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Published: January 17th 2013
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As it turns out, blogging is hard to do when you're travelling. It's one thing to plan travel, get meals, keep the clothes (relatively) clean and not kill your travel buddy in the meantime, but it's another to get it down on paper so others can enjoy the experience as well.
Right now I'm in Honduras, in one of two microbreweries. My last blog post was basically from the other side of the Peninsula, in Caye Caulker. There are many steps in between, and this blog will fill you in on one of them.
After leaving Caye Caulker, Eya and I took a water taxi to Belize City and found a bus to our next destination, an organic farm startup run by a Soviet-Bloc couple, expatriats from Kazakstan and Russia, named Andrew and Tanya respectively. They have an adorable daughter named Annetta who is constantly toddling about the property and laughing, and a ten-year-old guest named Greg (I think!) who was staying with them for a few days. They are in Boston Village, Belize, for those of you tracking our progress. During this time, we helped paint one of their rooms. Allow me to explain.
Andrew and Tanya
are starting a farm. They have a plot of cleared land, which is a feat in the jungle, and they have a stilt-built wooden house with cinderblock walls on the bottom floor, which they installed themselves. The loft (second storey) was built by a construction company to get them started. This house was my introduction to on-showerhead heating systems. Instead of a hot water tank, as we see in the states, water is piped into the showerhead cold from the water system or well, then is warmed by a heating element within the showerhead itself before exiting the showerhead to be enjoyed by the bather. It's fun finding the 'sweet spot' of water flow where it's not so fast as to be too cold, and not too slow as to be too hot; temperature is tied to water pressure here since it determines how long the water stays near the heating element.
The property has a small garden and some cultivateable papaya trees (from stock bred to produce good fruit, as opposed to wild papaya which is less palateable) but as they're still in the construction stages of their home, the farming operation has not begun in earnest. They
are finishing the cinderblock first floor of their home, and are painting a new bedroom. So we helped! It's going to be a charming room when finished, and I think their choice of texture and color fits in perfectly with their surroundings, a stucco/red paint with stone borders and textured concrete walls.
We did get a pretty funny story out of the stay. On the only full day we spent on the farm, Andrew (who speaks almost no English) and I went grocery shopping. Their mode of transportation to civilization is via motorbike, and I got to ride backseat along a very narrow, very winding, very bumpy and unfinished road with no helmet. Not biggy, road rash leaves good scars, right? Anyway, being my comfortable American self, I wrap my arms around my driver and we get to the store and do our business. Across the street from the store is a police checkpoint, complete with a uniformed police officer and a soldier in camoflauge, with spotlights for use at night and thick ropes along the road both as speedbumps and sandwiching the electrical cables for the lights, to protect them from tires. Andrew and I load up our
groceries, he has a smoke, and we hop back onto the bike to get back to the farm, only to be immediately pulled over at the roadblock.
The guy in the police uniform makes a comment about the text on my shirt, which I took to be neither insulting nor overly friendly, and I hang back by the bike while Andrew talks to the soldier, who had waved us over. He starts going through the usual questions and paperwork, while the cop makes a motion over his head that to me indicated the problem was my lack of a helmet. Ok, I figure most of the cars don't have seatbelts so this can't be too big of a deal. Then a local man walks over and explains to me, with the words "no homo" that I need to grip the seat of the bike while riding passenger, not the driver. I grin, thinking he's half joking and that I might as well just go along with it.
Turns out that homosexuality is illegal in Belize, and "hugging" your driver for safety is an indicator of 'the gay.' I didn't understand until Tanya explained Andrew's side of the story
back at the house, since Andrew's English is sparse. We all had a nice laugh over it. Fun little culteral fact, act like you're afraid of the same gender when in Belize.
We stayed two nights and had a campfire on the second night, complete with a miniature guitar concert by yours truly and accompanied by various feathered life and a set of spider monkeys chattering away in the dark. If you have never seen the stars in an area 50 miles away from the nearest city, you owe it to yourself. You imagine you can see the entire galaxy spread out before you. Stars from a city are pretty but unimpressive, stars from the wilderness make you question your own existence.
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Isabel
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Glad to hear from you! Love your motorbike tale.....