firstly before you read today's update please cast your eyes above - the last picture is a caption competition, it's an aubergine talking to a flamingo. in case you were wondering. and yes i'm fine. the prize for the best entry is a selection of vegetables from the local market.
saturday 13th june
i am writing this between writing content for our up and coming website, so if i suddenly lapse into strange marketing speak about how great flying is or how to make a reservation with us, please forgive me. bert has been telling me i have to put photos on the blog so i have finally gotten round to this, which i’m sure you will agree is a welcome addition.
friday 12th june
once the early morning fog had lifted we set off in the plane to blackbird caye, out in the turneffe atoll (what exactly is an atoll please – is it a group of small islands which also includes coral reef?). this was a reckie trip for bert flying doug ingersoll of caribbean island brokers to take photos of an island for sale out there called long caye. doug is the one who recently sold leonardo dicaprio an island in belize, cor blimey, am working on how we can get to meet him, but i bet he doesn’t spend that much time there. i might drop a flyer through his letter box anyway, you never know. we flew pretty much straight out east to the sea, just south of belize city, and over the reef to the atoll. the gps wasn’t working, which is quite an issue, but having studied the map and having flown there before, bert was fine with finding it. i managed to convince myself not to do any freaking out, even when bert got out little life jackets for us before we set off (argh help why do we need these they won’t protect us if we drop in the sea will they anyway?), and it worked a treat. bert doesn’t put up with any silliness in the plane, so any panicking has to be done quietly to myself these days. after about 1 hour 45 minutes we got to blackbird caye and landed on the gravel airstrip out there and were collected by 2 caribbean men in their little buggy and taken to blackbird caye resort, which is basically just a dive resort as there is nothing else at all to do on the island. it is totally beautiful out there, and i’m glad i don’t have to try to describe it now you have the photos, as it’s kind of hard to explain those blue colours convincingly enough. we met wayne, a surly and overweight south african whose grumpiness and unhelpfulness was at very noticeable odds with the beautiful surroundings and serenity, like he had inverted all that was beautiful about it there into the exact opposite inside himself. i wonder what his story is. anyway he couldn’t help us with hiring a boat for doug on monday out to long caye as a big dive group was coming in and the boats were all used, so he sent us down-island to the oceanic society research field station. this is basically a coral reef and ocean research centre which has volunteers and students and anyone else that wants to help out staying for a week at a time and diving and snorkeling and researching and counting sharks dolphins manatees crocodiles etc. katherine from columbia runs it, and was really lovely, as all columbians i have ever met seem to be. she is leaving soon to go to guam, near hawaii, to study some more and do more research, her dream job is to work for national geographic so she is building up experience for that. she invited us to stay and have lunch with them which we did, and told them about flying and how we could maybe help them by donating some time to fly them over the reef etc. there was the cutest dog ever on the island too. they sorted out a boat for us for monday, and we bought a tshirt from them to support their cause and off we went back to the plane all happy. we had to see unhappy wayne on the way back and he told us that mike, the island and runway owner had flown in in the meantime, seen the ultralight and was not too happy we had landed there. we thought we had spoken to him on the phone the night before, but it turns out this was his brother, who was quite inebriated at the time – perhaps he had forgotten he wasn’t mike, or got some weird kick out of saying yes it’s my runway and you can land there. wayne clearly didn’t believe this but it was the truth. we were going to fly out to look at the bluehole, the huge ocean sinkhole another 17 miles out, but had to get back to call the real mike now to check all was ok (which it all was in the end). flying during the middle of the day is a lot bumpier, the best times are sunrise and sunset when the winds are generally smoother, so this flight was quite shaky and after filming the sea and the islands and mountains once we were back onland for a while i felt a bit sick. we saw loads of small fires burning, they call them controlled burns (ie they burn off the roughage on the ground to prepare for ploughing again before the rainy season), though sometimes they don’t look that controlled, surely the fences aren’t supposed to be burning too…
after all this excitement and wearing my new oceanic research centre tshirt for a while, i went out cycling with mick. we met hernan out cycling too, and 2 other men who i don’t know but we all cycled together for a while, then they carried on at the bit where we turn round. our fastest time is 1 hour 13.5, for the 18mile distance, which includes about 14 hills, none of them hugely steep, but all of them quite long and lots of them into the wind. the best bit is coming back from town with the wind behind you, you can get up to 60k on the downhills. another good bit is getting to the guatemalan border where we turn round just before the customs office, it feels like you’re in a race as they all stop to watch us go past and there are little traffic cones around the place. the lady from the carwash where they bought a trailer (american for caravan) from a man who had driven it down from alabama, goes running along the road so we wave to her, and mick has been here a long time and is very well-known so often people wave to him or drive alongside for a chat on their motorbikes. he picks me up and takes me home as it is en route to his resort, in his little mule (a small 4wd buggy thing) – i stand in the back with the bikes so they don’t tip out, today mick did a sudden turn off to the hangars and i nearly flew out of the truck. i think it was intentional actually he is trying to injure me so i can’t cycle faster than him (my fastest time on my own is 1.09, but this was just after getting back from mexico when i must have been stronger from those horrendous hills).
thursday 11th june
today i taught the kids about the world and about belize, with the help of my world map, and my map of central america, and of belize. i told them the highest mountain was in nepal, called mount everest. michael said he'd climbed it. i asked him how it was. he admitted he hadn't after a while. they renamed the atlantic ocean ataranticarra as they couldn't pronounce it. i taught them that russia is the biggest country – it is 17,075 sqaure km, the next biggest is canada which is 9,971, so russia is basically twice as big as the next biggest country which is quite amazing. the 5 main oceans are pacific, ataranticarra, indian, southern and arctic – i have never heard of southern before, but it is all the ocean down near the antarctic, so perhaps it is also called the antarctic ocean. these kids have never left belize, and perhaps they never will, and they had never seen a world map, nor knew that the world was mainly water and hardly any land. they found it interesting i think, but after a while shane fell out with them and went and sat outside, but we don't know why, i went to talk to him and we looked at the clouds moving around and i told him how they work and he showed me a scar he had from climbing a tree, then he came back in and watched the others playing memory pairs game.
after lunch today we spotted some people at the hanger, it was 2 soldiers, we went to see them, hoping they weren’t here to shoot us. they had seen bert flying the other day when they were doing firing in the hills near chalillo dam, and wanted to come and warn him that they will be doing lots more of this and he would need to be careful where he flies and that they will email us to let us know when and where etc. they were really nice and didn’t court marshal bert, and it was refreshing to meet some english people and have a straightforward conversation where they said here’s what we’re doing, here’s what we want you to do, thank you very much. things don’t often happen that straightforwardly here. bert told them that’s fine, and told them about the ultralight and how he’s a very safe pilot and has never has any incidents (apart from when the army are shooting at you, i said under my breath). we told them to say hello to grant and gill who we had met at the fly in in february, grant is the helicopter pilot and gill is his wife.
this morning while i was teaching world geography bert had been at a trade license certificate meeting with the town council. we need to get this certificate in order to legally do business here, as well as the work permit. i figured maybe there’d be a 50 dollar charge for it, but bert said they had asked for 4000 dollars! they ask what the annual premises value is, which is a kind of vague question, bert told them the rent we pay for the house and airstrip, they said right we want 25% of it annually or you don’t get your certificate. i can’t possibly do that, we have no money and are not up and running yet bert said, and snatched the calculator from the man, and they negotiated it to 15%, which bert said we still couldn’t pay. the man called another man in another room in the town council and they agreed on 900 dollars of which bert said he could only pay half there and then. ok said the man. they said this money goes towards the roads and towns. in which case it seems most other people must be paying way less than what they are supposed to too, as the towns and roads are crap here. and there are still general sales tax, and income tax, and business tax we have to sort out. it is definitely interesting all this business setting up nonsense in a third world country, i don’t see where all these taxes go other than in officials’ pockets. it’s fair enough to make things a bit hard on foreigners wanting to work here (though it’s not really as the country does actually need the money that new tourism like us will bring in), but the most annoying thing about it is nothing is actually set in stone, and nobody tells you all the things you have to do and what you’ll have to pay and when and who to, and what bribes you should be prepared to make. the best thing to do is keep busy with other things as it can get you down otherwise. we make frequent trips to the cake shop to recover from these setbacks and daydream about being millionaires with ultralight adventures belize becoming a big national corporation, hiring loads of other pilots and operating out of placencia, san pedro etc, and i can be the big boss of it all ha ha. next week we have a meeting with the minister of tourism to discuss these things, and bert is planning on organizing a hang gliding and sky diving meet here, which would be the first in belize ever, and we’re going to write an article about ultralighting in belize for the sport aircraft magazine in america.
in the afternoon we had to drive to belmopan to renew our tourist visas in our passports at immigration which is a drag, you have to do it every month, and pay 50 belize dollars. once bert has his work permit that lasts for a year in your passport, and i will apply for mine if all goes well with the business. the immigration and nationality department is typical of most government offices – there are lots of people sitting around behind the desk doing nothing, and a long queue of people waiting to be seen, and things going on behind closed doors that nobody is quite sure about. there are a few leaflets in english and spanish about embracing god and jesus into your lives, and some mouldy old posters listing various fees of various things. when we went to take the work permit application a few weeks ago, at the desk where we renew our passports there was a man intently clicking away on his computer, i looked at the screen and it was giant tetris he was playing. in full view of everyone waiting and surely of his boss or colleagues, which amused me highly. he also played solitaire and mine sweeper while we waited in our queue, i think tetris was his favourite though.
wednesday 10th june
today we took the kids to the zoo, which was fun – with talia and annette the 2 volunteers from cornerstone, and becky an english volunteer from there too. we took the bus there and back, it got busy on the way back so we squashed up and i had a big lady sitting next to me and michael squished asleep against the window to the other side, and alexis sitting on my knee talking non stop in her 4 year old creole language and funny clicky noises she makes. she spent 30 minutes eating a sausage from her sausage sandwich which was kind of sweet but also fairly gross. they enjoyed the zoo anyway, and it was fun to go again. interestingly the zoo was created in 1983 with 17 animals that were left from the filming of a natural history documentary, and has since then grown into a bigger but still small zoo. none of the animals there were taken from the wild, they are all indigenous to belize and many of them are also endangered. this time i saw the tapirs which i hadn't seen before, they are cute with big long trunk-like noses, they tried to sniff the kids when they went to stand next to them for a photo. we watched spider monkeys swinging around the trees. every new animal we saw, alexis asked can it bite you can it eat you? michael ticked off the animals we saw in a little book i’d bought them of belizean mammals. he kept leaving the book everywhere as he gets a bit side tracked with other things, and the cover fell off, and every animal we saw he said it’s not in the book, and i had to say oh i think it is actually let’s look for it, and there it was and he ticked it off.
i bought a book from the zoo shop called the last flight of the scarlet macaw – one woman’s fight to save the world’s most beautiful bird. the lady that created the zoo was sharon matola, from america, who became an expert on the macaw. when the government proposed the building of the chalillo dam, which is just up river from us here in cayo, she leapt to the defence of the macaws, as this was one of their main habitats, and they are increasingly growing rare in all of central america. this book is the story of her fight against them which ‘touches upon greed, corruption and the legacy of colonialism’ apparently, and is supposedly amazing. our friend mick is in it too as he was part of the fight against the dam. bert is reading it at the moment, and read me a bit from the first page, which i think is the best description of belize i’ve found anywhere yet and have reproduced here for you:
belize goes unnoticed by the rest of the world, and over the years the country has parlayed its obscurity into an attractive asset. for those shipwrecked on the shoals of life, belize offers a new beginning. the country teems with adventurous refugees who’ve set up shop in the middle of the central american jungle. british innkeepers, mennonite farmers, chinese shopkeepers, lebanese entrepreneurs, american missionaries, canadian aid workers, and dutch scientists live peacefully alongside the nation’s longer-established residents, the garifuna artists, maya cacao growers, mestizo plantation managers, and creole politicians who make up the majority of the country’s population. belize draws the eccentric, the madcap, and the downright mad.
very apt we thought. interesting, more belizeans now live in the usa than live in belize. it is hard to know how to categorise belizean people, whether they are caribbean, or latin american, or mayan etc. i read the rough guide history of belize in the back of our guidebook, which was really interesting, and i promise to summarise it on the next blog, but need to read it again before then as i got in a muddle when i tried to relay it to bert the other day.
7th, 8th, 9th june
nothing as interesting as the above things happened. we bought some stationery for the office, 2 clipboards with pens attached (very nice), 4 nice new pens for writing things down with (very nice), some sellotape in a holder, a plastic folder; we watched marley and me but it broke about half way through; we watched heartbreak kid but it did the same; we watched the holiday which is a ridiculously romantic comedy thing about 2 girls who do a life swap from london and l.a for a bit to get over their ex boyfriends, and they find the thing they weren’t even looking for, can you imagine it, featuring cameron diaz (annoying but good in this), kate winslet (i like her), jude law (very handsome), and jack black (very funny and good at the piano); bert left the bananas and avocado he’d bought at the market, and when we went back the next day they had kept them for us; we gave whisky the dog some worm tablets – he will be having a bath soon too but he doesn’t know it yet.
and finally my film 2009 update of 2 very good films we watched recently:
blood diamond: totally brilliant, starring leonardo dicaprio as a rhodesian diamond smuggler taking diamonds from sierra leone, where civil war raged in 1999 and onwards, and the ensuing bloodshed, corruption and tragedy resulting from this diamond trade. there is a law to prevent countries buying diamonds from conflict zones (known as conflict diamonds) so he smuggles them to neighbouring liberia which could legally export them, to huge companies in london and elsewhere. as stated in the film, whenever they find resources in africa, the rest of the world gets rich from it, and the africans die. as different gangs fight for control of the diamond mining areas, the african people get massacred and enslaved and raped and murdered, their children stolen and drugged and armed and turned into child soldiers for the guerilla group trying to overturn the government, the ruf (revolutionary united front). the film follows an american journalist investigating the situation, she meets dicaprio and they get to kind of fall in love but that isn’t the main premise of the film at all. they are on different ‘sides’ but become intertwined with each other, and with solomon, an african who has found a huge diamond while working in one of the mining areas and hidden it. dicaprio is using him to find the diamond and use it as his ticket out of the country, solomon is helping him as dicaprio has promised him his family back from the refugee camp, and son back from the child soldier unit he’s been drugged into joining and fighting for, and the journo is using them all for her story whilst trying to do the right thing. the best line is when dicaprio first meets journo and goes from trying to pull her, to realizing she is an interfering journalist, and tells her to f-off, saying: you come over here with your laptop, your malaria pills and your antibacterial hand cleaner thinking you can save the world – well think again.
sin nombre: from the same people that made motorcycle diaries, and traffic, and produced by diego luna and gabriel garcia bernal, a film about a honduran family emigrating from honduras up to america and the horrendous journey they go on, walking for hours to guatemala i think, then getting the train (ie illegally, on the roof) for days up through mexico, risking being attacked, raped, murdered along the way by gangs. alongside this story is one about mexican gangs in tapachula, the mexican/guatemalan border town in south eastern mexico. the 2 stories interlink when casper from one of the gangs goes on a money making trip with his gang boss and a 12 year old gang member smiley, to rob the emigrants on their train as it passes through tonala. the gang leader is going to rape the honduran girl, but casper kills him, kicks smiley off the train and is now officially on the run as he knows smiley will tell the gang who will activate all their other departments across the country to hunt him down and kill him. the girl chooses to run away from the train with casper, who doesn’t want to have to look after her as he knows he will soon be killed by his gang, but he agrees to travel with her to the us border and help her. though not an actual true story, it is all based on what actually goes on.
not exactly cheery films but very important and raise so many issues, and make you think all those clichéd things about how lucky we are to live in freedom and have opportunities and not be at war or live in constant fear, and how crazy that all that is happening in our world. made me realize how amazing it is that journalists will risk their lives by going into conflict zones to report to us what is going on, and we will sit there and watch their little reports, as the blood diamond journo says, somewhere between the sport and the weather on cnn, then carry on with our lives.
i hear the world is on level 6 flu pandemic alert again, is this to detract attention from some unsavoury other news that is going on, or is it real this time?
bye from madcap belize xx
i am writing this between writing content for our up and coming website, so if i suddenly lapse into strange marketing speak about how great flying is or how to make a reservation with us, please forgive me. bert has been telling me i have to put photos on the blog so i have finally gotten round to this, which i’m sure you will agree is a welcome addition.
friday 12th june
once the early morning fog had lifted we set off in the plane to blackbird caye, out in the turneffe atoll (what exactly is an atoll please – is it a group of small islands which also includes coral reef?). this was a reckie trip for bert flying doug ingersoll of caribbean island brokers to take photos of an island for sale out there called long caye. doug is the one who recently sold leonardo dicaprio an island in belize, cor blimey, am working on how we can get to meet him, but i bet he doesn’t spend that much time there. i might drop a flyer through his letter box anyway, you never know. we flew pretty much straight out east to the sea, just south of belize city, and over the reef to the atoll. the gps wasn’t working, which is quite an issue, but having studied the map and having flown there before, bert was fine with finding it. i managed to convince myself not to do any freaking out, even when bert got out little life jackets for us before we set off (argh help why do we need these they won’t protect us if we drop in the sea will they anyway?), and it worked a treat. bert doesn’t put up with any silliness in the plane, so any panicking has to be done quietly to myself these days. after about 1 hour 45 minutes we got to blackbird caye and landed on the gravel airstrip out there and were collected by 2 caribbean men in their little buggy and taken to blackbird caye resort, which is basically just a dive resort as there is nothing else at all to do on the island. it is totally beautiful out there, and i’m glad i don’t have to try to describe it now you have the photos, as it’s kind of hard to explain those blue colours convincingly enough. we met wayne, a surly and overweight south african whose grumpiness and unhelpfulness was at very noticeable odds with the beautiful surroundings and serenity, like he had inverted all that was beautiful about it there into the exact opposite inside himself. i wonder what his story is. anyway he couldn’t help us with hiring a boat for doug on monday out to long caye as a big dive group was coming in and the boats were all used, so he sent us down-island to the oceanic society research field station. this is basically a coral reef and ocean research centre which has volunteers and students and anyone else that wants to help out staying for a week at a time and diving and snorkeling and researching and counting sharks dolphins manatees crocodiles etc. katherine from columbia runs it, and was really lovely, as all columbians i have ever met seem to be. she is leaving soon to go to guam, near hawaii, to study some more and do more research, her dream job is to work for national geographic so she is building up experience for that. she invited us to stay and have lunch with them which we did, and told them about flying and how we could maybe help them by donating some time to fly them over the reef etc. there was the cutest dog ever on the island too. they sorted out a boat for us for monday, and we bought a tshirt from them to support their cause and off we went back to the plane all happy. we had to see unhappy wayne on the way back and he told us that mike, the island and runway owner had flown in in the meantime, seen the ultralight and was not too happy we had landed there. we thought we had spoken to him on the phone the night before, but it turns out this was his brother, who was quite inebriated at the time – perhaps he had forgotten he wasn’t mike, or got some weird kick out of saying yes it’s my runway and you can land there. wayne clearly didn’t believe this but it was the truth. we were going to fly out to look at the bluehole, the huge ocean sinkhole another 17 miles out, but had to get back to call the real mike now to check all was ok (which it all was in the end). flying during the middle of the day is a lot bumpier, the best times are sunrise and sunset when the winds are generally smoother, so this flight was quite shaky and after filming the sea and the islands and mountains once we were back onland for a while i felt a bit sick. we saw loads of small fires burning, they call them controlled burns (ie they burn off the roughage on the ground to prepare for ploughing again before the rainy season), though sometimes they don’t look that controlled, surely the fences aren’t supposed to be burning too…
after all this excitement and wearing my new oceanic research centre tshirt for a while, i went out cycling with mick. we met hernan out cycling too, and 2 other men who i don’t know but we all cycled together for a while, then they carried on at the bit where we turn round. our fastest time is 1 hour 13.5, for the 18mile distance, which includes about 14 hills, none of them hugely steep, but all of them quite long and lots of them into the wind. the best bit is coming back from town with the wind behind you, you can get up to 60k on the downhills. another good bit is getting to the guatemalan border where we turn round just before the customs office, it feels like you’re in a race as they all stop to watch us go past and there are little traffic cones around the place. the lady from the carwash where they bought a trailer (american for caravan) from a man who had driven it down from alabama, goes running along the road so we wave to her, and mick has been here a long time and is very well-known so often people wave to him or drive alongside for a chat on their motorbikes. he picks me up and takes me home as it is en route to his resort, in his little mule (a small 4wd buggy thing) – i stand in the back with the bikes so they don’t tip out, today mick did a sudden turn off to the hangars and i nearly flew out of the truck. i think it was intentional actually he is trying to injure me so i can’t cycle faster than him (my fastest time on my own is 1.09, but this was just after getting back from mexico when i must have been stronger from those horrendous hills).
thursday 11th june
today i taught the kids about the world and about belize, with the help of my world map, and my map of central america, and of belize. i told them the highest mountain was in nepal, called mount everest. michael said he'd climbed it. i asked him how it was. he admitted he hadn't after a while. they renamed the atlantic ocean ataranticarra as they couldn't pronounce it. i taught them that russia is the biggest country – it is 17,075 sqaure km, the next biggest is canada which is 9,971, so russia is basically twice as big as the next biggest country which is quite amazing. the 5 main oceans are pacific, ataranticarra, indian, southern and arctic – i have never heard of southern before, but it is all the ocean down near the antarctic, so perhaps it is also called the antarctic ocean. these kids have never left belize, and perhaps they never will, and they had never seen a world map, nor knew that the world was mainly water and hardly any land. they found it interesting i think, but after a while shane fell out with them and went and sat outside, but we don't know why, i went to talk to him and we looked at the clouds moving around and i told him how they work and he showed me a scar he had from climbing a tree, then he came back in and watched the others playing memory pairs game.
after lunch today we spotted some people at the hanger, it was 2 soldiers, we went to see them, hoping they weren’t here to shoot us. they had seen bert flying the other day when they were doing firing in the hills near chalillo dam, and wanted to come and warn him that they will be doing lots more of this and he would need to be careful where he flies and that they will email us to let us know when and where etc. they were really nice and didn’t court marshal bert, and it was refreshing to meet some english people and have a straightforward conversation where they said here’s what we’re doing, here’s what we want you to do, thank you very much. things don’t often happen that straightforwardly here. bert told them that’s fine, and told them about the ultralight and how he’s a very safe pilot and has never has any incidents (apart from when the army are shooting at you, i said under my breath). we told them to say hello to grant and gill who we had met at the fly in in february, grant is the helicopter pilot and gill is his wife.
this morning while i was teaching world geography bert had been at a trade license certificate meeting with the town council. we need to get this certificate in order to legally do business here, as well as the work permit. i figured maybe there’d be a 50 dollar charge for it, but bert said they had asked for 4000 dollars! they ask what the annual premises value is, which is a kind of vague question, bert told them the rent we pay for the house and airstrip, they said right we want 25% of it annually or you don’t get your certificate. i can’t possibly do that, we have no money and are not up and running yet bert said, and snatched the calculator from the man, and they negotiated it to 15%, which bert said we still couldn’t pay. the man called another man in another room in the town council and they agreed on 900 dollars of which bert said he could only pay half there and then. ok said the man. they said this money goes towards the roads and towns. in which case it seems most other people must be paying way less than what they are supposed to too, as the towns and roads are crap here. and there are still general sales tax, and income tax, and business tax we have to sort out. it is definitely interesting all this business setting up nonsense in a third world country, i don’t see where all these taxes go other than in officials’ pockets. it’s fair enough to make things a bit hard on foreigners wanting to work here (though it’s not really as the country does actually need the money that new tourism like us will bring in), but the most annoying thing about it is nothing is actually set in stone, and nobody tells you all the things you have to do and what you’ll have to pay and when and who to, and what bribes you should be prepared to make. the best thing to do is keep busy with other things as it can get you down otherwise. we make frequent trips to the cake shop to recover from these setbacks and daydream about being millionaires with ultralight adventures belize becoming a big national corporation, hiring loads of other pilots and operating out of placencia, san pedro etc, and i can be the big boss of it all ha ha. next week we have a meeting with the minister of tourism to discuss these things, and bert is planning on organizing a hang gliding and sky diving meet here, which would be the first in belize ever, and we’re going to write an article about ultralighting in belize for the sport aircraft magazine in america.
in the afternoon we had to drive to belmopan to renew our tourist visas in our passports at immigration which is a drag, you have to do it every month, and pay 50 belize dollars. once bert has his work permit that lasts for a year in your passport, and i will apply for mine if all goes well with the business. the immigration and nationality department is typical of most government offices – there are lots of people sitting around behind the desk doing nothing, and a long queue of people waiting to be seen, and things going on behind closed doors that nobody is quite sure about. there are a few leaflets in english and spanish about embracing god and jesus into your lives, and some mouldy old posters listing various fees of various things. when we went to take the work permit application a few weeks ago, at the desk where we renew our passports there was a man intently clicking away on his computer, i looked at the screen and it was giant tetris he was playing. in full view of everyone waiting and surely of his boss or colleagues, which amused me highly. he also played solitaire and mine sweeper while we waited in our queue, i think tetris was his favourite though.
wednesday 10th june
today we took the kids to the zoo, which was fun – with talia and annette the 2 volunteers from cornerstone, and becky an english volunteer from there too. we took the bus there and back, it got busy on the way back so we squashed up and i had a big lady sitting next to me and michael squished asleep against the window to the other side, and alexis sitting on my knee talking non stop in her 4 year old creole language and funny clicky noises she makes. she spent 30 minutes eating a sausage from her sausage sandwich which was kind of sweet but also fairly gross. they enjoyed the zoo anyway, and it was fun to go again. interestingly the zoo was created in 1983 with 17 animals that were left from the filming of a natural history documentary, and has since then grown into a bigger but still small zoo. none of the animals there were taken from the wild, they are all indigenous to belize and many of them are also endangered. this time i saw the tapirs which i hadn't seen before, they are cute with big long trunk-like noses, they tried to sniff the kids when they went to stand next to them for a photo. we watched spider monkeys swinging around the trees. every new animal we saw, alexis asked can it bite you can it eat you? michael ticked off the animals we saw in a little book i’d bought them of belizean mammals. he kept leaving the book everywhere as he gets a bit side tracked with other things, and the cover fell off, and every animal we saw he said it’s not in the book, and i had to say oh i think it is actually let’s look for it, and there it was and he ticked it off.
i bought a book from the zoo shop called the last flight of the scarlet macaw – one woman’s fight to save the world’s most beautiful bird. the lady that created the zoo was sharon matola, from america, who became an expert on the macaw. when the government proposed the building of the chalillo dam, which is just up river from us here in cayo, she leapt to the defence of the macaws, as this was one of their main habitats, and they are increasingly growing rare in all of central america. this book is the story of her fight against them which ‘touches upon greed, corruption and the legacy of colonialism’ apparently, and is supposedly amazing. our friend mick is in it too as he was part of the fight against the dam. bert is reading it at the moment, and read me a bit from the first page, which i think is the best description of belize i’ve found anywhere yet and have reproduced here for you:
belize goes unnoticed by the rest of the world, and over the years the country has parlayed its obscurity into an attractive asset. for those shipwrecked on the shoals of life, belize offers a new beginning. the country teems with adventurous refugees who’ve set up shop in the middle of the central american jungle. british innkeepers, mennonite farmers, chinese shopkeepers, lebanese entrepreneurs, american missionaries, canadian aid workers, and dutch scientists live peacefully alongside the nation’s longer-established residents, the garifuna artists, maya cacao growers, mestizo plantation managers, and creole politicians who make up the majority of the country’s population. belize draws the eccentric, the madcap, and the downright mad.
very apt we thought. interesting, more belizeans now live in the usa than live in belize. it is hard to know how to categorise belizean people, whether they are caribbean, or latin american, or mayan etc. i read the rough guide history of belize in the back of our guidebook, which was really interesting, and i promise to summarise it on the next blog, but need to read it again before then as i got in a muddle when i tried to relay it to bert the other day.
7th, 8th, 9th june
nothing as interesting as the above things happened. we bought some stationery for the office, 2 clipboards with pens attached (very nice), 4 nice new pens for writing things down with (very nice), some sellotape in a holder, a plastic folder; we watched marley and me but it broke about half way through; we watched heartbreak kid but it did the same; we watched the holiday which is a ridiculously romantic comedy thing about 2 girls who do a life swap from london and l.a for a bit to get over their ex boyfriends, and they find the thing they weren’t even looking for, can you imagine it, featuring cameron diaz (annoying but good in this), kate winslet (i like her), jude law (very handsome), and jack black (very funny and good at the piano); bert left the bananas and avocado he’d bought at the market, and when we went back the next day they had kept them for us; we gave whisky the dog some worm tablets – he will be having a bath soon too but he doesn’t know it yet.
and finally my film 2009 update of 2 very good films we watched recently:
blood diamond: totally brilliant, starring leonardo dicaprio as a rhodesian diamond smuggler taking diamonds from sierra leone, where civil war raged in 1999 and onwards, and the ensuing bloodshed, corruption and tragedy resulting from this diamond trade. there is a law to prevent countries buying diamonds from conflict zones (known as conflict diamonds) so he smuggles them to neighbouring liberia which could legally export them, to huge companies in london and elsewhere. as stated in the film, whenever they find resources in africa, the rest of the world gets rich from it, and the africans die. as different gangs fight for control of the diamond mining areas, the african people get massacred and enslaved and raped and murdered, their children stolen and drugged and armed and turned into child soldiers for the guerilla group trying to overturn the government, the ruf (revolutionary united front). the film follows an american journalist investigating the situation, she meets dicaprio and they get to kind of fall in love but that isn’t the main premise of the film at all. they are on different ‘sides’ but become intertwined with each other, and with solomon, an african who has found a huge diamond while working in one of the mining areas and hidden it. dicaprio is using him to find the diamond and use it as his ticket out of the country, solomon is helping him as dicaprio has promised him his family back from the refugee camp, and son back from the child soldier unit he’s been drugged into joining and fighting for, and the journo is using them all for her story whilst trying to do the right thing. the best line is when dicaprio first meets journo and goes from trying to pull her, to realizing she is an interfering journalist, and tells her to f-off, saying: you come over here with your laptop, your malaria pills and your antibacterial hand cleaner thinking you can save the world – well think again.
sin nombre: from the same people that made motorcycle diaries, and traffic, and produced by diego luna and gabriel garcia bernal, a film about a honduran family emigrating from honduras up to america and the horrendous journey they go on, walking for hours to guatemala i think, then getting the train (ie illegally, on the roof) for days up through mexico, risking being attacked, raped, murdered along the way by gangs. alongside this story is one about mexican gangs in tapachula, the mexican/guatemalan border town in south eastern mexico. the 2 stories interlink when casper from one of the gangs goes on a money making trip with his gang boss and a 12 year old gang member smiley, to rob the emigrants on their train as it passes through tonala. the gang leader is going to rape the honduran girl, but casper kills him, kicks smiley off the train and is now officially on the run as he knows smiley will tell the gang who will activate all their other departments across the country to hunt him down and kill him. the girl chooses to run away from the train with casper, who doesn’t want to have to look after her as he knows he will soon be killed by his gang, but he agrees to travel with her to the us border and help her. though not an actual true story, it is all based on what actually goes on.
not exactly cheery films but very important and raise so many issues, and make you think all those clichéd things about how lucky we are to live in freedom and have opportunities and not be at war or live in constant fear, and how crazy that all that is happening in our world. made me realize how amazing it is that journalists will risk their lives by going into conflict zones to report to us what is going on, and we will sit there and watch their little reports, as the blood diamond journo says, somewhere between the sport and the weather on cnn, then carry on with our lives.
i hear the world is on level 6 flu pandemic alert again, is this to detract attention from some unsavoury other news that is going on, or is it real this time?
bye from madcap belize xx
