Thursday, 9 July 2009

a tale of two cities

an announcement before starting today’s blog – for the benefit of siobhan, and maybe other readers who also find my first paragraphs too long but haven’t mentioned it to me – i have shortened the opening paragraph now. this is it; it is very short. the next one is long. tee hee. but not as long as previous first ones have been – and anyway it’s obviously my trademark style as an author.

tuesday 16th june
have i ever mentioned how difficult it is to get things done in belize? today was a day of mixed blessings - which reminds me of the bakery on the walworth road where i used to live in camberwell called the mixed blessings bakery which always made me laugh, and frown a bit in confusion. we started the day driving to belize city for a meeting with mr mike singh, the 2nd in command to the belize minister of tourism, so a big cheese in terms of cheeses of belize. he was very nice, and bert has met him a few times before. basically we wanted to know we had his backing in our venture, and in future ventures like putting an airstrip at caracol so tourists don’t have to endure the 2 hour bumpiest road in the world ride to get there, and getting a bigger plane and putting floats on it so it can land out at islands etc – as bert is always telling me, belize is a float plane paradise. anyway all went well, we gave him a disc of photos of belize we’ve taken from the plane and a postcard and poster of our business. he told us he was dead keen to get float planes and aircams going in belize, and he’d been on one in canada recently and it was ace. then he said you should get your tour operator’s license by the way. ok we said, how do we do that? just go across the street to belize tourism board (btb) and they’ll do it. so we trot across the street and sit in someone else’s office who gives us an application form – it is one side of a4, and the fee is only 300 belize dollars. great, easy. there is a list of 12 things on the back that you need to have in order to be granted your tour operator’s license. not so great – some of the things were straightforward like a photo of the interior and exterior of the business premises, others were fair to middling like insurance documents, police background checks. thing number 12 was proof of belizean citizenship or permanent residency, of at least one of the business owners ie me or bert. belizean permanent residency takes around 12 months to get and neither of us have it, and i certainly never will. um, help? the man dealing with us (amusingly called kenneth williams, though nothing like the original, this was the non-funny, caribbean office worker version, not a giggle in sight), said we can present ourselves to a board meeting which is happening next week, to ask for special dispensation relating to point number 12, and explain what we are doing, who we are, why we can’t have a belizean business partner , why we weren’t born in belize, why we are in belize anyway, i mean why would anyone come here unless they really didn’t have to be here. (he didn’t say that last bit it was just an aside i added, though even throughout all this nonsense i am liking belize more than i did before, perversely thanks to its bonkersness). and then having presented ourselves at their board meeting they would consider our case and whether they could allow us to proceed with our tour operator’s license application. the meeting is held every 2 months, so lucky us that the next one is next week or that would be one hell of a setback. and lucky us that we have to go all the way back to belize city in our smart clothes and endure more and more insane nonsense.

so we trotted off to brodie’s department store, to get some cadbury’s chocolate and other happiness inducing supplies, both pleased with our mike singh meeting and totally crestfallen at the thought of another hoop-jumping bureaucratic exercise that will no doubt take weeks/a month to complete, thus putting off the great launch of the ultralight business, and thus pushing us that bit nearer to absolute poverty and starvation and ultimately death (over-exaggeration in the hope of making light of the situation, but not too far from the truth). incidentally, as no other business like ours exists here, and the civil aviation department is not too in the know on what an ultralight even is, you won’t be surprised to hear that our tour op license depends on the civil aviation department giving some kind of ok to the plane in the first place. this is all crazy stupid and who knows just how much time it will take, and what other hoops they will require us to jump. thankfully my legs are getting stronger from my daily cycling so my hoop-jumping ability must be increasing too. after a fairly soggy chicken sandwich and some pringles in the car in the rain in belize city, we set off home trying to look on the bright side, though we couldn’t quite remember how to do that, even whistling didn’t help like the monty pythons suggested. as we had to pass belmopan, the capital of belize, and where all the government offices are, we decided to stop there on the off chance of them having completed bert’s work permit application. surely they would have rung you, i said, they know how urgent these things are. well, let’s try anyway said bert, just in case. so we tried. and the man came out and said are you the pilot? yes it’s ready. gosh (that was us, not him). he gave us a form and sent us to the tax office to register there before we were allowed to have the permit. we stopped at the bank on the way to get out the money we need for the permit (a staggering 2000 belize dollars!!! nb by the way a belize dollar is twice an american dollar, it’s a fixed rate). all the money we had on us was the 400 bzd i had begun withdrawing from the atms in anticipation of having the permit soon, so we went to the atm with my uk bank card, and our new scotiabank of belize bank card. the max per day you can withdraw from scotia atms is 800 bzd. so if we took the maximum out on each card we’d have 1600 plus the 400 in the car, would be the total 2000. great. the machine wasn’t working. not great. we tried belize bank, but its limit was 500, plus you can’t use scotia cards there - you can only use your scotia debit card in a scotia atm in belize, ie not abroad, not at any other cashpoint, and not to purchase online or over the phone etc – what service hey. we went back to scotiabank, and got in the queue, which thankfully wasn’t as long as normal (ie 3 very slow people ahead of us instead of 15). we gave her our cards and told her the atm doesn’t work. she swiped the scotia one and it was all working, then she asked for a cheque from us too, as it was a chequing account. so what that it’s a f-ing chequing account, does that meant we have to write cheques everywhere we go, if your atm was working we wouldn’t be here at all, i said in my head, and thought of that film with michael douglas called falling down, when things like this push him right over the edge into a killing spree. she gave us a cheque, we wrote it to ourselves. she took my card and driving license and said i could take out only 250 bzd without my passport. this is crazy i said, the machine doesn’t ask for my passport. she said try telling the machine you want 400bzd twice, as it’s full of 20’s and i think that’s the problem why it won’t dispense the full 800 in one go as they won’t fit through the slot. this was indeed the problem, and i got my 800 in 2 go’s. we go back to the car, morale levels depleted by the scotiabank. we realize we don’t know where the income tax office is, but then remember it’s on trinity boulevard, then get stuck in some weird one way street going somewhere weird and i’m shouting instructions from my little map. we get there with our piece of paper from the work permit office, a chinese looking belizean asks for our documents, bert starts freaking out, i get the documents from the car (the company corporation certificate etc). bert fills in a form, the chinese man takes it off him, and his passport, puts some numbers and letters in his computer, gives it back to us with a form which every 15th of the month you take to the income tax office to declare your tax for the month. jeez, there’s a nice prospect i thought, but stored that thought up to freak out about later. income tax on the business will be 6% monthly. we go back to the work permit office with our scotiamoney and hand it over to the cashier who is filing her nails while we count it out infront of her. we ask her if she wants to watch us count it. she says no. we count it and hand it over. she counts it again. 3 times. we go back to the work permit man and he stamps bert’s passport and glues a small picture of him onto a piece of official green paper with words on it, and that’s what you get for your 2000 belize dollars folks. we leave and i make a rule that we aren’t allowed to talk about anything business related for the next hour.

bert tells me how in hawaii he had to go through 6 months of this red tape and he had a competitor there who they had legal wranglings with too along the way and it was all awful just like this but not quite as bad as this. i tell him to shut up and obey my rule about not talking about business. then we discuss if we could bypass the tour operator rule somehow. then i tell bert and myself to shut up and obey my rule. if it seems i am going mad it would be true, but i defy anyone to go through this process and not lose a marble or two along the way. on the drive home we drove through some rain – seems like the rains finally arrived on monday, i hope they’re here for good and it’s not just some weather blowing through.

monday 15th june
i went in to teach the kids but they were moving to a different house in town so they cancelled the class for today. i went and did other useful things in town. today bert was out on blackbird caye with doug, photographing long caye for his island website. bert had set off really early around 6am and flown out to caye caulker, an island in the north, to meet doug and fly him out to blackbird caye. it was cloudy today and we were concerned incase it got stormy but the flight over was really smooth apparently. they saw the guys at the oceanic research centre and they gave them a fish sandwich – i had sent bert off with 2 cold hotdogs (colddogs?) in a little bag but he’d forgotten about them in all the excitement of his flights. they got good photos anyway, but then the weather got not so good, so when bert had dropped doug off at caye caulker again, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to risk flying home and rang for a weather report from here. i said it was cloudy but there was a small patch of blue sky he could probably fly through. i went out cycling with mick and on our way back from town heard a big buzzing noise like a big bee, i looked up and it was bert right there above our heads, in his plane that is. hooray.

today also the rains did arrive – thank the lord. it is now cooler, greyer, rainier and generally a lot easier to cope with life and getting things done. thunder rumbled around for a while and clouds scudded across the sky and then it really rained a lot. it has rained every day since then. it brings out these flies called flood flies, and also at the moment there are flying termites around, which once they’ve shed their wings apparently only have 10 seconds to mate.

wednesday i saw the kids, and gave them a wordsearch i’d made them with countries, continents and oceans on to back up their geography lesson i’d given them. they really liked it, but none of them could find africa. uh oh, but then we found it spelt afrhca. oops. we looked at it on the map again, and i told them that’s where lions live. they love learning about animals and where they come from and whether they could eat you or how far they would chase you. on the bus back from the zoo the other day we’d had a conversation about whether the bus would beat a cheetah in a race, and would a cheetah beat a motorbike, or a bicycle, or a lady running, or a baby? and if so, would the bus go faster than a lady, asked alexis, or faster than a baby. yes, i said, the bus would definitely go faster than a baby.

in yesterday’s class annette had started to teach them some things about how our bodies are made from cells, and how we grow etc, and when she started by asking what are people made of, they said bones, skin etc, she said there is something even smaller do you know what it is – michael said dust ma’am, we are made of dust, another teacher taught us that, the first people were adam and eve and they ate an apple and got evil and we are made of dust and god did it. argh we all looked at each other, now what. how do you explain creationism versus evolutionism to young kids, she was hoping they would say we are made of cells. i quietly did some colouring with alexis and stayed out of it.

sunday we went on a drive to see a hydro dam up the river from us, along a dusty bumpy road, called hydro road. we were hoping we could have a tour around it, but the guy wasn’t there in the little security room so we went and asked a nearby machete wielding belizean. he spoke only spanish so i spoke my now very rusty spanish to him, we thought maybe the guard was at lunch. he told us to go for a drive around so we went down some really cool off road jungly roads, in really thick jungle. the roads were very recently made and bert loved using the 4wd going up and down them, one of them was steep and a bit wobbly and i thought we might tip off the edge but we didn’t. we stopped and listened to all the jungly noises and looked at the jungly plants. we found out from the machete man that it was going to be a resort there and a tourist centre, i guess about the jungle and the dam. very cool. we found the hydro guard man and he said to come back during the week. the hydro power house place is basically where the electricity is made from the mollejon dam, mick told us they made a tunnel that the water falls 10 feet down so it creates enough movement to get the power from. i think that’s what he said but we were cycling at the time into the wind so i wasn’t able to hear every single word. i’ll ask him again. it was all very exciting and there are lots of interesting things like this in this funny little country all there to be discovered and explored once you get off the beaten track. we figured while we are still in waiting mode we should do things like this. we are going to try and meet the zoo lady as bert is still reading the book about the zoo and the chalillo dam project that she was against, and hopefully we could donate a flight to her to see if she can see some macaws from the plane.

and that is the end of today’s update. here are some parting comments on other random things we’ve done:

finished a jigsaw – a picture of an alpen mountain scene, in austria. the top left corner piece was missing which is so upsetting but i think i’d be more upset if it was a middle piece. i had got a sudden strong urge to do a jigsaw and it was really relaxing and rewarding, and i think the reason i wanted to do it was to have the satisfaction of having started and finished something and succeeded at it. a novel feeling given the frustration and incompleteness of everything else going on business wise.

watched braveheart – can you believe i haven’t ever watched this until now? what a film. loved his hairdo, reminded me of morten harket from a-ha, who i used to collect pictures of from look-in magazine and glue into a scrapbook. what a good scottish accent he does.

learnt about cetaceans, from a leaflet from the oceanic society – basically there are 3 sets of mammals that live in the sea (remember i had mentioned on an earlier blog how funny god would make a sea living animal that doesn’t breathe water), which are cetaceans (dolphins, whales, porpoises), pinnipeds (seals and sea lions), and sirenians (manatees and dugongs). did you know killer whales have been spotted on the lighthouse reef atoll here in belize?

yesterday i did our bike ride on my own as mick was busy, and i broke my record speed of 1:09, to 1:06:50. i decided to go as fast as i could for the whole distance and see what happened. it was a bit windy and drizzly, good conditions as you don’t get over hot that way, i was very pleased with myself, it was an average speed of 26.6kmh. still not tour de france material but there you go.

this afternoon we are going to see a house down the road we might move to as it’s cheaper, and owned by a lovely columbian lady who could maybe teach me spanish, and tomorrow we have a meeting with mr jose contreras of the civial aviation here to discuss the last bits of things that need discussing before we hopefully can start advertising ourselves for flights. they have asked bert to be president of the belize ultralight association, which is very cool, currently there are not very many members, just bert, mick and their friend mike green, and the old man who is president at the moment but he is too old to carry on. it would mean bert could make up the rules that govern ultralighting in this country and basically have a big input into it all, working alongside civil aviation who are very much on our side as they want the tourism from ultralights. hopefully this meeting will go smoothly and he won’t tell us we have to go and fill in another 5 page form and go through more red tape. if he does we might have to admit defeat and sell the truck and get on ebay for a campervan and drive off into the sunset…

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