Iguana Dance With Somebody (…but I don’t wanna feel the heat)

The quaint US embassy building - one of the last wooden embassy buildings - in the rain-sodden sweltering heat of BC.

I could also have gone for a musicals title this week: Fit Lizard on the Roof (ouch!). The rains here don’t come themselves but instead bring various animals sheltering from the deluge. As well as barking dogs, I now have to contend with Iguanas running around on the roof of the house. These are large (2,3, more… feet long), sharp-clawed creatures that seem to like to hold dance classes and race meetings above my bedroom between 2 and 5am.

Talking of lizards, this is Steve, my roommate. Steve is a juvenile gecko. I could tell he was a juvenile just from his size. That isn’t obvious in the photo, but you were able to tell from the fact that his tail hasn’t grown yet – weren’t you? Like most of the population of Belize, Stevie can trace his ancestry back to a more distant place – China in his case. Geckos aren’t indigenous to Belize but came from Eastern parts, and perhaps as recently as 25 years ago. And their numbers have exploded in the last ten. Competing with intruders is a common problem for Belize’s wildlife and for many species it’s a battle to adapt/evolve fast enough to survive. Anyway, I’m not holding that against Steve-o, as long as he helps me in my battle against the mozzies.

So lizards at home. And the rainy season has created a bit of a ‘wildlife issue' at work too. Four of us share a smallish office at BCVI head office in Belize City. Naomi is my fellow CWW volunteer at BCVI and is working hard on the charity’s patient database, Christa (from the US) has been working as resource and promotions manager for a few months now and Mark from Belize is our long-standing IT manager.

The four of us were joined last week by a small rat. The little fellow somehow got in through the wall and streaked across the floor. After a few interesting moments, Mark and I managed to trap him in the bottom drawer of Mark's desk. I was then able to carefully pull the drawer out and carry it outside. As I 'coaxed' the rat out, Mark tried to flatten it with a broom but missed and it jumped into the drain at the side of our front door and swam away like a good ‘un. The fun didn’t end there though. As I carried the drawer back into the office, another previously unnoticed rat popped out of the drawer and skiddaddled across the office floor. We lost that one too but not before I got his photo.

So Mark and I took two rats out of the office and brought one back in. By any reasonable performance measure, I’d say that was quite a successful project. But alas, as always, the policy people in the office saw things rather differently.

Basil the rat is disappointed to find that the shapely mouse he has been eyeing up will only accept a USB connection.

I didn’t make it to Mexico last weekend because of the torrential rain but the weather is improving rapidly and plans are now in place for a deeper forage into Mexican territory - perhaps as far as Cancun – in a week or so’s time. Meanwhile, the bad weather at the weekend was a good excuse for a sustained bout of partying.


This year’s international Twister invitational is brought to you by our sponsors B E L I Z E. Here we can see a tense moment in the latter stages of the fiercely contested gold-medal bout between Sweden’s “Left-Foot-Blue” Larsson and Scotland’s “Right-Hand-Red” McKay. Columbia, the US and Scotland’s male representative were knocked out – in more ways than one – earlier in the competition.

Finally, it doesn’t really lend itself to pictures but I feel like I’ve been making more great progress with the project. So I’ll finish off with a picture of where I work:

Rat’s where I work

Just Me and Maya Shadow

I had the whole of an ancient archaeological site to myself. This wouldn’t happen at Maccu Piccu.

I’ll definitely look back on this last week as the one where I really settled into life here. In some ways it’s been less eventful, but so many things have left me smiling in the last week, especially the things that haven’t gone so well.

The weather forecast predicted a monsoon for the weekend so the fishing trip was cancelled, and I think most people in Belize decided to stay home and do their washing. I wasn't in the mood for doing my washing – it’s amazing what you can get away with in a country with a good strong ‘background’ smell – so I decided to try to get to the Mayan ruins at Altun Ha instead.

Altun Ha is in the middle of nowhere, 60 miles out of Belize (a long way in this country) and 12 miles up the old northern highway, which is nothing more than a heavily pot-holed single-track road. Getting there would need a combination of buses and cadging lifts.

Buses in Belize tend to get crowded and standing in the heat can quickly become exhausting. It’s therefore a blessing that the drivers are thoughtful enough to get a good breeze going by keeping the door forced open whilst driving at motorway speeds. At the same time, it’s rather unnerving standing right in front of the door, aware that any overly enthusiastic braking would see me pitched onto the hot tarmac.

After getting off the bus it was ridiculously easy to cover the last 12 miles. People were stopping all over the place to offer me a lift. A bunch of rough looking guys were even friendly enough to let me borrow a bicycle to save me from walking the last couple of miles.

Altun Ha - one of the better preserved sites, though abandoned over a thousand years ago - was a real experience. For the two hours I was there the site was completely deserted. A bit like turning up at Stonehenge and finding you've got the place to yourself. In fact, I think I could have had most of Belize to myself, the weather report was so dire. And sure enough my luck ran out after about half an hour. At which point I discovered exactly why Belize is so fantastically green.

There’s a little jungle path from the site that runs three hundred yards down to a reservoir. In between sacrificing virgins and establishing a stupendously accurate calendar, the Mayans dug this reservoir to provide them with drinking water and somewhere to bathe when the rains came. And when I got to the reservoir the heavens opened.

It was as I stood, half under a tree, wondering if I should make a mad dash back to the shelter of the site and praying unhopefully for the rain to turn back from biblical to merely tropical, that I noticed a human-sized, but distinctly scaly bather in the water. Putting my specs on, I realized it was a crocodile, maybe about 100 feet away and slowly arcing towards me.
The croc is in dead centre of the pic, just above the green patch of foliage. No complaints about the picture please – it seemed menacing at the time!

In these types of scenario, you tend to root around in your brain for whatever apocryphal tale you last heard about the situation in question. I could recall some story from somewhere that went roughly along the lines that, statistically more people died from cattle running into their vehicles than from… something else. But as the croc approached, I couldn’t remember whether this was elephant stampedes, shark attacks or crocodile encounters. I could also remember that something could run faster than any man, but I couldn’t remember whether that was crocodiles, snakes or Hong Hong Phooey. Anyway, he didn’t come that close in the end, which was a little disappointing as I didn’t get a more impressive picture than the one above.

After sheltering for some time the rain had barely let up, but the narrow jungle path was becoming seriously flooded so I headed back to the ruins. About half-way along, I felt something lodge itself in my open sandals under my right toes. When I shook it out, it turned out to be this frog:
Unfortunately, as I paused to preserve a record of my amphibian hitcher, a huge fly landed on my ankle and gave me a bite large enough to leave a tiny trickle of blood on my leg.

I was quite worn-out with all these wildlife encounters by the time I got back to the ruins. But at least the sun had come out, letting me get some picture postcard shots.

For me, the lesson from that day was that it’s best to accept the weather here and get on with things. I do occasionally log on to the BBC weather page for Belize City to look at the 5 day forecast. It’s not been particularly accurate so far but I’m always amazed to read the minimum night-time temperature – the prediction for each day has never been less than 26C yet. And though the rainy season is now here in full force, the heat has barely diminished. Apparently at this time of year, hurricanes forming over the Caribbean push the weather on to the land, making the humidity soar and making the changes from rain storms to clear blue skies more frequent, and less predictable. And you can still get fried if the clouds clear for even just an hour. When I logged onto the weather site on Wednesday the ‘current’ humidity level was… 98%.

Otherwise, the project continues to come along nicely. My boss has gone on four weeks holiday, but I’ve got a really good idea of what I want to do in the next month and I’m quite happy to get on with that. I’ve been traveling with work too, interviewing staff about administration/sales of glasses, here in Belize City at first, but also up north at Orange Walk. Really enjoying this part of the job – there’s so much to learn.

Going to Mexico for the holiday weekend now (Columbus Day this time). To say I’m looking forward to Mexico is putting it mildly. I’m just praying that some stranger comes up to me at some point and says “Hey, Gringo!” That would truly make my year…

It’s just another week for Hugh, Hugh and me in Paradise

Since Caye Caulker, I’ve been desperate to get back out to the Belizian islands. San Pedro on Ambergris Caye was another special place. Ambergris Caye is the island that Madonna sings about in La Isla Bonita, but otherwise I couldn’t find anything wrong with the place. I did some fantastic scuba diving at the reef off San Pedro, getting to 100 feet below the surface at one point. Will say more about the diving later.

The atmosphere in the Cayes is completely addictive. I’m already wondering how I can wangle a mid-week visit without missing work.

Having now been to both Caye Caulker and San Pedro, I’d say that Caye Caulker pulls me back more… but maybe that’s without reckoning on Palaba Bar. This is a little bar perched over the water on the end of one of San Pedro’s piers. It’s just a few yards from where I took the photos at the top and bottom of this post. A beer or five there as the sun goes down is just heaven…

Does anyone

have a spare

2.8 million

US dollars?

I’ve also been to Belize Zoo. Since growing out of short trousers, I’ve only ever been to one zoo that hasn’t made me feel uncomfortable. Belize is pretty close to being another. Here the animals are kept in something like their natural habitat, though I was still a bit concerned by the pacing of the big cats. All the animals at the zoo are indigenous to Belize, so it’s a great way of getting to know the fauna of the country.

This guy may look stuffed, but he is very much alive and well and a very important bird to Belize. The zoo does it’s best to educate Belizians about the importance of living in harmony with the wildlife, a lot of which is unique to their small country.

And this is my friend Hugh. Hugh Jass has been a resident at Belize Zoo since the 1980s…

Plenty of wildlife can be found without even having to go to the zoo. This is my neighbour, Emiliano, with the sort of intruder that can regularly be found in the garden between our houses. Mr Torres is a teacher at one of the local schools and his wife, Gloriacela is the head-teacher.

Work has been good in the last week. I’ve started to put together a financial model that looks at BCVI’s finances in a different way. This will hopefully help with the charity’s management/strategic decision making. I also gave a presentation this week to some of the staff of CARE Belize about budget management. CARE Belize (Community Agency for Rehabilitation and Education) is a charity for children with disabilities.

Taking great photos here is like shooting fish in a barrel.

Carnivals and Birthdays

Have had an absolute blast this last week. To keep this blog manageable, I’m going to have to leave out some of what I’ve been up to and pretend I did it during a quiet week, if/when that happens!

After carnival, I went down south for two days with work, to the towns of Dangriga and Punta Gorda. The geography is different down there, jungle-covered limestone hills gradually rise up all the way to PG, where you can see the mountains of Guatemala and Honduras in the distance, across the waters of the Caribbean.

LEFT: Mark, (our IT expert), Mrs Musa (my boss) and Christa, (fund-raiser for BCVI) explore Belize’s limestone caves on a short break from our work trip.

RIGHT: A ‘slight delay’ to our journey as a pipe is laid under the main road from Belize City to Punta Gorda…

I’ve made a good start on the project in the last week or so. I’ve now met most of BCVI’s 28 staff and I have a much better grasp of what BCVI do and how they do it. I’m most surprised by the large variety of activities BCVI undertake, from walk-in clinics (where ‘foreign object’ problems (!) are most common) and diagnosis, through to surgery and also rehabilitation. The rehabilitation programme is particularly interesting. There are programmes to help children better integrate with their peers, and schemes to make it easier for visually impaired young adults to get back to work. My work may be more on the primary care and surgery side though, as BCVI can charge patients a small amount for these services, and this helps with financial sustainability.

So I am working hard, honest! But there’s been more partying (state-sponsored) in the last week too. I experienced clubbing Belizian-style with the girls last Saturday. A lot of hip-grinding in a large, dark, humid and slightly dingy shell. It reminded me of when I used to go clubbing at the art school.

Monday and Tuesday were quiet – just a build up to the big celebrations on the 21st. On Wednesday, we had a half day to make the most of the celebrations. I dragged myself away from my computer for an evening of drinking and dancing. Aside from the usual Belizian festivities, the highlight on Wednesday evening was the Figueros Pirotechnico (hope no-one is checking my Spanish) or fireworks display. The fireworks were set off from a boat, sitting a few hundred yards out from the harbour. They were pretty impressive and went on for a good 30 minutes. Next month I’ll be trying to sort out the finances of the Belize Defence Force (BDF), which have mysteriously plunged into deficit.

For some reason I slept in on Thursday morning and missed the parades that officially marked the 25th Anniversary of Belizian Independence. I am told that this was quite a formal affair with a number of speeches by Prime Minister Musa, opposition figures and visiting dignitaries, including the Panamanian leader who – it was agreed by all – has a very attractive wife.

Feliz Cumpleanos Evan! Aqui con Mari (Maricruz)

Anyway, the big celebration for me was Evan’s birthday, which each year coincides with the country's anniversary. My present was a myth-busting four-pack of Red Bull and four bottles of Guinness. I was quite sure I had called his bluff. However, he gamely proceeded to make up a couple of these cocktails and appeared to enjoy them. Actually, I have to confess it was pretty tasty.

In the afternoon we took a trip up to Orange Walk near the Mexican border. This is the second largest town in Belize and maybe about the size of Largs (almost certainly the only possible similarity between the two). We had a fantastic day out watching the carnival. It was made all the better by Evan and Mari’s families who made me so welcome. Got some great photos, of which a few are below. Wish I could attach the videos, which give much more of a flavour of the amazing atmosphere.

Waiting on the parade. From L-R, Evan, Ulises (from El Salvador), Emiliano (neighbour), Norvea (Mari’s sister), Mari and Wilbur (brother in law).

Las Senoritas. Czarina with Gabi, Paula, Kar (all nieces) and Shajira (Evan and Mari's daughter).

Carnival float and overhead cables… not a good mix.

This is a celebration of the hurricane. Or the 100th anniversary of the arrival of the flushing toilet in Belize, I’m not sure which.

As a young lad, I was always a big fan of Wonderwoman.

Man in Sombrero on albino horse (are these captions really necessary?)

The last float disappears into the sunset, to the hip-grinding sound of Punta-rock.

Address To A Hammock

Fair fa’ a hammock’s flippin’ ace,
A canny slacker’s favourite restin’ place,
A’boon them a’ ah climb an’ tak ma place,
Well oot o’ reach o’ clatty dugs an’ mingin’ roaches,
Then lose the suntan lotion fir ma face,
An’ wake in ‘oors tae find ma coupon toast is.

On Caulker Caye, go slow’s da Creole way,
An’ hammock sittin’ lasts a’ flippin’ day,
Jah man! In gettin’ here ah think ah may,
Have used up a’ ma luck,
So nae mair dodgy verse, instead ah’ll say
Gie us a hammock!

With sincere apologies to the original…

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face
Great chieftain o the puddin'-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place
Painch, tripe, or thairm
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang's my arm.

Ye Pow'rs, wha mak mankind your care
And dish them out their bill o fare
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies
But, if ye wish her gratefu prayer
Gie her a Haggis!