This pier is at the end of the Perla Escondita Condos. With tomorrows departure looming, I find my Yo Yo, a bag of frozen shrimp, hooks and swivels and weights and try my hands at some hand fishing in Belize.
It takes a minute to figure out how to cast with this rig. You unravel your line in little loops on the pier deck, gently pick up the weights in your right hand while holding the Yo Yo in your left. Then, you cast the weights as far as you can and move the Yo Yo in the direction of your cast so the line doesn’t snap and whip the hook and bait off. that are connected to the weights.The heavy sinkers take the bait and hooks to the bottom where the big ones are.
I am not having luck today but one of the ladies picked up by a tour boat, on this pier, snaps my picture for me so I can show people I was really here.
Posts are like dipping a spoon into the sea and scooping up teardrops of wiggling, squiggling, quivering life out of a very big bowl.
When and where you decide to dip your spoon is up too you, but you are tucking memories away safely like squirrels saving their nuts.
Later, with a post and a few pictures, I can revisit this moment and relish it like the pearl that it is.
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.
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.
The resort and casino are on the north side of Ambergris Caye and you get there in a taxi by the new road, or a water taxi with Coastal Express, or catch one of the resort’s own shuttles that bring guests to and from their accommodations.
This time of year the resort is not bustling. Saturday’s guests are off doing tours or sleeping from too much sun, too much party, too much jet lag, too much culture shock.
Captain Morgan was, by most accounts, successful. He was a privateer rather than a pirate. He was authorized by the Queen to steal Spanish gold, sink Spanish ships, kill Spanish seaman and citizens. Pirates steal from everyone, have no allegiances, and are enemies of the state.
Captain Morgan was a clever fighting man and retired in Jamaica where he amassed land, riches, and died in his own bed. There is a rum named after him and on the walls of this resorts guest houses are wood planks with names of fellow privateers that prowled the Caribbean.
Captain Morgan’s spirit is still lurking in these islands and who knows when he will swoop in to the casino, draw his broadsword, load guest valuables into his large brimmed hat and finish a bottle of spiced rum before disappearing into the seas on a full moon night with the prettiest girl under his arm.
The biggest news is the casino doesn’t open till six in the evening.
If he had it to do over, Captain Morgan would run a casino instead of pirating
With gambling you don’t kill your customers.
In San Pedro Town this afternoon, after school, a couple of boys come up with their own game. Tarzan’s jungle can be any place on the planet as long as there is a little boy who puts two and two together.
One of the boys grabs one end of a dangling palm branch, holds on, then swings himself out over the beach and water and back to dry land. The branch might break and send him crashing but it is a risk worth taking.
While he swings, the other boy waits his turn.
A couple of girls, outside the picture, shake their heads and call the boy’s crazy.
And, we are.
Two popular pastimes in San Pedro Town are Karaoke and Drinking.
Since bars open early and close late, there is always a lot of drinking going on. Likewise, when karaoke starts and participants pick up a microphone, the singing, good, bad, and ugly, picks up like an afternoon squall.
There is an undercurrent here where what you think you hear is not always what you hear, what you see is not always as you see it, what you assume is often erroneous, what you plan goes astray. Poker cards in the hole are held closely and opportunities to leap without looking are always at hand. There are Spanish gold doubloons in a shipwreck out on the reef and all it takes to get them is a hundred thousand of your money.
Wade, owner of Road Kill Bar, is painting this morning and his orange Karaoke sign advertises fun.
Karaoke is a sign of our times where audience participation is the real star of the show.
Make Believe is definitely more fun than not.
On Tuesday nights, at 6:30 pm, featured entertainment at Crazy Canuck’s is crab races. The races are a fundraiser for local schools and charitable groups and give locals and visitors another reason to drink, dance, socialize, relax.
Number 57 is halfway across the obstacle course on a prison break before Kevin, our master of ceremonies, wearing a red crab hat and holding a microphone, catches him and carefully slips him back under an upside down champagne bucket in the center of the ring.
The first race begins late, after announcements, when Kevin lifts the upside down champagne bucket again and the crabs move, from being under the bucket, towards a rope perimeter that forms a circle around them on a big plywood game board resting on the sand.
The crowd is excited and some gamblers rush the platform to support their pick.
It is illegal to touch or step on the board but you can yell, flash lights, move hands and arms up and down to influence the race outcome. The winning crab is the one who crosses the rope at any point in the rope circle around them.
At the end of this first race, Daryl provides live music while losers come up with a different strategy for the next race and try to handicap the crabs that will be running next.
It is all in good fun and none of the crabs, tonight, end up on anyone’s plate.
Number 57, my pick for the first race, never crosses the rope line, and, as far as I’m concerned, can go into tomorrow’s soup.
If I were really lucky, Stephanie Kennedy, the ” Belizian Temptress ” would come through the door and try her temptation on me.
My defenses have been pretty weak the last few days.
Every Anthony has his Cleopatra.
nnnnnn.
The ocean is a grocery store.
At the end of piers, the tips of jutting land, on bridges or banks, in small boats and large, men shop for dinner.
Early today three men are casting from the end of a pier at sunrise. They have been up all night and one lifts the top off a five gallon paint bucket and shows me his catch – six red snapper.
” You take them to a restaurant, ” he says, ” and they will cook them up for you. “.
They cast their lines out thirty feet and weights carry the baited hooks to the bottom. When the line pulls taut they wait. Sometimes you have a bucket of fish in half an hour; other times it takes all night and a pack of cigarettes to fill your cart.
” Captain Shark’s is the place to get a pole, ” the talkative one tells me.
This morning I find bait and tackle at Captain Shark’s across from Maya Air next to the Hyperbaric Chamber. The store has fishing gear but also boating and diving items. It costs fifty Belizian to walk out with twenty pound test line, extra weights and hooks, a bag of frozen sardines for bait, and a Yo-Yo, a gadget used to hand cast and retrieve your line without tangles.
It will be a sad day when they ask for a license to fish from the pier.
It is a crime to lock the grocery when you have hungry men.
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