tarantula there and also there had been lots of us army boys there on some sort of secretive guatemalan army training mission – this time, there were no tarantulas or army, but we did meet an interesting character called brian. he was writing a book on mayan culture, and had, in his own words, discovered 13 new constellations which related to mayan architecture. he was sound asleep and snoring in a hammock when we first arrived but perked up and came to talk to us in his funny and slightly straitjacket-inducing way. he had written a book and self published it as nobody else would, it is called the cosmic mirror. he was in fact intelligent, that type of intelligent that somewhere along the line has tipped over into fantasy land detached subtle madness, and had used to be a jazz musician and composer (this explained a lot of the madness) and married to a german, who he said, exhibited increasing nazi like qualities after they had married which she had kept well hidden before the marriage. he had met a girl in antigua who had taken his book away to read and not given it back, it turned out he liked this girl and he updated us frequently on various aspects of his dealings with her. i advised him not to take the vengeful route he was proposing in retaliation to some strange thing she had done to him, but to sit and do nothing as that was the morally superior option. he found me the next morning to tell me he had thought a lot about my advice, and to date, it was the most sensible advice he had had. a compliment indeed from a mad man. he had also met a girl on a bus who had taken his email address and he had been checking his email religiously every day since then, but still nothing. he had met belize’s leading archaeologist who he had quickly written off as a phoney and denounced belize as a phoney country as half the streets don’t have names, and if you are looking for hospital street, you are supposed to deduce that that is basically the street with the hospital on. he had read lots of garcia marquez books and told me about one called endaira, which is ariadne backwards. he did know a lot of things, that’s for sure, but it became tiring listening to him.

other than this entertainment, we swam in the man made lake complete with reeds that creeped me out by brushing against my legs, we walked up a little hill, and through beautiful pine forest, past a dried up river, took some video of a donkey loaded up with firewood and his owner wielding his machete, they were both very friendly. we had an argument about pine cones (me and bert, not us and the donkey owner) – i insisted that you can use them to predict the weather, as their spines close up if it is going to rain, and also at night – i think i must have dreamt this once when young and ever since believed it to be fact – or is this in fact how pine cones in england behave? we put it to the test, and sat the pine cone in our room, the next morning it was exactly the same, but i explained to bert that that was because it had closed up during the night, but we had been asleep and not seen it and now it was open again as it was daylight, and promptly demanded the 100 dollars we’d bet on it. one night it was super windy and the wind blew into the room which always spooks me a bit. i made bert get up and put my guitar in its case in case it blew out of the window and got damaged. should’ve sneaked a look at the pine cone at this point but i was preoccupied with the wind and my guitar.

and that was the end of our trip to mexico and guatemala, we got home on tuesday 14th, quite impressed that our intended few days in the yucatan had turned into a 3 and a half week trip and not cost that much at all despite splashing out on a few luxury items along the way. on arriving back to belize there was a huge storm, we drove out to the hangar and sat on the car bonnet and drank beers and watched the lightning rolling around the sky. then realized we would be a prime target if it chose to hit the ground. then had an argument about how lightning works – i was sure it comes up from the ground and down from the clouds and meets in the middle, bert thinks it always just comes downwards as you would be able to tell if it was going up from the ground, and also if you were standing there it could go up through you. we have since researched this (in a really cool book that hermano jaime sent over, called 101 things you need to know – and some you don’t!) (their exclamation mark not mine) and discovered the following:

water and ice droplets in storm clouds bump around and become electrically charged. at the top of the cloud they have a positive charge, and at the bottom, a negative charge. sometimes the negatively-charged bottom is close enough to the positively-charged ground (or the top of another cloud) to be attracted to it, and electrical energy is released in a flash of light.

interesting huh (though it doesn’t actually say whether it goes up to down or both ways). listen to this about thunder too:

thunder occurs when lightning heats up the air around it. the air temperature suddenly rises to around 30,000°c. this incredibly hot air expand due to the heat, then cools and contracts, causing a shockwave which we hear as thunder.

other topics covered in the book include: how do clouds stay in the air? is time travel possible? where does the sun go at night? how do oysters make pearls? if you have any pressing questions, please ask me and i’ll see if they are covered in my book, otherwise i’ll keep a list of new un-answered questions and send them to them for a new book.

another interesting thing back here in belize was that a baby horse had been born, he was about a week old by the time we got back. very cute watching him trying to stand up from lying down position and watch him just walk wobblyly round and round his mum in the little stable.

into the wild part 3: fire and cobblestone

here is part 3 of the me and bert road trip. sorry it's getting a bit confusing going back and forth between real time blog writing and catching up with what happened last month. hope you can cope with the desultory nature of all this. this blog update is much more concise than previous ones too, as i was panicking at how much i had to catch up on and wrote it in a big rush without going in to lots of detail. perhaps this is preferable though?

holy week in antigua, friday 3rd april to saturday 11th april
we arrived in antigua where i had spent a week last year with abi so dedicated blog readers will already know all about it. it’s not like real guatemala here, ie it’s safe, policed, clean, you can buy all sorts of things that you can’t get anywhere else in this part of the world, for example we bought a coffee press, a guitar and a world atlas, which were all things we had been looking for along the way. it is really beautiful and cobbly and there are also loads of coffee shops and a few cinemas showing independent and other films. it is surrounded by 3 volcanoes which you can see clearly on clear days, both are dead except for pacaya which you may remember me and abi climbed up last year and i freaked right out. more to come on that later. anyway i am going to write a summary of the week’s events now in no particular order (in an attempt to inject some randomness to the blog and veer away from the obsessive compulsive disorder i seem to have acquired in ordering everything in strict date order).

so this week basically we watched loads of holy week processions, and inhaled enough incense to file a lawsuit against the city and the catholic religion for damaging our lungs. the way the processions work is that you sign up to a brotherhood and give them your height and you are then assigned a turn number and a shoulder number. the processions start from any of the many churches in the city and involve statues of jesus (or mary for the girls to carry) being taken out from their usual place in the churches and placed on custom built floats, made of wood and with little indents which is where the carriers’ shoulders go. the floats are then carried around the city streets for the next 12, 14, 16 hours or so. jesus is always looking to the right, so we always tried to be standing in his line of vision so he would see us and we would get more points for heaven. after a while though we weren’t too bothered about whether or not he saw us, as we were busy looking for a nice place to have a chocolate brownie and to avoid the crowds. some say the act of being a carrier in the processions is meant to be a penance to remind you of the suffering of jesus and to go through some of that suffering yourself. another theory is that it isn’t so much a penance as just a time for reflection and inner thought about yourself and others and how you can live a better life etc. whatever the actual reasoning is i imagine it is quite an experience as these floats look very heavy, i think the main thing you’d be thinking is shit this is hard work i wonder when the next corner is so i can hand over to my replacement carrier, i hope they haven’t got stuck in traffic. at either side of the float are boys or girls (depending if it’s a jesus or mary float) flinging incense around the place, and people with sticks to hold up the low electricity cables so that the whole procession including jesus or mary doesn’t get fried. there is a man/woman at the front of the float not really carrying it but leading it along, apparently this is a vip type role in the whole proceedings. there is also someone holding up a stick with a number in it, which is the turn number – like i said you are assigned a turn number, ie on each turn of the parade’s journey through the city the turn number on the big stick changes, and you know the start time and the route so you can pretty much figure out where you’ll need to be and when. your shoulder number is which bit of the float you are at. we saw a few shoulders that must have been measured wrongly as they were way too high compared to the other carriers, which obviously makes it very tricky for them. behind the processions goes a marching brass band with timpani and a small woodwind section. in true this-part-of-the-world style, none of the music is in tune, the ‘musicians’ are kind of smartly dressed but mostly have baseball caps on and usually are on their mobile phones in the gaps between playing. not sure what jesus and mary would be thinking, maybe turning in their graves. though i don’t think jesus technically has a grave to turn in as he’s risen from it, isn’t that what all this easter celebration is about? [mum i know you’ll be groaning at my utter lack of religious knowledge and/or common sense at this point. i will ask bert to find the relevant part in his bible and read it to me as a penance.] anyway, the brass band are paid for their trouble, and actually it must be fairly taxing going round and round the streets for that long playing your melancholy religious-thought-inducing music. all that incense can’t be good for those clarinets and sousaphones either.

all this and i haven’t even talked about the carpets yet. these carpets remind me of that bit in the film of seven years in tibet where the chinese governors go to tibet to talk to the dalai lama and they walk over the intricate mosaic carpet that the tibetan monks are making on the floor, to make the point that they don’t respect the tibetan buddhist traditions. the carpets the monks make get destroyed immediately anyway by the monks as some sort of comment on the fact that nothing in real life can be as perfect as the buddha himself i think. anyway – back to catholocisim - basically if you live in antigua and your house is on the route of any of the processions you spend the 10 hours before the procession is due to pass by your house making a carpet outside on the cobblestones. and yes that does mean that if a procession is due to come past at noon for example then you get up and start making your carpet in the middle of the night. it’s crazy. the carpets are made from sawdust, every carpenter and lumber mill in the whole of guatemala saves up their sawdust for this event and sells what he doesn’t personally use for his own carpet if he is lucky enough to be on a jesus or mary route that year. the sawdust is finely chipped, not big huge sawdust chips you’d put in horses stables, and it is dyed bright colours. you can design your carpet however you like, there are no rules, except perhaps no advertising, though we did see one with a football team’s logo on it. other common construction materials are pine needles, flowers, vegetables including lettuces, radishes, cabbage leaves, beans, and entire mini sculptures of churches and houses and/or jesus/mary scenes. usually there is a layer of sawdust coloured sawdust that makes the base of the carpet on top of which stencils are placed and other colours of sawdust are sprinkled through a sieve to make pretty patterns. the carpets can be any shape you like, obviously rectangular is most fitting as streets are rectangular, but you can have circles or cross shapes etc. you can write things on them too, lots of them had the initials jhs which i couldn’t figure out what it means, and never got round to asking any of the carpet makers, i guess it’s jesus h something, perhaps jesus hijo sagrado? anyway, he’ll be turning again in his non-existent grave, sorry jesus h.s. the carpets were constantly being watered by one of the family members, with a hose from their house, i’m not sure if this was to keep the ingredients alive or to make it more shiny and aesthetically pleasing or maybe it’s easier to put the sawdust down on other sawdust if it’s a bit damp. the whole family gets involved in the making of the carpets, the teenagers get the bulk of the work as they’re big and strong, and they love it, there’s no skulking off to play football or go down the pub, they get right into it. the little kids love it too and we saw a lot of them carefully arranging flowers or lettuce leaves with their parents’ help. the grandfather generation oversee the whole thing, or help water it. so the carpets are finished and that very minute the procession comes along and walks all over them, destroying the last 10 hours’ worth of hard painstaking back-breaking work in one fell swoop, in as long as it takes to say jesus h christ the carpet is all gone, carpet after carpet after carpet. then when the second coming (ie the smaller mary procession) has come past and walked on the remnants of the carpet, a little mini bulldozer appears and men with brushes sweep up the holy vestiges of sawdust and cabbages and put them all in the bin. bystanders can take bits and pieces of the ex-carpet if they feel that way inclined. i suppose if you were really hungry you could help yourself to a bit of trampled lettuce.

the culmination of all this religious activity is the night of thursday and all of good friday. the processions go on all night, with a roman soldier procession on horseback which leaves one of the churches at midnight. we got up around 3am to go and watch more of this, which was interesting but ultimately quite the same as seeing it in the day apart from it’s all in the dark. we also had the added entertainment of not being able to get back into our hotel and having to sit on the doorstep from 4.30 to 5am until a brotherhood man appeared who was staying there and also had a key – perhaps only religious folk get given a hotel key. by good friday the purple hooded robes that all the brotherhood members wear have been replaced with black ones, there are foot washing ceremonies, crucifixion reenactments and more processions. in the evening we watched a particularly large one go past the end of our street, complete with masses of lung destroying incense, dissonant brass band which were quiet for this particular section, and the float this time had jesus lying down instead of standing up carrying his cross. if i knew my bible stories better i would know what was going on, i think it is because he died on good friday to rise again on easter sunday? it was quite awe inspiring this one, partly because of the amount of people both watching and participating, and the black costumes, and the silence of the band, and the size of the float and poor jesus now dead. we videod lots of the processions, but it just doesn’t capture the eeriness when you watch it back, nor the sense of occasion. as you may have noticed, i am not religious, not in the mainstream sense of the word anyway, and i am sometimes skeptical of pomp and circumstance, but i was really silenced and thought-provoked by the sheer effort and dedication and mystery involved in the whole semana santa proceedings. it was really amazing that we had ended up there in this week of all weeks, it is supposedly the main place in the whole world for easter week, other than seville in spain, but i would not like to do it again due to the busy-ness of the town and the prices of accommodation which double or triple for the week. the guidebook recommends booking 5 months in advance at least, so we had stumbled across one of the few hotels with last minute rooms left, and really at an acceptable price. plus the hotel owners were lovely and i practiced my spanish on them and their son was studying aviation which was interesting. they brought me a cup of herbal tea one morning when i was ill in bed, with what in hindsight i can diagnose as mild swine flu.

other non religious things that happened that week involved going up volcano pacaya again. bert really wanted to see the lava and barbeque some marshmallows and steaks there, so i had finally succumbed and agreed to compromise my determination to never set foot on a live volcano again. this time we didn’t get half as near to the lava, as there had been lots of seismic activity recently, including an earthquake the week before just outside antigua, and lots of little volcanic eruptions. our guide was constantly on his radio to the people that monitor the volcanic activity, which both comforted and worried me. on the way up you could hear little growls which we thought was the echo of traffic from the roads below, but i asked the guide and he said no it’s the volcano erupting. anyway we survived and in fact enjoyed ourselves, bert was upset we couldn’t get close to the lava flow but we could at least see it in the distance and videod little bits of orange rock flying out from a mini crater half way down from the actual top. the top itself was puffing out lots of smoke and making growling noises every so often. we had our binoculars which we lent to the other people in our group and everyone oohd and ahd at the lava in the distance.

we bumped into the dutch tour group again and had a nice chat with some of them. dutch people speak better english than english people. we also kept bumping into some of the nice canadian couples that had been on our volcano tour, and had nice chats with our hotel owners and the car park man where we had parked the car for the week (every car left on the street gets towed away by semana santa tow vehicles so there is room for jesus and mary to go past), so that after a few days we felt that we were in some little village where we knew everyone which was weird. it’s dangerous to assume that antigua is the real guatemala as it really isn’t, it’s a little haven of cobblestone streets with coffeeshops bookshops museums etc . my guidebook says this is how guatemala would look if the scandinvians moved in and took over for a few years, all clean and safe and no stray dogs or litter anywhere. it would be a really nice place to come for a month or so and study spanish at one of the many spanish schools and live in a little fantasy land for a while.

we ate lots of cake and brownies, drank lots of coffee, i indulged my book shop obsession in the many book shops – we bought a world atlas so we could fantasize about all the interesting places we could travel to in our as yet imaginary campervan bought with the imaginary ultralight business earnings. i also bought graham greene the power and the glory which is set in chiapas, mexico, and also 2 guatemalan books, one called i, rigoberta menchu which is written by a guatemalan mayan lady that survived the genocide of the 60s-80s, having watched her whole family get massacred, and writes about the atrocities here, and also campaigns for human rights etc, and she went on to win a nobel peace prize. the other book is called blood in the cornfields which deals with similar recent historical themes but from a non native point of view. interesting other books i looked at dealt with things like america’s involvement in central and south american history, for example the cia funded the guatemalan government’s genocide campaign against the mayan villages, and fund lots of political campaigns if that suits their needs in terms of keeping these countries suppressed, ie supporting military dictatorships. this is all very fascinating stuff and i wish i had more of a political and historical brain as i find it hard to properly understand the intricacies of international relations, but i am going to try to learn lots about it at some point.

i also bought a guitar this week which i am teaching myself to play and awaiting some guitar music from mama pepinillo the virtuoso guitarist. we visited a coffee museum which was really cool and learnt that brazil is the biggest coffee producer in the world, then columbia. brazil’s coffee grows in the sun, whereas in guatemala they grow it in the shade, and at altitude, which they say makes it superior coffee. i bought a little coffee mug with a duck on it. then we went to a museum of mayan music and costumes , where a mayan lady did a brilliant tour around it for free, and she didn’t seem to mind being videod the whole time by us. we went to a place in jocotenango, the village just north of antigua, for a sauna and massage. bert said this was the best ever massage he’s had, and i have never really had a proper massage so have nothing to compare it to, but it was very good, despite the fact that the massage lady had a big moustache. a nice lady had explained to me how it works, ie here is a locker for your stuff and here’s a changing room and here’s the sauna. it was all very old school, nothing swanky at all, just bare tiled floors and walls, a bit reminiscent of my local swimming pool in sowerby bridge. everyone is just in their knickers (obviously the men and women are in different rooms), so i followed suit and got changed and locked all my stuff in the locker, and then before going to the sauna i managed to accidentally flush my locker key down the loo. oops how am i going to explain this one (and who to?) in my still very basic spanish..? i went into the sauna and shouted over to bert what had happened. he thought i was joking but i wasn’t. the other lady in my sauna happened to have lived in new york for ages and understood my anguish and piped up but had you already flushed the toilet when the key fell in? yes i said. oh no she said. i know i said. let me help you she said. so off we went and we made a makeshift glove from a plastic bag that some cups were in for the water machine, and she was going to use that but then one of the staff appeared who she had told, and she had a proper glove so she used that to delve into the toilet and lo and behold there was the key still there, it had not gone far. i thanked her profusely and went off to update bert that all was ok and we’d be able to get the stuff out of the locker again and wouldn’t need to call the fire brigade out with bolt cutters.

we went to a slide show about semana santa and asked lots of questions; we had some thai green curry; we lost our flask we’d been using for coffee; we bought a coffee press and some nice coffee beans; we went to casa santo domingo an ex convent which is now a hotel and museum complex and is very beautiful; we had an argument about what a campervan was (must have been to do with english/american lexical/semantic differences ); we got spooked out looking round old cathedral ruins one night and watching people go down into a crypt and seemingly never come out again; we went to a little park with our new rug to sit in the sun and read, the entrance fee was massively reduced for natives, so i said ‘hola, estamos guatemaltecos’ and the man laughed his head off; we tried to wash our clothes in the stone sink (pila) on the hotel roof but there was a chicken in there being plucked by the cleaning lady so we waited until the next day; we talked to a purple costumed man in the cathedral whilst we watched one of the floats leaving on people’s shoulders, him and his wife were both macro-biologists, and his wife had asked her husband to ask bert if he was a famous film star as she thought he looked like one (bert loved this); we watched into the wild, a sad and interesting film you should watch about giving up this westernized life for a life of just nature and wilderness; we thought about moving to costa rica; we played chess; we watched some super cute little mayan children do traditional dances in traditional costumes; we watched a little band play buena vista social club type music; we looked at lots of lovely handicrafts in the markets; i got a bit ill and slept a lot and deeply, and woke up in the night thinking there were 2 little ghosts on the wall but in the morning realized it was our towels hanging up on hooks.

and that was the end of our week in antigua. from here we went on to a place in the east called el castillo el felipe, on the shore of lago izabel near rio dulce, where me and abi had been before. en route to this place we had to go around guatemala city, on the ring road. this was a disaster which i will write about in the next and final installment of our road trip.

theseus and ariadne

hello readers. i write to you from deep in the circuitous labyrinth of bureaucratic nonsense, also known as applying for a work permit in belize. i can only just see a little twinkle of light through the thick undergrowth blocking my vision, it is a maze denser than the densest jungles and with deadlier animals than the deadliest snakes or the fiercest jaguars waiting to catch you out at each turn. it is a mind -mumbingly soul- destroyingly heart-breakingly laborious and ridiculous process of which kafka and dickens would be proud. it reminds me also of a scene in catch-22 that we watched just the other day when captain major was promoted to major major by dint of his surname being major and he has no experience for the job. the first thing he does in the job is to decree that nobody can come to disturb him when he is in his office with questions of any kind, but once he has left his office for the day then they can come in to see him. he will only be seen when he is not there and if people come to see him when he is there they must wait until he isn’t there to be shown in to see him. talk about hitting the nail on the head. i won’t describe the ins and outs of our labyrinthine daily life in actual detail as it makes me want to kill myself - only to say that to achieve said task of obtaining said work permit we must achieve sections a b c d e f g etc to z, and to achieve section a alone you must sub-achieve sub-sections 1 2 3 4 5 to infinity ad infinitum nauseam. even at night there is no escape from it. my dreams are panic stricken and stressful, i am running from one place to another trying to pack a giant suitcase with items i can’t quite remember where to find and with a giant clock ticking slowly down to the time of my train departure, and the conductor looking at his watch and then at me running all over the place, then i realize that of course that pair of socks won’t be here on the train platform they’ll be back at home i must get a taxi to find them but oh no now i’ll never make the train, i’ll call bert to bring me them, but my mobile has the numbers missing so i can’t dial him so i look for a sock shop then realize there are other more pressing things i need to do in the last 4 minutes before the train leaves. all the time the running around i am doing is like wading through waist high mud, the effort expended is not matched by the movement forwards, the input/output energy efficiency graph is all wrong. i wake up exhausted. i long for a system to just make a little bit of sense somewhere at some point and i now understand why england gave belize up in 1980….though really they could have left it in better shape, i am quite ashamed of them.

onwards to a happier and more intellectually satisfying subject: this week i looked up lots of words hitherto unknown to me, that i had been keeping a list of from reading midnight’s children and love in the time of cholera. here are some of the most interesting:

my favourite: atavistic: relating to or displaying recurrence of a genetic feature that has been absent for several generations; relating to or displaying the kind of behavior that seems to be a product of impulses long since suppressed by society
marasmus: process of emaciation associated with malnutrition
intransigent (at last a word that describes me!): stubbornly or unreasonably refusing to consider changing one’s decision or attitude
lanceolate: tapering to a point like the head of a lance
desultory: happening in a random, disorganized, unmethodical way, eg a desultory conversation – passing from one thing to another (maybe i am intransigently desultory)
benighted: unenlightened intellectually, socially or morally; also – overtaken by night or dark (archaic)
ataraxia: freedom from worry, peace of mind
prestidigitation: sleight of hand used in performing magic tricks
germaine – wasn’t listed in the dictionary, can anyone shed any light? or perhaps cast any illumination? or elucidate, clarify, enlighten, reveal, explicate, expound?

this week i met 3 new people from england:
1. david who runs the fish shop halfway down the hill into town. he is from glasgow and worked in the police in yorkshire for a long time – helie i wonder if he was one of the ones that got you for nicking those penny sweets from woolworths? he is a very tall and very talkative chap, we knew we’d be in there a while when he said ooo come in sit down sit down (we sat down on makeshift stools made of a small ladder and a little ice chest probably full of fish), it makes me nervous when people stand up in me shop sit down have a seat now where are you from what are you doing here i’m from glasgee meself worked in your neck a the woods mind for years ay all over those places dewsbury halifax huddersfield til i did me spine in came to belize in the army loved it stayed here i was in the states for a while mind married a belizean lady she’s called mary oh excuse me me phone’s ringing [peers at mobile phone and hands to me] can you see who’s calling me luv please is it yammie? me – yes it says yam] hi yammie ach yeah we do got snapper in at the moment yeah listen though how are ya i’ve not heard from ya since when was it now och yeah back in march wa’nt it – we tried to leave with our fish after a while, he followed us talking at full speed down the road, we got to the car and started getting in it and wondered if he was going to get in too and keep talking to us as we drove home and gosh what would we do if he did. he was lovely though and so was the fish we bought from him which bert cooked in lime juice all wrapped up in a tinfoil parcel.

2. paul the glass blower from somewhere in england i can’t remember. he has also been in belize 18 years and was also in the army here and is also married to a belizean lady. hmm quel coincidence and all in a matter of minutes. paul was far more taciturn, invited us to his glass blowing studio for a cup of tea. i’ve always wanted to see how glass is blown so this is very exciting. perhaps he will blow us a cup of tea into a mug down a glass blowing funnel. we saw him again at the market the next day, i was in a towel as i’d just swum in the river in my cycling clothes as i had been cycling and had nothing to wear except a towel so was sitting in the car in my towel looking kind of strange i suspect. i explained this to him and his wife but they took it all in their stride and i liked that.

3. a girl called rachel eteson who i must have almost met many times in bradford, she went to my school but had left when i started there to go to a different school and we know lots of the same people but had never met in person. when me and bert visited john mcafee the other week he had called us a few days later to say here is someone that thinks she knows you and she said is your brother called jim and he has a friend called chad etc. she is living in san pedro working in property management, i said cool we’ll see you next time we come to san pedro. in the end she spotted me at chaa creek where we go swimming as she was there with a friend and saw me and thought i looked like jim which i do, and figured i lived in the chaa creek area and had an english accent so it must be me. and me it was.

films we have watched this week: the aviator (brilliant), trans-siberian (fair to middling), the endurance (amazing story)
food we have eaten: rice and vegetables, rice and vegetables, sausage and potato (it made us feel sick and we discussed reverting to vegetarianism), pancakes with orange and sugar, bert’s amazing fish supper, swiss chard (cooking right now as i write this) straight from mick’s vegetable garden, mocha rum cake from the sweet shop, ginger nut biscuits
music we have listened to: cara dillon
things we have almost bought this week: a beautiful 1981 westphalia campervan for sale for $5000, absolute steal, in florida, we would have sold the truck and gone up to get it and driven it back and then lived in it to save money. it had of course gone. we continue the search
amount of different plans we have made for if/when work permit application procedure defeats us into dribbling wrecks and we have to abort ship man overboard: about 1,000

i read about a book that someone has written in which every sentence includes a negative. i read a few sentences of it and you don’t actually notice too much, it’s very clever. like it would say it wasn’t yet 5pm instead of it was nearly 5pm. i might try to write a book in which every sentence includes an oxymoron i will call it the bittersweet hotcold darklight book.

i am drinking some orange juice at the moment with ice in it which reminds me of a while ago whenever i had orange with ice in it after a while of drinking it these little seeds would appear. i obviously panicked in case they were poisonous disease-carrying spores from some killer mushroom or something. i checked the orange juice bottle in case they’d somehow got in there, but couldn’t find them. i checked they weren’t coming out of the tap, but they definitely weren’t as sometimes they weren’t there in your drink but sometimes they were. i checked the freezer finally and it was because our sesame seed bread rolls which were in there had bashed into the ice making section and little seeds were in the ice cubes which you then put in your drink which then melted and you’d see them floating around your drink. i felt like a detective who had just solved a big mystery, like sherlock holmes must have felt a lot of the time, or poirot. eureka.

last story for now. last thursday i felt slightly unwell, i had a sore throat when i woke up. while we were in town (as part of the continuing mystery of how to achieve sub section 2 paragraph 3.1a of the work permit debacle) i went to the doctor’s therefore. i said to the receptionist um i was in mexico a few weeks ago and i now have a sore throat, do you have the swine flu vaccine please? no. does anywhere in belize have it? no. ok, thanks, bye. [exit, to the sound of the whole waiting room sniggering at me]. better safe than sorry, or at least better to know my options. which aren’t very many as i’m sure you wouldn’t be allowed on a plane if you had swine flu, i read they were installing thermal detectors in airports to spot people with fevers so i’d be caught red-handed. i feel fine now by the way.

today’s parting comment – did you know that the longest single word you can make from the letters on the top line of a qwerty keyboard is typewriter. how serendipitous. or perhaps pre-planned?