What I should have done was read about the ruins before I got here.
Lamanai, which means submerged crocodile, is a Mayan city in the Orange District of Belize. It dates to the sixteenth century B.C. and was occupied into the seventeen hundreds A.D. It was a city of forty thousand and combined farming and fishing and large trade networks for success.
The three main structures, excavated in the 1970’s by David Pendergast, are the Jaguar temple, the Mask, the High Temple. The Mask Temple is the tombs of successive rulers who built their burial place atop that of their predecessor. The High Temple is in a natural amphitheater and was the site of public spectacles, religious ceremonies, and political grandstanding.
Standing in this hot humid jungle looking at tourists climbing to the top of huge stone structures, I weigh the manpower and skills needed to build them and the spiritual and political reasons for completing them.
Longevity speaks of doing things right for a long time in the time and place you find yourself.
What would they have thought of our world if they could have imagined it?
Would they choose, if they had the choice, our world over theirs?
We don’t see any other monkeys on this trip.
More might be here, but this is the only one who is tame enough and smart enough to meet the boat, take food from us tourists, and entertain for his bread and butter. He is a spider monkey and almost as cute as the little girl who feeds him lunch from the bow of our boat.
Monkeys are always a big draw.
Some say they are our cousins. Some like to watch them climb. Monkey’s are inquisitive, territorial and social. There is no one that doesn’t watch this monkey business.
Shariah is happy.
She gets to feed the monkey and be on stage at the same time.
The final stretch to Lamanai is a fifteen mile ride up the Old River.
The river reminds me of a Mazatlan boat ride and a ride down the Tortuga river in Panama. I am a city guy but get to the country as much as I can. Many city denizens know nature only when it bites them.
We are enroute to an ancient Mayan city built where the land rises higher and trees stand taller. There were many different tribes living under the Mayan umbrella. Their pyramids were built before Christ and these Lamanai ruins, saved from the jungle by British archeologists, give us glimpses of an ancient vanished past.
Without explorers and discoverers, who venture to places everyone else finds not worth the effort, our lives would be dry.
Without the world’s historians and storytellers, we would think we were the first to be here and there was nothing more here to learn.
We would be intolerable.
For most of our school days we rode big lumbering yellow school buses to big lumbering schoolhouses.
We walked to a designated bus stop and waited, in all weather, for a driver to swing open narrow doors, and then saw faces of other kids who were just as thrilled as we were to go to school, take notes, write papers, give oral book reports, and deal with cretins.
This tour to Lamanai, I get to visit school days again.
Our bus isn’t yellow but it is the same Bluebird series that we rode in with Puritan seats, windows that move up and down on metal tracks, an emergency exit in the back that meant sure death if you were caught opening it by a bus driver who meant business and had power to make you walk to school instead of ride. This bus has religious modifications but the driver is attentive and we drive north from Belize City on a roadway that is part of the Pan American Highway.
On this bus ride I don’t have Rasta music or Reggae or salsa or even Garifuna drums as traveling music. There is no radio. Wind coming through open windows cools us on a sunny morning.
Field trips were always the funnest part of school, but we didn’t have many.
School was never as fun as it should have been and riding that bus was like a prisoner going to the electric chair.
There are as many tour companies in San Pedro Town as there are bars, restaurants, or lodgings.
The day tour from San Pedro Town to the Mayan ruins at Lamanai on the Belize mainland, including drinks, transport , food, a guide and park fee is $150.00 U.S . We are gone an entire day, from 7 in the morning till six in the evening and see Belize by boat, foot and bus.
Our trip starts as a tour boat picks up guests at the end of piers where they are staying. There are twenty of us,this trip, young and old. The boat captain is Erin and our guide is Gustavo.
On the way to the mainland we get educated about mangroves, weather, ecosystems, navigating sand bars, pirates, and answers to any questions we ask.
As often is the case, guests are not asking questions but Gustavo tells us history and habits of those who live here. He makes himself available but not obnoxious. A good guide opens the book and points you to good parts, explains, but doesn’t read the words to you.
Even though this is a Sea-Rious tour we all go home, at the end of the day, smarter than we started and with smiles on our faces.
Evenings, if you get bored, you can play pool at the Average Joe Bar down the street from Chez Carib, next to the Caribbean Fuels gas station in San Pedro Town, Ambergris Caye, Belize.
Pool is a good game to know how to play, and, like riding a bicycle, you get rusty in your skills but you don’t forget how. In a new place it is a way to find friends, meet and make new friends, or keep the friends who already know how to put up with you.
This evening the game is eight ball and, since there are six people who want to play, we partner up. Four of us play and then the winning pair of each game keeps the table and plays the pair that sat out.
Jack and Kristi and Greg and Mark were here when I dropped in. Walter and I make a team this particular game though I’ve never met him before.
I start well but lose ground.
This night there are good shots, bad shots, some erudite comments, and chatter.
Beer and good shots do not have a good relationship, but beer lets you think you are better than your shots prove you are.
A palapa has a thatched roof that lets rain run off it like water runs off a duck’s back.
The shape and structure of these traditional island buildings is functional, not complicated to build, and uses local materials. In a big wind the whole thing creaks and moves because wood and thatch are flexible. High ceilings catch cool breezes and hold them. You can see this well known San Pedro Town palapa at the end of its own pier from land, water, or sky and it is always a crowd favorite.
On Sunday afternoon, on a road trip north driving our borrowed golf cart, Rabbit and I visit the Palapa Bar and Grill for a look even though we have beer in our cooler for emergencies.
The Grill has been here as long as most can remember but it has been recently sold and the old owner is opening a smaller place in town. The new owner has already been labeled “aggressive.”. Apparently the right price was paid, and it must have been good, because this place is packed this balmy Sunday afternoon.
The Palapa Bar and Grill incentives are cool breezes, no mosquitoes, inner tubes to float on, good food and plenty of drinks. The place looks and feels like a great location for a beer commercial for a postseason NFL football game.
When you are in San Pedro Town longer than a few days, you grow tantalized by gossip, rumor and speculation. It is the quantity and quality of gossip that keeps glasses filled, entertainment flowing, and customers sitting on their bar stools.
The ladies in inner tubes are combining the best of drinking, tanning, socializing, and gossiping.
Civilization is out there somewhere.
We all wave as it sails past.
Golf carts are in, in San Pedro Town.
Some of the carts are old; others are new. New ones cost from nine to fifteen thousand U.S. dollars depending on what they have under their seat, and, while the carts aren’t complicated mechanically, mechanic shops around town are busy. Unpaved roads and cobblestone streets play hell with front ends and suspensions.
Rabbit’s cart was loaned to him by a female friend going back to the states for a month. On the way to the airport it broke down and they had to get a taxi and she missed her flight. Her mechanic towed it to his shop and when Rabbit picks it up it still doesn’t seem right. When you push the gas pedal the cart hesitates before engaging in gear.
” It’s a solenoid under the gas pedal, ” Rabbit says, and, not being a mechanic, I can’t say that isn’t the problem .
When you ride in a golf cart here, you have arrived. Knowing they are an expense, and continual problems, you are still glad to have one.
When you got wheels, women find more to recommend you
Bicycles beat walking and golf carts trump bicycles.
If this baby breaks down again, you can bet his woman friend is going to pay the bill and we are going to drink all the beer.
Ambergris Caye is not wide but it is long. From one end to the other, head to toes, is over twenty eight miles.
San Pedro Town is in the middle of the island and holds most of the business and population. The island’s one improved road, to the south and north,is functional. Once off the pavement though, small tributary roads are potholed, dirt, muddy in wet weather, often difficult to navigate.
As you walk south or north,homes become more private, isolated, and there is more open landscape between them. There are resorts all along the main road and some accommodations have ” Beware of Dogs ” signs on their front gates, security cameras and barbed wire, swimming pools, tall fences you can’r pull down or climb over. These expensive Caribbean bungalows are nestled next to bare wood shacks where a single electric pole runs twentieth century technology to seventeenth century shacks to keep a refrigerator and lights running.
Along the bike ride. I hit a place called ” Hotel California ” that makes me hum the Eagle’s top hit. There are plenty of escapees from cuckoo California in Belize. Californians like to run but they always bring their state, and it’s ideas, with them.
A sign on the Hotel California’s fence says, ” Trespassers will be shot first, and then shot again if they survive. ”
At the end of this bike ride is a knot of construction men digging a hole with shovels and a backhoe to install PVC pipe to hold electric wires that will supply electric to a future gated community for escapees from America and Europe.
In paradise, someone still has to mop floors, fix broken pipes, babysit, build, take care of the needs of people with money from abroad.
On the ride back to Chez Caribe on my borrowed bike, I visit the Marcos Gonzalez archeological site, going back thousands of years. The world has been full of people for a long time and people still don’t clean up after themselves, leaving clues behind about what they were up too. Going from this site to Hotel California is an incomprehensible leap in time and technology, lifestyle and mindset.
I hide my bike in the bushes because I don’t want it to disappear.
A bicycle in Belize is a poor man’s Cadillac and plenty of poor people would borrow this one for free if they had an opportunity.
Taking precautions might be tedious, but I don’t want to walk home and have to explain a bad outcome..
I doubt the residents of Marcos Gonzalez were any more honest than those in San Pedro town today.
According to Rabbit, retired bartender, Ramon’s Village is one of the better values in San Pedro Town. If you are coming to Ambergris Caye for a week and want to have convenience, service, good food, security, access to the water, a good home base for your explorations, nice accommodations, for a good price, Ramon’s is the place for you.
The resort burnt down several years ago and was rebuilt with work going twenty four seven. Ramon didn’t want to re- open but did anyway. His resort has an international flavor, and, unlike many lodgings on the island, is maintained by a full staff of worker bees.
Ramon’s is maybe not the best way to get to know the island, close up and personal, but lots of people visit San Pedro Town with no desire to move here and want the island to be accompaniment to their vacation instead of the melody.
Even Ramon himself, greeting breakfast diners, asks me this morning how I am doing?
I compliment his hotel and listen attentively..
Maintaining and managing a profitable business anywhere is worthy of respect.
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