hermit the crab and the super drifter

caye caulker from the air

this is strange to have to revert back to belize updates whilst now being in montana: i wrote the first half of this whilst in belize and the rest just now in montana, so it has dual citizenship i guess.

july 23rd onwards
so the tour de france finished, lance came third which is ace. i think next year he’ll win, i wonder who will be on his new team – not contador that’s for sure. cavendish did amazingly well, though i still think he’s a bit arrogant. it was cool watching them cycle the champs elysses for all those laps, i hope next year i can go and watch it in person in a campervan, but not be one of the really annoying crowd members who run next to them really close, that must be really annoying.

we went to see a man who had advertised an rv for sale (ie a recreational vehicle, ie a campervan type thing). it was cheap, but old, but we figured it could be ok, and got quite excited. we duly got unexcited when we saw it, talk about a rust bucket. we asked him had he driven it down from the states, as it had california plates on it – no, he had it towed… hmmm suspicious, why? oh i just did. he was a nice man actually, and turned out he has a show on belizean tv, we watched a bit of it, it’s kind of a lifestyle/religious programme, whatever that really means i’m not sure, but it sure wasn’t that entertaining what we saw of it.

we read the paper a few days, which i don’t often do in belize as the main content is murder-murder-corruption-missing person-murder-religion-murder. one particularly snappy front page headline was ‘money missing from many places’. the best one i saw was last year when i was here for the very first time with abi, it was an economic analysis i suppose about prices rising, it said: chicken gwan up, eggs gwan up. it’s funny because belize is really such a small place that sometimes it seems everyone knows everyone and everyone knows everyone’s business, it’s classic small town syndrome, i find it very claustrophobic, having lived 7 years in london where i quite cherished the anonymity. anyway when reading the paper you see people in there you know or at least have heard of or you know through someone else. mike singh our friend we’ve had meetings with at the tourism and aviation office (he’s the ceo) was named in a moneygram money scandal, bert’s friend jay (the man that has a car dealership in belize city) was in there giving a car to the police force because they’d helped him rescue one of his stolen cars etc etc. one question i have relating to my newspaper readings was - is burglarized really a word? as in the house was burglarized in the early hours of the morning. (i thought it was an ali g type made up word). it’s not coming up with a wiggly line on my computer spellcheck, so perhaps it is, but hang on a minute, the word spellcheck itself just got a wiggle under it – isn’t that ironic. anyway i always thought it was burgled, which also hasn’t got a wiggly line, so perhaps both are allowed. any info appreciated – perhaps one is american, one is english? bert said he’d never heard the word burgled, but if he had to guess he would say it meant vomited, as in oh gosh i just burgled up my dinner.

i called england to speak to the pickles family (3 of the 4 anyway, mum, dad and helie). they were having fish and chips in robin hood’s bay, which is where helie works at the moment. dad told me he was reading a book called 3 cups of tea, and that he had finished reading the book i posted him about belize that bert had read about the scarlet macaws. we didn’t talk for long as it is expensive, but it was very nice to speak to them at all. the main reason for my call was to say can you believe it’s been a year since i left england? they had tried to call me the day before to say the same thing to me, but the phonecall hadn’t worked. anyway i suppose i can believe it’s been a year because that’s what happens, time passes, but it is also kind of an interesting fact that ought to be addressed in some way. here is a small summary of that year away:

south america with abi and laura – guatemala and belize with abi – mexico/guatemala/belize with just me mainly – belize with bert and the planes – montana - ---- who knows what next/aka the future

that’s about as short a summary as i can make it. i have seen lots of things, and done lots of things, and written lots of words about all of that, along the way. i have realized lots of things, some of which i have written about, others which just bubble away somewhere in my brain to be examined further later. i have missed lots of things, like trains and ribena. i have missed my family and friends a lot, which is a bittersweet kind of thing, like it’s nice to miss people that much because it confirms how important they are to you, but it isn’t nice to miss them because that makes you sad. anyway without becoming too sickly reminiscent, that is basically a synopsis of my year away and my current thoughts on the matter. i have had more and deeper or perhaps more amusing thoughts, but they come and go and those are the ones that are here at the moment so that’s what you get. i often wonder how different whatever i write here could be depending on the moment i choose to write it – essentially you would be getting the same information, but there are an infinite number of ways in which i could convey it depending on lots of variables like: what mood i’m in, whether i’ve just eaten and if so what i ate , where i physically am – ie at home, in an internet café, at someone else’s house etc, what the weather is like, what book i am reading at the moment, whether i cycled that day and how far etc etc. i think this is an important matter but am a little tired to discuss it further at the moment.

monday 27th july
due to circumstances beyond our control, we have been unable to still get to work from the airstrip in cayo, so bert came up with the cunning plan of selling aerial photos that we had taken in the past, to resorts. we set off to the islands armed with our photos on a cd to try and make our fortune, or at least to make enough money to pay next month’s rent and bills. on the way to belize city we picked up a blind man and his daughter, he was going to the dialysis clinic in belize city, he has to do this 3 times a week and it’s 320 usdollars per session, which is crazy. he told us he is working with some american doctors to get free dialysis in belize and it is about to happen, which is great. he told us that july is buttefly month in belize, there are definitely a lot of them around, most of them get splattered on the windscreen which is sad.

we dropped our car at the princess hotel in belize city (remember it abi?) and went off to get the boat to san pedro where we met up with john mcafee of mcafee virus software fame who let us stay in a condo he was renting on the island. it was a once swanky but now slightly creepy building, right on the beach, next to captain morgan’s resort. we didn’t have a key for it so each time we left we had to lock the front door from the inside then climb out of the balcony door and leave that unlocked, which made us feel a bit suspicious whenever we came home and had to effectively break in to our own house, or at least look like we were breaking in. the building was last occupied by a religious cult who hadn’t insured it and couldn’t mend the hurricane damage it suffered a few years ago. it had a deck which was all crumbly and a rusty old boat shipwrecked next to it, i dared bert to swim under the rusty old boat he said even he wouldn’t. we bought some food from a store nearby, and i duly noted that things are very expensive on islands. i’m not sure i’ve mentioned it before, but for the last 2 months i’ve been keeping a record of every single penny we spend, and any we earn (large discrepancy), which involves carrying my little notebook around everywhere to make notes. the problem arises if bert goes out to the shops as he never remembers what he has spent and the receipts seem to go missing too…

we spent the next 4 days visiting pretty much every hotel or resort or other place we might think was interested, in san pedro town and outside of town, trying to sell out photos. overall we made 2400 bzd there (1200usd), our biggest sale was to the spindrift hotel who bought 300usd worth of pics. we had 2 days of no sales which was very disheartening, but that’s the way life goes, and despite the no sales, it is all useful contact making as we would hope to operate the business out of the islands one day. we also got 100bzd of food at fido’s, one of the beach bar/restaurants. we visited a dive shop, where a fat english man with a stain on his shirt (supposedly the man in charge), looked at our photos and told us he takes photos like this all the time, and why would he be interested in our photos, we politely replied something to do with the high quality of ours etc, then bert told him about his float plane operation plan and how maybe it could help the man’s dive business in future, maybe bert could fly divers out to the bluehole, to which the man screamed i don’t think you have thought this through have you and then pointed out all the potential difficulties and problems with our so-called plan. all i could think was why and how are you working in the tourism industry when this is how you talk to people, and also what is that stain on your tshirt - a baked bean? some fajita juice? we never found out, and we trotted off giggling.

we hired a golf cart to get around, cars aren’t allowed on ambergris caye, which is where san pedro is. basically there is a south island and a north island, they are connected by a little bridge, you pay them 10bzd for a return trip over it in a golf cart. barry bowen, the richest man in belize, loaned the town of san pedro the money to build the bridge, so this money goes back to him. the south island is where san pedro town is and the north island is a long dusty bumpy road and resorts and private homes on the east which is the caribbean sea and the reef, and to the west there is a lagoon, where there are also some houses, but obviously it’s not as desirable. there are lots of swanky resorts, and also condo buildings, that seems to be where the money is these days. there are also lots of resorts south of san pedro town, but we made most of our money in the town itself as we had the best photos of that area. the pics were taken early in the morning when the sun was coming up, by marius the lithuanian photographer who is making the aerial photograph book with bert, called heavenly belize, out later this year. they were taken in december, so some places which were still building at that time weren’t so interested in them as their places had changed since then.

one night we had dinner with the owner’s of ramon’s village resort to the south, they bought some pictures from us the next day, and they bought our dinner for us which was lovely. the main owner is called richard headrick and he was going the next week to the sturges harley davidson biker festival, but got a call that the person driving his harleys to sturges had a crash and all the bikes were written off. he was still going to go anyway. he had once flown an ultralight, he taught himself how to fly it and basically just got it in the air then crash landed it back down and never wanted to go in one again. when we left he gave us a leaflet about himself which i read soon after, and basically his story was that he used to be all into drugs and drink and crazy things and had spent time in a honduran jail for stealing some mayan artefacts and nose-dived a plane down to earth in a plan to kill himself, but after and in fact during all that he found jesus and now he is all into that and all sorted out. he was really cool, he had long long grey hair in a pony tail and a hawaiin shirt on. he said grace before we ate, sometimes bert does this too – i like it because taking that little time to sit and think about how fortunate you are to have food on your plate really makes you realize you lucky you are, especially in these turbulent crazy and vaguely apocalyptical times. all my life i have just sat and wolfed my dinner down without ever thinking about it, then felt sick from eating too fast, and once the sickness wore off then start looking forward to my next meal. not quite that bad but you get the idea.

other san pedro related tales were:

there is a german lady who has a little gift shop in north ambergris, so each day we drove past her – she’d wave to you from the first door, then you wave back and carry on and she’d run to the other door to try and beckon you in that way as you carried on past. she was kind of dumpy, not very desert islandy really, one day we stopped and said hi and that we’d come to the shop another day, i spotted she had a little cat and asked what he was called. barry, she replied. hmm, very exotic, i thought, barry the caribbean cat.

john’s dog snickers who had been really ill last time we were there was now much better and really really fat, he wouldn’t stop eating. last time we saw him he was eating tons but skinny as a rake and bleeding from his nose (gross), so we figured he didn’t have much time left. it was nice to see him all fat. john has quite a lot of dogs, one of them is actually called fatty. john’s cousin darell and him (john, not fatty) have set up an island taxi ferry service, to rival the existing one there already. they launched while we were there, their prices are a bit less and apparently the other company is really badly run, so they are sure to do well. on day one one of the crew fell overboard, and on day two darell ‘borrowed’ some money from the till, but generally they are doing well so far apparently.

on july 31st it was bert’s birthday, we went for dinner with john and a friend of his, at captain morgan’s resort which is next door to where we were staying in the ex religious cult place. we wanted to know when was the hurricane last year that had made it rain loads and loads in belize, and we asked the waiter but he didn’t know and got kind of nervous and sweaty at being intimidated. john asked him another question which he also didn’t the answer to, i felt sorry for him. anyway, i got bert a birthday card with a picture of a jaguar on it which i think he liked.

we met up with barry bowen, and his wife dixie. they have a beach house in san pedro, and a little bulldog called dently, he looked like an accordion all crinkled up, like he needed ironing. i could never have a dog like that because i really would iron him and that would probably have me arrested, or at least him taken to hospital, but it would bug me so much that he was all crinkled like that. he puffed his fat little way up their spiral staircase. he was in fact very cute, but too crinkled. i suppose the opposite of a bulldog is a whippet. dixie bowen is really nice, as is barry, he bought some photos from us of his shrimp farm near placencia, and some of san pedro and his house. does that make us rich by proxy, that we now have some of the richest man in belize’s money in our pocket? barry is also a pilot so he and bert talked about flying a bit. he has a plane, a cessna 210, closed cockpit, he doesn’t like the idea of ultralights. bert told him i like cycling and that i’d cycled some of the hummingbird highway, he said why on earth did i do that, i said for fun mainly. i’m not sure if he was impressed, or confused.

all this talk of money makes me wonder something i’ve always wondered about this whole financial crisis – why is it that given that all countries seem to be experiencing financial hardship, they can’t just say ok let’s all agree we’ll just mint some new money and then give it out and people can start spending again and we’ll all be out of this slump we’re in? what is it that determines how much money a country has, what stops the banks just minting it anew when it runs a bit low? bert said it has to be backed up by solid gold, is that true? and also, if people are losing jobs and nobody is spending money and stock markets are crashing, then where is the money going – i imagine money is like energy and matter in that once it exists, it can’t just stop existing, it can merely change its form, or its owner. so is there some one or some institution that has all the money now, whereas before it was more shared out? i really don’t get it. and when did money start existing, and how?

after meeting the bowens and their dog, we went off to caye caulker on the ferry, to sell some pictures there. we traded for a really nice condo to stay in for 2 nights, right on the beach (as everything is on these thin little islands). the lady who owned it was called barbara, from canada, she was really nice and knew everybody on the island, and everything about everybody, and gave us tons of good advice of places to try to sell to etc. we made only 450 bzd whilst there, plus the 2 nights for free, and all in all it was a good time. caye caulker is much more relaxed than san pedro, no golf carts or cars, less people, only a few streets really, but enough there for a few days, like nice coffee, places to eat, and sea to swim in. we went to see barbara’s friend irene on the other end of the island, who was involved in marketing for the town council, but she no longer was, but recommended tony who was the head of the town council, so we found him – he was tired from partying the night before, and said he’d call us back later to get some others together to look at the photos as he didn’t have the power to make a money related decision – this is often what happens we found out – you waste your time showing them the photos and giving them the whole spiel about who we are and why the photos were taken, and how much they are and isn’t that a great price because if you were to hire someone to take them it’d be so much more, and isn’t the light great on them because it was so early in the morning, and as you can see there is a slight off shore breeze which means the water by the shore is so still you get the reflections of the buildings, and wouldn’t they look lovely on your website – oh you don’t have a website? – well i’m sure you’ll have one in the future. etc etc. and then they go yes they really are beautiful but i am not the one who can make the decision, i will have to show them to my boss/husband/committee of board members/dog. it’s tiring and we had to have frequent coffee stops which obviously eats into your profits, and then you get on a negative cycle that you’re not making any money, then you can’t possibly sell any more photos because nobody will buy things from grumpy people. you have to stay positive and smiley. i could never ever do something like this as a full time real job. bert is really good at this selling thing though and is much better than me at staying positive in times of hardship/vague stress. one man, i suppose it was tom, as the hotel was called tom’s hotel, when we told him the photos are a really cheap price, he said how much, we said 100bzd each, he said that’s not cheap, and closed/slammed the door in our faces. you look at his hotel and it’s practically a shanty town of falling down wooden ‘chalets’, in need of a few licks of paint to say the least, and you wonder why he doesn’t invest in some marketing and some general maintenance, and maybe he’d cheer up a bit as would his guests, if he ever has any. barbara said that is really the thing you notice with the resorts and hotels here, the ones run by belizeans will be quite shabby and they don’t take much care over upkeep and maintenance, until 5 years later they realize that their place is looking kind of grubby and in the meantime foreign investors have come in and built and maintained much nicer places just next door, along with websites and more advanced customer service. i’m not saying i agree with foreigners coming in and running things when it’s not their country, and obviously there is the matter of money, ie belizeans don’t tend to have much, but you just realize there are big differences in how they do things, and they often don’t seem to know how to capitalize on their potential – kind of the problem of the whole country, there is so much potential for amazing tourism here, but it just isn’t quite developed and realized yet. in a way it’s exciting because there is so much that could be achieved here, but it’s also frustrating. for example everything we’re trying to achieve with our float plane idea and how amazing it would be with all the flat water in belize to land on and fly people all over the place, and pick people up from the beach and fly them to the blue hole diving spot – it’s kind of crazy there are no float planes doing that yet. we did finally get approval for the float plane to operate, from national security (they ban it due to drug trafficking problems), so now we just need an investor to get a plane. anyone out there interested? we can forward you our business plan if so.

we found a beach bar on caye caulker selling lobster, potato, veggies, 3 rum punches and some cake, for 25 bzd each, what a deal, so we ate there for dinner one night. there were lots of english people around in caye caulker, i guess it’s prime travelling time for brits, summer hols and all that. we sat with a nice boy called stewart who is going to study natural sciences at cambridge this year, which is strange as there was a boy on our inca trail trip about this same time last year, also going to study natural sciences at cambridge that year, ie last year. perhaps they will meet and in the course of conversation realize that they both met me at one point. anyway, the other interesting thing about stewart was that he had willingly spent 5 days in belize city once with his brothers. i have never met anyone who has spent more than one night out of choice in belize city, ie the only reason you would stay there is because you were flying out of there early the next morning, ie what me and abi did last year when she left for the states the next day. belize city is pretty much horrible, apart from a small area of it which is ok, but even still you would never exactly plan to spend time there, like you would plan to spend time in london, or paris etc. you would just end up there and have to grin and bear it, or make the most of it. apparently lots of immigrant workers in the states are losing their jobs due to the economy situation, and returning to their countries and thus crime is again on the increase in places like belize city, guatemala city, and other central american countries. that crime then spreads from the main cities to other parts of those countries.

whilst on caye caulker, we got a pet hermit crab. he is currently sitting in the flowerpot eating some raw meat as i write this. we found him clinging onto a sea wall one morning we went swimming, bert brought him back to our condo and we kept him in the drawer. we put a little saucer of water in there for him to drink and a pile of sugar to nibble on - we had not real idea how to look after him yet. in the night we had to take the little plate of water away from him because he was making too much noise climbing in and out of it all night – he didn’t drink any, he just clunked it all the time. the first few days with us he was quite shy but he’s really come out of his shell now. (please pardon the pun but it’s really true). when we left the island we carried him in a pocket of my rucksack, we made sure there was some air in there but not too much of a gap that he could escape. we took him out on the ferry back to belize city and showed him the view from the window. the little boy sitting opposite us had a pet tortoise in a cardboard box and he let us hold him and video him. we wondered why he had the pet tortoise in a box, but he probably wondered why we had a pet crab in a rucksack, so we were equal at least in our wonderings.

there was thunder on caye caulker during the night like i have never heard it before, like the whole earth was cracking open it was so loud. i imagine it scared caulker the crab, if crabs are capable of feeling fear, as it scared the crab(p) out of me. it was also while on caye caulker that i heard that hermano pepinillo (ie brother james) had completed the london triathlon, knocking 30 minutes off my time of 2 years ago. i would expect him to beat me as he is a boy and i am a girl, but that is an impressive time – 2 hours 30 minutes. considering he has a partially metal leg, and has had operations on both knees, it is even more impressive - he should practically have been entered in the special needs triathlon with all those issues going on. obviously i will now have to start intense triathlon training in order to knock 30 minutes off his time, ha ha i don’t think so.

we got to belize city on monday afternoon (august 4th) and tried to sell some pictures there, but it was the same old story of the right person who made the money decisions wasn’t around. we went to one restaurant called celebrity restaurant. i can assure you that no celebrity has ever, nor ever will frequent the celebrity restaurant, it smelt funny and had peeling wallpaper and strange turkish mafia types running it, who eyed us suspiciously when we walked in, perhaps because we weren’t celebrities? not yet we might not be but just you wait celebrity restaurant. we stayed the night at a swanky apartment building owned by luke espat who is another rich belizean, who owns the belizean ports which are being developed for more cruise ship capacity. this was exciting as it had a washer and dryer and we used that to wash all our clothes. plus it had a balcony with a view over the sea, unfortunately you could see parts of belize city too from the balcony. we ordered chinese takeaway which was pretty horrible, a load of deep fried unknown objects, and some sticky rice. we tried to feed some to caulker the crab, who we were housing in the drawer in the bedroom by that point. i hope the cleaners didn’t think it was too strange that there were remnants of chinese takeaway and a small pool of water in the drawer. caulker wasn’t interested in the food, i don’t blame him, and crawled off to sit in the corner of the drawer. i have since learnt that hermit crabs, despite the name, actually like hanging out with other hermit crabs. i now feel pretty bad as we didn’t think to get a few more crabs for him to have as friends, and i hope he doesn’t get too lonely.

tuesday morning we got picked up from our condo by john mcafee and his friend tom and his friend helen. helen lives in cuenca in ecuador, which is a strange coincidence as i have been thinking of going there – it is an andean town in the south of ecuador, meant to be beautiful and a nice place to teach english. this is what helen does there and she gave me info on the school she teaches at, which i am contemplating applying to at some unspecified time in the future, which is when most of my plans take place. i will let this thought bubble away with other ones such as cycling to patagonia… if only money wasn’t an issue there are so many things i would do – good things i mean, not indulgent things like buying yachts or ferraris. anyway we went with john, tom and helen to see some property john has in the north of belize on a river, where he plans to build a tree house resort. we drove to orange walk where we took a boat with eric the boat driver, up the river to the property. there are some workers living there who are clearing it, you can’t get power there so they are doing this all by hand with machetes and by burning bits of it. it was hot and buggy but it will be a cool place when completed. right on the river, so perhaps bert could fly his float plane there too.

bert has 4 nephews called tracy, trevor, travis and troy. this in itself is very amusing, but there is more to it than just that. he used to take troy hang gliding, and he noticed that troy would sing along to the radio in the car on the way, and that troy was a very good singer. bert took troy to a karaoke bar one night to capitalize on his talent, but troy was shy and needed 3 tequilas before he got up to sing. 4 months later, troy was running the karaoke bar and had won the local and national karaoke competitions. these days troy works performing in las vegas and has done lots of cds and is famous in the american country music world. whilst we were driving along we looked through tom’s cd collection, which was very impressive and included classics like pink floyd, dire straits, the lovin spoonful (remember this is belize and music knowledge is not exactly abundant so this was impressive stuff). along with these classics what should we find but a cd of the wonder nephew troy combs himself! we put it on. it is country rock, kind of line dancing stuff. john didn’t like it so we only got to listen to a few songs, but basically it was kind of funny to find it there in tom’s car in the jungle in belize and bert is his uncle.

we stayed that night at a resort called marrumba, it was over the top jungly / animal skin décor, kind of like if you had to stay there too many nights you’d get kitsched out and be sick on the place. for example our room was concrete walls inside, with swirly plaster bits, painted bright silver, and with space age kind of lamps all bendy and different colours, and tiger skin pattern cushions, and palm leaves everywhere with red flowers. anyway for one night it was ok and we weren’t sick on it, but we did drink a few too many rum punches and john mcafee danced on the table without his shirt on. he was sober as he doesn’t drink. there was almost a full moon that night, so perhaps that was the cause of our strange antics. it was fun anyway.

wednesday 5th august, we got a lift back to belize city with john and tom and helen, picked up our car, had some lunch and drove back to cayo. all in all it had been a successful trip selling pictures, we made enough to pay our rent and bought a good second hand laptop so can sell our computer now too, or trade it in for a month’s rent. we had lots of contacts that we followed up on too who may want to buy photos from us, so we figured out how to email them with watermarks so they could look at them but not use them until they pay for them. it was kind of nice to be back in cayo, though it would be cool to live out on caye caulker, mainly as there would be more work there, this thought has been stored up for future pondering too.

august 6th – august 15th: a summary, not too many interesting things happened as it was mainly a decision making time about whether to leave for the states or not

our friend mick from chaa creek was back from his trip to england, so we went to see him which was nice. they are closing chaa creek for 2 months due to not enough guests, i’m sure other resorts will have to resort to this too, which is a shame, but hey times are hard and if it will help in the long run then it makes lots of sense.

i received a parcel from abi and laura which was very exciting as it contained some weighing scales which i used to weigh out the ingredients for my pancakes which we eat at the weekends, instead of using the measuring jug which isn’t very exact. also she sent the book cloud spotter’s guide which is the official book from the cloud appreciation society. bert wants to read it first as he loves clouds too, plus i am reading a book at the moment called who killed palomino molero, by a peruvian writer called mario vargas llosa. the cloud book would have been a good one to read on the plane as we flew over some really cool cloud formations on the sunday. we flew through one coming in to land at missoula but it wasn’t too bumpy so i didn’t have to freak out this time. also in the parcel was a letter from abi and laura, in which laura said that her dad and her uncle pete and their friend are avid readers of my blog! they discuss it at their weekly game of golf apparently, and spent lots of time pondering the 'important' issues i raise. ha ha. well i am very flattered, thank you for that mr cook and pete and the friend. you should meet up with my parents for a game of golf as they play golf all the time, imagine the blog discussions you could have then.

i also received a parcel from mum with some newspaper articles in it, and some children’s books in case i did some more work at cornerstone with the kids. i like getting newspaper articles, there was one about words and language which was very interesting, right up my street, so i’ve asked mum to collect all the future ones as it is a column. there was a whole supplement about michael jackson, which bert read cover to cover, i couldn’t get him to do anything useful until he’d finished reading the whole thing which became vaguely annoying.

i got an email from dad about his recent bike ride with his chums (that is dad language for friends) – he won a bag of jelly babies for being the best hill climber, i will call him alberto contador from now on. sounds like he had quite a lot of falls and near misses, he said he hadn’t got the pedal/brake combination quite figured out. he also snapped the chain, obviously those contador hill climbing muscles were too much for the bike to cope with. he used my focus bike which is the one i cycled land's end to john o'groats on, and he was very impressed with it, rightly so it is a great bike. it is all carbon fibre, and i got it from a really good bike website called wiggle.co.uk, for a really good price. being in montana is making me miss my bike so much, it is perfect for cycling here, lots of bike paths, and big roads, and up hills and down hills, and perfect temperature, not too hot not too cold. i asked in a bike shop about a job, they hire in march which is a long way off. they had some cool bikes there, like orbea and kona - i bought a bike magazine special all about the tour de france (would have been good to get it before the event, but belize doesn't stock things like that), so have been busy reading about bikes and looking at pictures of bikes.

we made a little home for hermit the crab in one of our flower pots, we put some sand in it which we picked up from a local bar whose floor is made of sand – i asked if i could borrow some of it and that it was for my pet crab, and he said no problem and put some in a little bag. we got some scraps of meat from a butcher, we told them it was for our pet crab and he laughed at us. crabbie figured out how to escape from the flower pot by climbing along the leaf that is closest to the ground, and then dropping off it, which is around a foot high so i hope he didn’t hurt himself. he appeared hours later in the kitchen. we lost him overnight once, but it wasn’t much to panic about as there as were lots of bugs for him to eat in the house.

i watched a programme about luis tiant, a famous cuban baseball player, he was the one that throws the ball - is that called the pitcher i'm not sure. there was a time when a lot of u.s baseball teams were made up of cubans, which is quite strange given their relationship, and the cubans were really amazing baseball players. this guy luis tiant was like the most amazing pitcher that ever lived. it was a documentary following his visit back to cuba all these years later, he was now around 60 and hadn't been back to cuba since leaving it 46 years ago, so all his old family members practically died when he turned up to see them. it was really sweet, i would like to visit cuba. the spanish they speak there is very hard to understand though, they seem to pronounce only half the words. i watched a programme about space and the universe, it said that we are made of 7 and then 20 zeros of atoms in our body. wow. and it talked about multiverses, ie perhaps our universe which is huge, is just one part of a whole multiverse, ie a whole load of universes, imagine how huge that is then.

we sold the truck and went to belmopan to arrange for the money from the sale to be transferred from our belize bank account to my account in england. this is because you can’t use your belizean bank card anywhere except belize, which is really not handy. to transfer money internationally in belize, here is what you have to do: go to belmopan to get a permit to transfer the money, which involves going to the transport department to get them to transfer the truck licence to the new owner, which was the car dealership in spanish lookout, then go to the income tax department to get a letter which says that you don’t owe any income tax and that you wish to transfer xx amount of money. then you take these things to the ministry of finance, and they write up the permit to transfer the money which you take to your bank. the bank then has to request the money you need to transfer, by calling a bank in belize city, the man they need to speak to is of course on lunch when you get them to do this. when we got the income tax letter the amount was in us dollars, which when we took it to the finance ministry obviously made no sense when i said it was going to england. so we drove back to the income tax place and got a new letter in uk pounds. the lady that typed the letter though was not exactly sharp, and just changed it to uk dollars. this currency doesn’t exist, but the finance ministry man accepted it anyway. this whole process is ridiculously stressy when you only have one more day to do everything else that needs doing before leaving the country. it took basically most of the day. it is to prevent drug money being transferred, as you have to explain why you have the money and what it is from etc, so in fact it is a good thing, but that doesn’t stop it from being annoying. i got cross examined in the income tax office, they said where is the business based, i said on the chaa creek road, they said there isn’t a runway there, i said actually there is, we built one. we went to have a tequila in cayo when we got back which was nice and made the stressyness and nonsense of the whole procedure become somewhat forgotten. we got the bus back to our house which really isn’t that much hassle, and i’m sure we could survive without a car and just with buses if we have to if we go back to belize one day – it’s much cheaper and we only live around 10 minutes from town.

anyway, that’s pretty much all there is to say about belize for now. we’re not sure what the future holds for us there, if we can find an investor for the business it would make sense to return and do that as we have done so much with it so far. the problem is that with the economy as it is at the moment, and tourism dropping worldwide, then it maybe isn’t the best time to try to be starting something like this. we will see what happens. for now it is so nice to be here in montana – we have done 3 hikes so far, seen mountain goats, stayed in a cabin on the lake, had a close encounter with some raccoons, and i rode on a harley motorbike. more to come on all these things and other things next time. this afternoon we are babysitting madi while jessica goes to work, madi is super cute and has tons of disney dvds so maybe we will watch some of these. she likes having books read to her, and she does cute little twirly dances.

over and out for now and god bless america and all its coffee shops, i am totally addicted to coffee, if i don't have it i get a big headache. better than being addicted to drinking or smoking is how i justify it. hope all is well with everyone thanks for reading sorry it's such a long blog but you did get a picture this time too which tells a thousand words remember. xx