The papusa is an El Salvadorean snack.
It is a grilled soft tortilla, much like a pancake, stuffed with chicken, pork, cheese, beef, and condiments. They are $1.25 U.S. at this El Salvadorean restaurant in downtown San Pedro Town.
Night in San Pedro Town has a different look than day. There are bright lights, new characters, corners look less defined, worn facades are obliterated by dark.
If you are on vacation, and want to indulge, you go to Elvie’s Kitchen for fantastic local food. If you want to budget, you check out little stands, small family restaurants, and street carts.
El Savador has established a foothold here, along with Guatamalan’s selling woven products on the beach. Nicaraguan’s work with concrete and construction. European’s do banking. Belize natives fish, work for the government, or live off tourism. Everyplace you go in the world, except Japan and China, people’s from different countries establish beach heads in your community and thrive.
Tonight is cool and pleasant, a welcome respite from the day’s sun.
Parked out front of the restaurant, golf carts wait for customer’s getaways, driving home under a moonlit night sky, stopping for all the red lights as tides roll in.
Seeing night in a new place, as well as day, gives us travelers the full picture of the places we find ourselves.
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As quick as Thanksgiving goes, Christmas is nipping at its heels.
The girls at Crazy Canuck’s, on a Friday afternoon, have opened cardboard boxes and are decorating.
Stockings hang over the liquor shelves, tinsel is hung around the bar’s ceiling, an upside down Christmas tree with blue lights gives us an upside down perspective, peppermint sticks are just out of arm’s reach. On Thanksgiving we give thanks, but on Christmas we pay homage, say our prayers, and put ourselves in our proper place.
I am getting the Christmas spirit.
When I see Rudolph the red nosed reindeer, he will be in speedos, have sunglasses, and have a beach girl on each arm.
Why Rudolph’s nose is red is another bar story.
When I travel light I look for a laundry first thing.
Down the street, from Chez Caribe, is my dirty clothes salvation.
Kenny owns and operates the J and J Laundry and works long hours- six days a week. You take your clothes, drop them off ,and Kenny, or one of his staff, wash, dry, put them in a plastic bag, and have them ready when you return to pick them up later in your vacation day. As soon as one machine empties, it is filled with more clothes to be cleaned, not quickly, but eventually. Island time is slower than watch time.
Kenny has been up and running for a year and bought the business from a previous owner who was tired of doing dirty socks. Along with the laundry business came Karaoke equipment. This means Kenny takes care of your dirty clothes and the island’s dirty singing.
This morning I pick up my clean clothes and go home feeling better about the world.
Belize is almost behind me and Ecuador is peeking its head around the bend in time’s river, moving its right forefinger and inviting me to visit and sit a spell.
My stay here has been wonderful. I am well suited for island life where there is no zoning and a million dollar beachfront home shares the same vista with a drunk fisherman sleeping under a rowboat.
Doing laundry is hardly newsworthy, but skip it and things start to smell bad.
There is always plenty to write about when you drop your standards and accept life as it comes to you.
Thanksgiving dinner falls into my lap.
In the middle of a Walkaholics ramble, our group is invited by the owner of the Sandbar to a free annual Thanksgiving dinner at her bar and grill. It is something she likes cooking for and an appreciation to loyal customers.
This is a full blown extravaganza with turkey, ham, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, dressing, salad. bread and desserts. The company is cordial and the mood is celebratory.
Last year my Thanksgiving was celebrated in Uruguay with a slice of pizza and a beer. It is hard at this moment to know where Thanksgiving will find me next year.
This week turkey’s have been in hiding.
Surviving dinner when you are the main course is a gift from God.
Alcoholics can’t walk by a bar without going in. Ministers can’t hear church bells without reaching for their Sermon. Firemen change clothes at the smell of smoke. Construction workers can’t avoid a construction zone.
This has been a year of house rehabilitation so it was impossible for me not to grab a paint brush and lend a hand.
The Legends Bar and Grill renovation, on the north side, is in progress. Opening day is December 1, 2015. Painting is the same down here as up north. You keep your eye on the edge, cut a straight line, don’t let paint drip, keep the brush moving, clean up if you make a mess.
The big push today is to prime wood trim upstairs in the bar, install galvanized metal sheets on the kitchen ceiling, and move a huge defunct cooler out of the kitchen, through two doorways, and onto the front porch where it will be picked up later and used in some way by the group of seven men who move it out.
When the group of men arrive there is much measuring, grunting, re- positioning, and evaluating. A few times the task looks impossible but if someone got it into the bar it can be taken out.
Jack’s sign is posted in the kitchen, beside a good cooler, and reminds him on a hot day, with both fans blowing and orders buzzing around his head like angry mosquitoes, that a craftsman is never far from his philosophy.
The last rainbow gracing these postings was in San Jose, Costa Rica near the Hotel Aranjuez.
This masterpiece is between Belize City and Ambergris Caye on the boat ride back from a tour of Lamanai, Mayan ruins in Orange Walk, Belize.
Mother Nature sends us a parting bouquet of flowers, a little good by kiss, a temporary light show, a reminder of who is behind all that we have been observing.
It is the end of another day on Planet Earth , November 23, 2015.
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.
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