The Yucatan Peninsula and A week in Belize

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There is nearly a month of history to relate so I intend to paint with broad brush strokes.
We left off in Palenque, Chiapas. I found a trailer park with palapas for sleeping in hammocks and set up there. There were fire ants and they infiltrated my backpack looking for my food, and every time i needed something from my pack my hands got eaten. it was agonizing. The trailer park was very hippy, lots of yoga and a permanent odor of marijuana. The next morning I went to the ruins, just a short walk up the road. At the gate a bunch of kids were hawking jungle tours, explaining the abundance of unexcavated ruins. I declined the tour but made mental notes of the map they were showing me. When I got in I walked down a jungle path without signs and into the shadows between the trees. Over the course of a couple hours I found a handful of rubble mounds, some more intact than others, a few tombs, and a few crumbling walls. I also nearly got hopelessly lost. I returned to the main plazas and began touring the excavated center of Palenque. I was quite impressed. The pyramids and palaces are massive and everything is very well preserved. I was walking up and down steps all day and looking over the countless other ruined buildings. There were inscriptions and engravings and sculpture. All in all a positive ruins experience. When I got back i relaxed a bit and then headed off to Pan Cham, a travellers complex of cabanas and restaurants, and met a group of other travelers and watched fire dancing and funky music. The next day I left the trailer park and went into town. I had to do laundry in a serious way, and I dropped it off first thing, but it wouldn't be ready till 6. i killed time and forgot where my laundry was, then ran around trying to find it so i could catch my 615 bus to villahermosa. The night was a mess of getting kicked out of bus stations and onto busses and i wound up in ciudad del carmen in the early hours, trying to stay awake and read. I went into the town and at a motel got directed to bunkhouses and found one. It was not a hostel, but a place for migrating oil workers to live. Ciudad del Carmen is a down sustained and developed around Pemex offshore drilling. I trapsed around town, to the beach and the market and the shorefront restaurants. The market was chock full of fresh fish. At night i met some of the fellow bunkers, a chef and a deep sea mechanic for an oil platform. The next day I moved on to Isla Aguada, a little fishing town across the bay, and ran into some university teachers who gave me a tour of the town. In the morning it was on to Campeche.
Campeche is to most beautiful town i have seen so far. It was once a ravaged by pirates in the 16th century so spain built massive city walls and fortresses, which now divide the historic city center from the urban sprawl around it. Buildings are vibrantly collored simple cubist blocks with vintage wood doors, nothing highrise, the park is verdant and the boardwalk is peaceful in the ocean breaze. the next day I met a bus terminal guy who took me around on his motorcycle, and his mom fed me lunch. The town is beautiful i tell you. Then it was on to Merida. Merida is to campeche as Xela is to Antigua, if that makes sense. It is bigger and busier, dirtier and more lively; it is as well beautiful in a classic sense of the word, just one level above the street. it is more ornate in its design. I met some finnish girls in the hostel and we went to the market, bought some fruit. It was fun to amble through there and try new fruits and cheeses and whatnot. We ate ceviche and returned to the hostel. I spent the whole day exploring town. the following day i went to some cenotes a half hour out of town. I hiked to them, which pissed the horse and buggy guys off considerably, but i didn't really care because i was swimming in deep dim aquamarine blue caverns with little holes letting in cathedral like beams of light, jumping off wooden staircases and plunging into the cool water and then climbing roots from overhanging trees and plunging again. Adventurous in an archaic way. I got back to the hostel sunbaked and dehydrated and raved to everyone about the day. Said goodbye to the girls from finland that night and the next morning left for valladolid. Valla is a classic colonial town in the Yucatan, and its main purpose for travelling is that its near chichen itza. I spoke spanish with a dude from spain, a first, in the hostel, asked him about life on the other side of the atlantic and all, and then went to chichen the next morning. I had to; it is one of seven wonders of the man made world. But honestly i wasn't that impressed. It was packed with cancun tourists and guides speaking heavily accented english, and a veritable city of souvenir hawkers. The ruins were different from anything i had seen before but i had to confront my jaded feeling about mayan ruins. the thing is that they are inherently so dead. I feel like i am searching for people and their stories and their way of life and ruins represent the opposite, the skeleton of a civilization. I got out once i had made the rounds.
And then it was off to el cuyo. el cuyo is another gulf fishing village that is an authentic antidote to the resort towns i would later see, but i was in and out in less than twelve hours. i could have stayed a week, a month. I was working my way to cancun. I tried to take a back road, a small rural highway, and got burned. I got stranded in a little mayan town of maiz farmers for four hours. It actually wasn't half bad, i spent the time talking to local kids about school and soccer, drawing them pictures of airplanes and cars, playing the ubiquitous streetside arcade games. It was a blessing in disguise. I caught a bus to cancun and spent the night in the bus station, as there is no affordable lodging there, and got woken up by a guard who said i could sleep, but i had to sit up. In the morning i walked into the las vegas of mexico. I took a bus down the hotel zone, a half hour ride, twenty kilometers of resorts. i took a dip in the good ole caribe and hit the road to playa del carmen. Playa is just as bad or good depending on your taste. Playa is where the cruises land, and its a town of fancy restaurants, cigar shops, and a beach packed with lawnchairs and men and women who are way too tan to be soaking up any more rays. Margharitaville. I headed out once more, this time to tulum. Tulum is a bit more tranquill, a palenque in the sense that it grew around ruins, and its more of a backpacker town. the hostel i stayed in was the start of the ruta maya, an institution i tell you, i signed in on a computer, and the place was a buzz of people drinking and smoking and cooking until two, but remember i didn't really sleep the night before and the main reason i was in a hostel was to sleep, so i did. well. I meant to take a free shuttle to the beach but it rained the next day and i ate free breakfast food and talked to a greek dude and an israeli femminist about inter gender relationships. then i rocked out to bacalar. In bacalar i slept two nights in a public park, strolling the town, swimming in the lagoon; then a guy who was in the park practicing dance for an upcoming carnival told me i might as well sleep in the guest room of his house. He was a good guy so i said yes and his family fed me for a few days and we hung around and went to the disco. It was a really natural cultural immersion. after two or three days i decided i was moving on and went to chetumal, the border town. A night in a bad hotel and it was goodbye to mexico. I crossed the border and spent an hour or two in the free zone, a tax free area in between the two countries that is a strip of liquor, cigarette, and american clothing shops, plus a casino or two. I immigrated and went straight to corozal, the first town in belize. a nice hotel lady took me to a place that normally gets rented by missionary groups and let me stay for five bucks a night. It was a large second floor of an old house, and i felt like a bachillor living in a loft or something i had so much superfluous space, but it was a great way to decompress after a hectic two weeks. I found Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver, a collection of short stories that was a breath of fresh air after David Foster Wallaces 1000 page Infinite Jest, and started tearing through it. I caught up my journal under a palapa with a picnic table on the bay. I aquainted myself with belize and its grocery stores and markets and dirt streets and parks, and people. I cooked market fresh stirfries and met vegeteble vendors who talked to me about the great marijuana they smoke and declined offers to partake (aren't you proud mom and dad). After a few days i moved on to orange walk, the bigger town in the north of belize, and stayed a night in a hotel room without a bed for a discount, let me tell you bad call i slept like shit but i got to walk the town and met some tour guides who had an uncle with a ranch in august pine ridge. I stayed there the next night and got to know chicho novelo, a seventy three year old mayan man with 16 kids and like sixty grandkids in the town. I ate delicious homemade food in his house and he showed me around the village in the cane fields, and told me about his life. I also met his sons tino and Rafael. It was a great day and morning. He runs the ranch for a Canadian anthropologist, Edmund, who takes chicho travelling to places like mexico and peru every year. After that i made my way to Crooked Tree Wildlife Sanctuary. I had seen a lot of business about Conservation in Belize, and being very familiar with the national parks of the USA i decided to drop in and see what they were doing. I chatted with the wardens about the fauna and habitat and what they were protecting it from, and then looked for a place to crash. Crooked tree is a little village on an island in a lake, just really rough dirt roads (everyone if they drive drives a jeep), and like two town stores. I found a lodge that normally serves birdwatching groups and the owner, Angie, let me throw up a hammock. Because she was already cooking for a birder group she let me eat with them. The birders were hilarious. Hailing from San Diego, they were all raving about past trips to africa and costa rica and what not, travelling in style with rolling suitcases and fine dining, which i gladly joined them in, and in the morning they got out the binoculars before breakfast and pointed excitedly at all the different storks and herons and flycatchers. I actually enjoyed following their fingers to different birds and it made me realize the abundance of flying critters. Oh, i should mention i couldn't sleep in the hammock and so slept on the trampoline. Angie's kid was extremely energetic and i was pretty much his baby sitter for the two days i was there. We jumped on the trampoline and played with action figures, walked into town and read books. At six in the morning the father, Mick, an English guy, gave me a ride almost to Belize city. I took a bus in, it was a sunday morning and the city was eerily quiet. Imagine South Chicago if it was abandoned for ten years. I mean it is the straight hood there. It made Guatemala City look welcoming. I beelined to the guest house and checked in. Scoped downtown and went to the Casino, the only thing open on a sunday. Lost two dollars american but got a free gin and tonic. (Sorry mom and dad). I got hustled with a few times in my explorations. The street hustlers are fierce. They just follow you where you are walking and its very uncomfortable, they try to show you around and stuff until you tell them to leave you alone and they like want you to pay them for the tour. So i stayed in at night. Obviously. The morning came and i went to the library and and a cool art collective's gallery. Then i rocked out to belmopan, stopped in to a peace corps office to see what they really do in the rest of the world, then took the hummingbird highway at sunset, its rolling mini mountains so vegetated it looks like there's no mountain at all just trees growing on top of each other. I got to dangriga and found a hostel. And that brings us to this morning.

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