Lickity Split

What I Did in Iceland. Part 1: It's Cold and There's a Big Church

 

My first day in Iceland began at 6:30 am. The pale sun, hanging at about twenty degrees on the horizon, struggled through a dense layer of gray cloud. As the plane taxied to the gate I saw Iron Maiden's 757 jet parked at the terminal, a fact that, while not of any interest beyond this sentence, I think bears mentioning. What also bears mentioning is that, due to the arctic latitude, the sky remained more or less the same the entire time.

 

I'd arranged a place to stay through couchsurfing.org, and my host, Olafur, met me at the main bus terminal, the BSI. The airport, for some reason, is a forty-five minute drive from town. This is not because, as in other cities, the airport must be located on the other side of the inevitable suburban sprawl of the city. There is nothing, and I mean really, seriously, fuck all, between the airport and Reykjavik, except for some cracked volcanic rock and fields of purple flowers. It costs about 17 dollars for the bus ride, which is reasonable considering you have absolutely no other choice but to take the bus. From the bus terminal we walked through the center of town to the bus stop to get to my host's place, and he left me to my own devices with his house keys while he went off to work researching, among other things, 18th Century Icelandic baby-daddy disputes. I immediately ransacked his apartment and ran off with all his valuables after smearing poo all over the walls. Wait, I mean I took a quick rest  and went out to test my ability to remember where I am and how to get back to where I was before.

 

Previous couchsurfers (If you don't understand what I am talking about, click on that link up there and have a look around that website until you figure it out. I don't have time to explain it right now, as I am trying to tell you about Iceland.) had left behind various maps--tourist maps and bus maps and city maps. I studied these for a while trying to make a plan about where to go. But in the end I decided just to get on the bus to the city center and walk around to get a feel for the place. The most immediate feel I got was cold, and wet. On the main shopping street I sought out a cafe I could sit inside for a coffee. On a corner was a little building set apart from the others by the slightly exaggerated peaks of its gables, with steaming cups of coffee etched on the windows. Perfect.

The place, Privid, claims on its menus to be the oldest cafe in Iceland, established in 1951. (Until fairly recently, Iceland was populated exclusively by elves who lived in mushrooms, ate only dandelions, and ran around naked accidentally impregnating each other.) I took a table upstairs overlooking the street. The place did't serve anything at all Icelandic. Instead they had the full gamut of American junk food, including several kinds of nachos (later to be described to me as "hangover food"). I got my coffee and watched the people on the street below grimacing against the blowing of the cold rain.

 

The spot would have been ideal had it not been for the two British fellows  having an absurdly tedious and unrepentantly pretentious conversation at the next table. They weren't exactly shouting, but they were talking in a manner that made clear they wanted anyone else around them to hear them and think they were smart and interesting. The conversation had something to do with love, semantics, and the politics of immigration, subjects which both of them were severely unprepared to discuss. It seemed they were planning to write some kind of really clever and socially relevant play. I wanted to jump up and shout "For fuck's sake if you want to write a play about people from different countries who fall in love and have to negotiate issues of citizenship, just fucking write it and stop deconstructing the fuck out of everything!" I came to the conclusion that this play will never get written.

From my perch I'd been staring down at a tourist schwag shop called The Viking, One of the first things I do when I travel to a new place is go check out these sorts of shops. Although I'm a compulsive object collector, it's not shopping for souvenirs that draws me into souvenir shops, but the immediate information they provide. In a gift shop you can find out quickly what a place is famous for, what parts of the culture are dangled out to the rest of the world to reel in the tourist money. That saves a lot of time, allowing one to quickly get down the the business of analyzing the interesting things, such as major shared personality flaws, political scandals, common complaints, absurd beliefs, and which aspects of American culture they are obsessed with. 

Seeking to escape the increasingly pointless conversation of those two nit-wits, I exited the American junk food cafe and and went into The Viking. The things they sell in the tourist schwag shops in Iceland include plastic viking horns, hats, and swords, items such as ashtrays and candle holders made of volcanic rock, plush puffins, little statues of elves and trolls, and socks, hats, mittens, and sweaters made from wool, rabbit fur, and deerskin. These last items, although clearly mass "hand" produced and identical from shop to shop, appear well made and are probably a good bet for anyone in the market for expensive winter wear. I do pity the child, though, who comes home from school having lost is fifty-dollar pair of rabitt-fur-lined deerskin mittens. I dove into one of these shops at the rate of about two per block over the next hour and a half just to get out of the cold and rain. Eventually I bowed to the pressure to buy a wool hat, a decision I did not regret at all for the next three days.

The only thing I did on that first morning aside from surveying the gift shops was visit the big church whose tower is the major landmark of the city center. This I did, again, mainly as a way of escaping the weather.

The church is not particularly old. Buildings themselves seem to be a relatively new invention in Iceland.  The structure was built in the 1920s. Its architecture is one of very simplistic gothic style. The whole building is the color of pale clay, dominated by a soaring bell-tower that which dwarfs the rest of the structure. The tower is saved from phallic symbolism by a pair of wings, or perhaps pleated curtains, which flank either side of the bell tower and descend to the ground. Inside, the insistence on monotone and clean gothic lines continues. Two rows of  columns march down each side of the sanctuary, supporting the closely-spaced arches of the severely-vaulted ceiling. The visual effect is mesmerizing in a geomoetrical kind of way but did not, as the Catholic cathedrals of Europe, carry any religiously sedutcive power. However. The near-entirety of the front arch, the one beneath the belltower, is devoted to a gigantic pipe organ, and a guy was playing it, turning the whole building into an instrument that you sit inside of. 

This organ player would play a bit of something, then stop, flip through his scores while twitching his cheek in indecision, and then finally play a bit of something else. I thought this a terribly irrational way of putting on an organ concert. I realized later that the organ concert was later, and he was just practicing. The only place to practice playing an instrument that is actually a building, or vice versa, is inside that building, I guess.
 
 

Before leaving I paid three hundred kroners, about three dollars, to take the elevator to the top of the bell tower. The cold rain blew in through the lookout openings as I snapped photos of the city. I always feel weird taking pictures like that, with the full knowledge that plenty of other people have taken other photos, much, much better photos, than the ones I am taking from that spot, and that it is in no way necessary for me to document the view of Rekjavik from that bellower. Especially considering that this is the Internet age, and any of my friends who wish to see an aerial view of Reykjavik can find much better photos in the Internet in about .5 seconds. But it seemed the appropriate thing to do.I guess one day I will look back at those photos and remember that moment. "Oh yeah," I'll say, "the bellower in Reykjavik. It was cold."

It was after that, actually, that I bought the wool hat, for fifteen dollars. Now I have a souvenir. One
day I will find this wool hat in a box and remember that I went to Reykjavik, and that I took pictures from the bellower, where I wiped drops of cold rain from the lens, and two British guys in a cafe were having a really pointless conversation, andI will wonder if they ever wrote that awful play.

 

Kaitlyn's Big Adventure

This summer I took my seven-year-old niece on her first train ride. She'd never left the Gulf Coast in her whole life and was going to Philadelphia for a special summer camp, Dragonfly Forest, for kids with autism and other conditions such as hemophilia that mean they probably don't get to go to regular summer camp. I could easily have just taken her on a plane, but I thought the train would be more fun. I wanted her to experience the physical distance that she was traveling, to watch it go by for a while, instead of just getting in to a  metal tube and suddenly arriving in a strange place where she was to spend her first nights ever away from her family. I thought a transition period would make the experience less shocking. I also wanted to experience an American long-distance train, having only traveled by train in Europe. 

 

The train from New Orleans to Philadelphia, the Crescent City, takes from 7 AM one day until around noon the next day. I didn't bother paying the extra $400 dollars for a sleeper car. That would have been cheating. And anyway, for that much money we could have just taken a plane. So what I did was take a behaviorally-challenged seven-year-old on a 30-hour train ride, in coach. 

 

Although she was admitted into the program for autistic children at Dragonfly Forrest, Kaitlyn is not actually autistic. What she is is hard to describe. She has communication problems and behavioral problems and is very small for her age. She is really mentally challenged, and keeps up with her peers academically. The child is sometimes very clever and surprisingly aware. Still, she has problems with communication, and how much she understands can often be hard to gauge.

 

Kaitlyn had been excited about the trip for weeks, having craned her head over my shoulder as I bought the train tickets to Philadelphia. We'd shown her the pictures of where she was going on the website, and I'd tried to make sure she understood she would be there for several days.   She might have understood that, but I was sure she had no idea what I was getting her into with this train business.

 

When the big morning came, she wasn't a bit nervous. She stood in line to board the train, clutching her
stuffed panda with an air of impatience,demanding to go to Pennsylvania. I assured her repeatedly that we were going to Pennsylvania, which by that time had become synonymous with some kind of paradise of fun.  We reached the front of the line and waved good-bye to her brother and Mimaw, and then it was just the two of us boarding an Amtrak train. She having never traveled, I having never traveled with a child. It amazed me that this kind of thing was even allowed. Apparently, everyone trusted me to know what I was doing.

 

The coach car on an Amtrak train is not so bad. It's like a really, really roomy bus. Big cushy seats and plenty of space in between. There's no entertainment except electrical outlets and tray tables, and big windows. You are left to entertain yourself, something most people do not know how to do anymore, particularly kids.

 

As I said before, one of the reasons I wanted Kaitlyn to take the train was so she would get a physical sense of where she was going. She knew where Pennsylvania was, but only according to the abstract concept of the map. She'd never been anywhere more than a three-hour drive from her house, and so I wondered how much she understood about how far way Pennsylvania was. My guess that she didn't really get the distance thing was soon affirmed, within the first half-hour of the ride, before we'd even reached Slidell.

 

"Where are we? Are we almost there?" She had expected, it seemed, to be on the train only a few moments before arriving in Pennsylvania and going to summer camp, as if it were some kind of portal. I had explained that we would  get on the train, have breakfast, lunch, and dinner on the train, then go to sleep on the train and wake up in the morning and THEN be there. But that concept hadn't set in. 

 

After reporting to her about six more times that we were still in Louisiana, I finally got to say "Mississippi! We're in Mississippi. You know, where Granny lives."

 

"And then Pennsylvania?"

 

Time to get out the puzzle.

 

Being not only an experienced traveler but an experienced childcare giver, I'd packed a number of activities for the ride, including a book, colors, and snacks. I'd hope she'd be mesmerized by the passing scenery, but watching the passing scenery in all its bland familiarity, I couldn't blame her for being unimpressed. Anyway, I'd brought along something very useful for this ride: a Map-of-the-States puzzle.

 

Kaitlyn loves puzzles. You can give her a puzzle and, if you remember to present her with one, she'll remain bent to the task and out of trouble for extended periods of time. And that is an awesome thing to know because, behind puzzles, her favorite activity is annoying the absolute crap out of you in any way she can figure out. She'd been working this puzzle since Christmas, so she had a solid idea of where all the pieces went. I assumed that the interactivity of the puzzle would make the geography of the trip stick. She would already know "Pennsylvania" and "Alabama" and "Virginia," then she would see those places out of the train window and realize they are places and would always remember that she went there.

 

I had all the "states" in a ziplock bag, from which she quickly retrieved Louisiana. Easy one. Soon she found Mississippi. "Yes," I said," that's Mississippi. Where Granny lives." She turned her face up at me, cocked her head and twisted her lips with that childish skepticism that says I want to believe you because I trust you. But what you just said is crazy. Granny, it is true, does not live in a puzzle piece.

 

The dining car opened for breakfast just as the land began transitioning to the sand and pine of southern Mississippi. I was excited about the dining car.  Going to the dining car gave us something fun to do, and I hoped it would help Kaitlyn understand that the train was a place, and that we would be in this place for a little while. The dining car is a big part of what makes the train Traveling rather than just getting from point A to point B.

 

"Come on," I said, "Let's go get breakfast." She asked to bring her panda along. Now that I think about it, she could easily have believed we were leaving the train all together. Why would she assume there was a restaurant? Moving vehicle she got. Restaurant on moving vehicle was not so obvious. She looked confused. But then, she often looks confused. We reached the door at the end of the car and she looked up at me with curiosity. When I pushed the button and the doors parted with a loud hiss,  she watched with a gaped mouth that twisted into a smile and then a giggle. We made our way through the corridor of the rocking train, bracing ourselves on the walls, wheels clacking underneath, Kaitlyn giggling like she was in a funhouse. 

 

The dining car attendants greeted us with an exuberance I hadn't expected. They immediately teased Kaitlyn like doting uncles, pretending to try to take her panda, which made her giggle and duck her head bashfully. She invites that kind of thing, with her shy yet wicked little grin, at that time revealing one loose baby tooth dangling crookedly from her gums. She clutched her panda as we slid into the booth with an older black couple on their way to Georgia.

 

To fill up the booths efficiently, pairs of strangers are put together at tables during busy times in the dining car. The result is a mood of gregariousness and camaraderie. The conversations of strangers shouted over the rumbling of the train, bursts of laughter, clanking of silverware, the smell of fresh coffee and fried meats cheered my heart. Train travel is so human.

It was hard to tell what Kaitlyn thought. She didn't have much to say, but she seemed delighted enough. Although I'd been on plenty of trains,  I'd never actually been in a dining car. I was pleased to see that the contemporary American train dining car retains some vestiges of what it must have been like to travel by train back when that was how people traveled. The tables were set with blue and white linen, each table having a nickel-plated vase with a couple of synthetic red roses complimenting the blue curtains. What a train has that a plane or a bus does not is decor. It took a minute to realize that the table cloths and plates were sturdy but disposable, but the cutlery wasn't plastic and it came wrapped in linen napkins. The food itself was pretty good and decently-priced. What made it though was the staff, who did their jobs with a genuine pride and enjoyment that you just don't see anymore. And the whole atmosphere of the car was one of leisure and fun, a world away from the irritable gloom of airline travel. What's more, while kids on airplanes are so often miserable and annoying, a kid on a train makes everyone smile. Kids, as they do with so many things, make trains more fun.

 

After breakfast we went back to the puzzle. Kaitlyn fished the states out of the sandwich bag one by one, pushing them around on the map to remember where they went. Finally she found Pennsylvania. 

 

"And this is where I'm going?"

 

This was not a question. Kaitlyn speaks in questions most of the time. Instead of telling you something, she'll ask you. She was very late learning to speak. When she was almost three she found she was able to ask questions that adults would understand and respond to. When she managed to ask a question that you'd understand and answer, she'd keep asking the same question over and over again, just to get the response. And every time you answered she'd let out that delighted cackle of hers. And she'd ask again, and again, and again, just thrilled to be having a conversation, as she understood it. She still does this sometimes, and it gets tiring, especially since now she knows she is being a pain in the ass and is enjoying it.

 

But her questions of "Where are we?" and "Are we almost there?" were actual questions, ones to which I was compelled to give the same answer every time. After a while I started answering "On a train." After the first few times she knew that was a joke. She scrunched up her face in frustration and said "No, where are we?" "On a train." "No. WHERE ARE WE?" "On a train." I can be a pain in the ass, too.

 

I was as relieved as she when I got to say "Alabama. We're in Alabama."

 

Fifteen minutes later: "Where are we?" 

 

"Alabama still."

 

"Man," she said, crossing he arms and slumping into her seat with a huff. "Alabama is long."

 

Dread crept in. What if she spent the next day and a half asking me every fifteen minutes where we are? A normal kid might be expected to cut it out after two or three states, but this is a kid who would ask the same question over and over again for an hour and not tire of it. I began to think that my bright idea of taking a cognitively-challenged seven-year-old on a 30-hour train ride was terribly misguided.

 

Again I tried to get her interested in the passing scenery, hoping that she might be convinced to do something like, say, stare out the window for a while and maybe even daydream. Do kids daydream anymore? When I was growing up that's what we did in the car. We stared out the window and daydreamed. It seems now that unless they are poor and underprivileged, kids are saved from the fate of having to daydream in the car by portable DVD players. Kaitlyn is no exception. She spends nearly every waking hour she is not in school staring at a screen. This was one of my main purposes in getting her to this camp. A whole week without a digital screen to stare at. Imagine what would happen inside her little mind. She may even have an independent thought. For the time being, though, I had to get her there. Feeling a little guilty about it, I pulled out my laptop and put on the DVD she had brought along, with its mindless little cartoon characters. I needed a break. Looking at the scenery we could work on later. 

 

She watched cartoons and dozed off while I read and daydreamed until it was time to go back to the dining car for lunch. When we reached the doors at the end of the car Kaitlyn rushed ahead to push the button.  She looked up at me as she pushed the button with deliberation and authority, as if she were showing me how it is done, or at least demonstrating that she knew. This was an important thing, her mastery of this new aspect of the world. And also, it was fun. For the remainder of the ride, pushing the button to open the doors was her thing.

 

By lunch she seemed much more settled in, less expectant that we would arrive at any minute. Also, the scenery out of the windows became significantly more interesting. We were passing through Tuscaloosa, the part of Alabama at that time still wrecked by a recent outbreak of tornadoes. I pointed out the destruction to Kaitlyn, thinking it might be something she was aware of. She tends to latch on to disasters. She was still talking about the BP oil spill long after everyone else had moved on. Having put together the information that I lived in New Orleans and the spill was near New Orleans, her first question to me when I visited her just after the spill started was "Aunt 'Car can you see the oil?" It was so much on her mind at the time that one afternoon, having dropped ice cream on the hot sidewalk, she pointed to the spreading puddle of goo and said, "Look. It looks like the oil." 
 

 

The rest of the afternoon went well enough that I regained my confidence in this adventure. By that time she was insisting on going to the toilet by herself. Having alighted and re-boarded with me a few times on cigarette-smoking stops, she had the hang of the steep steps of the car as well. She had mastered the train. I, too, was congratulating myself on my handling of traveling-with-child. We had dinner just after passing through Atlanta, by which time the two of us had become proper traveling buddies.

 

Around nine o'clock we changed into our pajamas and I arranged for a bedtime snack. We curled up in our seats with cookies and mild and watched her cartoons. She successfully got a full night's sleep riding in a second-class train car. I got as much sleep as could be expected while curled around a bony seven-year-old.

 

We woke up in Virginia. As we passed through Washington, D.C., I asked her questions to see if she understood what Washington D.C. was, and she seemed to have the general idea. The train ran a along a little ravine for a while, and I pointed to little waterfalls in the creek. We even caught site of a deer. I got her dressed for her first day of camp and packed up our gear as we counted down the stops to Philadelphia, where a camp counselor would meet us and take her away to a strange place for the next week. 

 

As I passed her off to the strange lady and waved good-bye, I was a little sad. After a day and a  half on the train I'd gotten attached. Kaitlyn was all smiles, though, ready to continue her big adventure without me.

 

Somewhere along the way she'd validated my idea of the train ride by saying, with resolution. "Lacar, I like you."

 

Traveling is a pain and I'm getting too old for it

Okay, I bring it on myself. I know. I keep uping the stakes, assuming that my cultivated travel skills need to be tested on new levels. I'm spryer than ever, and wiser, yes. I can navigate issues of transportation with ninja agility and adapt quickly to circumstance and I've got a well-honed sense of what I really need to bring with me. I can travel light and quick with a smallish backpack and shoulder bag. All this is true.

But my body is starting to protest. 

I thought taking a seven-year-old on a day and a half train, in coach, was a great idea. Up until the overnight portion came and I tried to curl myself into the two seats, shared with he, for a night's sleep. My joints were not pleased. The next night's sleep being on an air matress on the floor in New York was better, but the next day I was feeling the wear. Last night I got to a real bed in Boston, and for the first time I think in my life I pleaded with my host to allow me a full night's sleep. If I can still hang with the mental fatigue, my body is just not having the road warrior crap anymore.

But it's worse than that. I think I may be succombing to a general need for comfort. I've only been doing this for four days, and already I'm weary of living out of a backpack, digging around for the clothes I want, searching through pockets, continually retrieving and putting back. It's annoying.

I am, I'm afraid, going soft. I'm in my thirties now, and people in their thirties do not do this low budget backpacking nonsense. For a reason.

Oh age, I never thought you would find me.

St. Francisville, Louisiana: Nature, History, Taco Pizza

Finally I achieved my dream of sleeping in a tiny cabin in St. Francisville and walking around a town full of historic houses, and an old Episcapol church surrounded by a church yard, and a family pizza restaurant that serves both the "Italian Burrito" and the "Taco Pizza." 

 

There is little to do in St.Francisville, a town where all the residents seem to be either dead or at least taking a nap indoors, but it has some legitimate tourist appeal. You can walk around the historic homes section and read the plaques outside. We learned that St. Francisville was the capital of the Republic of West Florida, which was established for 90 days in 1810 before being taken as part of the U.S. This little revolt, it turned out, was led by the Freemasons. The churchyard around the Episcapol church is pretty and has a lot of Civil War era headstones among the spanish-moss-draped oaks. In the general area are more than a few grand old antebellum homes, if you are into monuments to an era when it was legal to own people and the wealth produced by that "institution."  The Myrtles, while not one of the more impressive estates, is supposed to be haunted as f***. If you like ghost stories you can go on a tour there. They have night tours as well. Also, it's a bed and breakfast, if you feel you need to stay up all night hoping/fearing to encounter figments of your imagination.  

We did not stay at The Myrtles, but in the 3V Tourist Court. It was my dream, for some time, to do this.
If you do not have specific aspirations to sleep overnight in tourist cabins from the 1930s I don't think you necessarily need to drive two hours from New Orleans for this. I, however, was thrilled by it. There are only five cabins, right in the center of town, in what that call the "square," which is just a meeting of roads and a long-ish stop light. The cabins have been very nicely renovated, retaining the old hardwood floors and tongue-and-groove walls and ceiling. The tiny proportions and quaint furnishings approach but remain this side of twee. The bed that dominates the vast portion of the little space is supplied with the soft white linens and piles of pillows you'd expect from a nice hotel. And all this for 70 bucks a night. Absolutely worth it for a couple's runaway spot. Would be boring if alone, awkward if with anyone but a significant other. If you feel inspired to go, you'd better make reservations in advance. St. Francisville is not exactly overrun with tourists, but they do get them, and these five cabins represent a noticable chunk of available accomomdations.

 Wednesday night was my birthday, so we put on some nice clothes and walked to one of the available restaurants, of which we were told there were two: Que Pasa and Sonny's p\Pizza. (Kevin, the man running the 3V, who gave us the key, did not mention the very nice-looking Oxbow restaurant, perhaps because we did not look like people who should go to the nice restaurant in St. Francisville.) We settled on Sonny's Pizza, which was a wise choice. Offering both the Italian burrito and the taco pizza, Sonny's solves that crushing delimma of deciding between "mexican" and "italian" for dinner. We got the taco pizza: a pizza crust piled with seasoned taco meat, shredded cheese, sour cream, lettuce, and tomato. The next day we discovered that it is better cold.

A forty minute drive from St. Francisville takes you up to the Clark Creek Natural Area, more commonly known as Tunica Hills. The thrill of Tunical Hills, if you live in South Louisiana, is HILLS. Actual topography. There are, most of the time, a few waterfalls. To reach these waterfalls you have some options.  You can just hike along in the creek beds, which is what I'd done in the past. You can walk on the nice wide main trail, which will take you close to three of these waterfalls. Or, if you want to breathe heavily and concentrate on not sliding off the path into a deep ravine, then you can take the "primitive trail." The sign warned that only "experienced hikers" in "very good physical condition" should try this. Being a couple of city-dwelling smokers whose recent hiking experience amounts to the stairs at Mimi's, we didn't exactly fit the description. We figured it would be all right. 

The main problem we encountered was not so much our inadequate respective phyiscal conditions, but the lack of waterfalls. Well, falls we found, not so much water. The three waterfalls reachable just off the main trail had some water going over them. The other five or so that we sought out, negotiating very narrow, often slippery, and usually steep trails, turned out to be dry. Of course the whole time we both kept claiming to "hear" what must be gallons and gallons of sweet cool water spilling over the rocks, despite the clear and obvious fact that the creek was all but dried up. What we were hearing was wind. Always wind. But we wanted so, so badly to believe. We should have stuck to the rivers and the lakes we were used to. [<------ Derek said that. I'm just repeating it.]

 

 

 

The hike, while a bit of an ass-kicker, was nice. Nature, exercise: sometimes you need that. At least we escaped New Orleas for a while. And, if you hold your head under that one big stream of cold water while imagining walking down the street in New Orleans in August, the whole trip is worth it.

[EDIT: I forgot to mention the alligators. We saw alligators.]

I am un-abandoning this blog

Yes, I was an asshole to stop writing this blog. I've done a fair amount of traveling, to, which I should have been writing about at the time, but didn't. So I will go back and account for all this running around, and I'd better do it soon because I've got more travling in the near future, and I do not want to piss off the travel gods.

 

A quick summary:

I still have to get to my travels with Adnan and Paola on the Black Sea Coast of Turkey in 2009. Luckily I have a throrogh written journal on that one.

Also I must write about the week I spent on a boat with my family in Italy, but I wasn't so good about keeping up with that one. I think I remember the good parts though.

In a little under two weeks I'll be taking my first trip to Asia: Bali. I'll being doing it in high style thanks to my brother's success, for which I deserve exaclty none of the rewards but whatever that's just how the world works sometimes. People get things they don't deserve all the time. And I get to be one of those people sometimes. If I do what I am supposed to do, and I damn well better, this blog will soon know what happens when a backpacking hippie winds up at the Four Seasons Resort, haning out with corporate business executives.

I'd love to get down to that writing about Turkey right now, but I have other priorities, so whatever.

Holy Shit I'm in Istanbul.

Oh neglected blog, how can I make it up to you?

How about I start with ancient updates from last year's trip to Turkey? Better late than never I suppose. I need to make something of this unemployment of mine.

So. Going all the way back to July 30, 2009, back when the Gulf of Mexico was not full of oil and the Saints had never won a Super Bowl and I had fewer ex boyfriends.

After my ten-day sojourn above Sarah Miller's garage in Massachusetts, I finally made my fifth Atlantic crossing to return to my old stomping grounds in Istanbul. When I stepped off the bus from the airport into Taksim Square, two blocks from my former apartment, my first reaction was "Holy shit." That was actually my reaction to Istanbul for a good few days. Where I expected excitement and nostalgia I encountered instead fear, bewilderment, and, at times, horror. But let me back up a minute.

When I stepped off the bus, task number one was to cross the teeming, shouting mass of Turkish people that is Taksim Square, buy a telephone calling card, and call my abrasive yet generous ex boyfriend who was giving me a place to stay for a few days. He'd emailed me already the directions to his apartment:

it's close to the osmanbey metro stop.(there's only one short metro in istanbul and it goes from Taksim square, which you can easily find! )Osmanbey is the first stop from Taksim. take the dolapdere exit (in the direction of Pangalti) at the Osmanbey metro stop,

at the top of the escallator turn right and walk up a (multi-laned one way) street against the traffic, you'll pass a big stone wall around a cemetery on the right, keep going, straight through the lights and the slight hill tilts down, keep going (towards a big yellow building up ahead) and the road sort of sweeps to the left near a taxi rank (at the yellow building), and you'll take the left sweep, very close (15m) is a t-junction where you'll find yourself facing a BIM super-market. turn right, and after maybe 15m take the little alley on the left at the edge of the block (containing the BIM), the alley is about 15m long and runs alongside a big horrible loud fucking building site...at the end of that you are outside our house!

There should have been nothing terrifying about getting on the Metro for one stop and finding my way to Dylan's apartment, and yet this first task loomed as a daunting test of my ability survive the city on my own. I'd lived in the place for two years, and I had every reason to believe that I would be fine, and yet I did not fully believe it. The first time I'd arrived in Istanbul, I'd been coddled a bit, picked up at the airport by a driver sent by my new employer, taken to a hotel. Three days later I was shocked when someone suggested that I get on a bus BY MYSELF. You mean no one was going to hold my hand and show me how to get on the fucking bus? Of course, I laughed later at how green I was, wide-eyed little newbie of an ex-pat. Afraid to take the bus alone. Hah. And now here I was again facing that same fear. I was supposed to walk through Osmanbey to Dylan's house BY MYSELF? What if I got lost? My Turkish had deteriorated significantly in my three-year absence. I'm notoriously bad with directions. What had I gotten myself into?

As expected, I took the wrong exit out of the subway and immediately got lost in Osmanbey. I was, however, able to use my fucked-up Turkish and a fairly lucky guess to get myself finally to Dylan's. Osmanbey is a working class neighborhood not accustomed to many foreigners, especially not ones with backpacks. People gave me queer looks, probably wondering if I was lost. Lost I was not, at least not after the first twenty minutes, and my confidence picked up a little as I tramped downhill towards the BIM.

At Dylan's I dropped my backpack and settled in to his little terrace to drink Efes bira and stare over the skyline of Istanbul, completely aghast at the fact of being there. Aghast at the fact at having lived there. And realizing that I did not understand why I had come back.

Hiding out in Massachusetts

I've run away from New Orleans and am hiding in a loft above Sarah's garage trying to get things done in some kind of productive way. So far I've done well. This is day five, and it's the first sunny day we've had since I've been here. We had to battle the wasps to get into our work space above the garage, and today they tried to make a comeback, but I was too quick. A friend of mine back in New Orleans put some vodoo armor on me, and I'm really relying on it. Besides the night of trespassing in the sculpture garden there has been little excitement, which is just what I need after a manic two months of New Orleans summer.

 Ah, yes, the Belize thing. Well, it's nearly done. I may post the next installment later today but there will be no pictures. All the pictures are on my iMac in New Orleans.

But!

Exciting things are coming up. I'll be on a plane to Istanbul Thursday. My plan is to head to the mountains on the Black Sea coast. I'll try not to take two months to finish writing about that.  I'll have my laptop with me so I could just blog from the hip as I can. That's the whole point of the blog, anyway, right, to just throw things out there all raw and bloody. I'll try to get better at that.

If you're coming to visit me in my loft, bring wasp spray.

Two Belikan - Part Four: Up Through Layers

   

We’d decided the night before where we’d have breakfast. We’d eat at the Cuban breakfast place, the one next to the bar we’d found after the watching the sunset from the hammock in the rooftop palapa. After a brief rest at the Tropical Paradise Hotel and a dip into our supplies of cinnamon buns, cheese and peanut butter, we went out for a walk again. The street was quiet and nearly empty. A plump lady stood in the lighted doorway of the shack that housed a laundry service. Apparently, it was open all night. We wandered into a beachside sports bar where a group of Americans was watching a basketball game on the big screen TV. Basketball is big in Belize. They’re obsessed. We found out later, on our visit to the Altun Ha ruins, that the Mayas had a game very similar to basketball that involved bouncing a rubber ball on knees and elbows to get it into a basket. The winning team was sacrificed, which was what they wanted, because that allowed them to be reborn immediately without having to pass through the nine layers of Hell.
    Jay wanted rum, so he ordered the rum punch advertised on a sign behind the bar.
I demurred at first, sagging from the heat and thinking that liquor was not really what I needed. I found, however, that a few sips of Jay’s rum punch pepped me up, so I ordered my own. We stayed for a couple of rounds then ambled back to the hotel bleary-eyed and satisfied.
    We slept like rocks in that warm room until about two o’clock in the morning, when the mosquito attack began. Buzz. Slap. Shit.
    “Are the mosquitoes attacking you, too?” I said.
    “Fuck yeah, they are.”
    Until then, we thought that we would be able to sleep without air-conditioning, that the breeze from the open window would be enough to keep us comfortable. Now, the open window was proving problematic. I was desperate for sleep, but knew I wouldn’t be able to get any with these little savages jabbing me all night. I was also concerned that I would get malaria. Do people get malaria in Belize? The situation seemed hopeless. There was no solution. Was there? Then, I had an idea.
    “I have an idea,” I said to Jay.
    Two ceiling fans hung motionless above us. I got up and flicked the switches on either war, and, after a few seconds of acceleration, these two fans whirled like jet propellers. I’m fairly sure that the hotel owners had just popped jet propellers off airplanes and attached them to the ceilings. They were effective. I took refuge under the white sheet and waited for the small gale kicked up by our twin jet propellers to drive the little punks out of the room, which they did.
    “We were really stupid not to think of that before,” I said.
    “Yes, we were.”
    Of course there was a solution to the open window/mosquito dilemma. Whoever ran this place had a Diploma in Hospitality Management from International Correspondence Schools. They would not have their guests be devoured by mosquitoes all night. This was Tropical Paradise, not Tropical Hell.
     As we predicted, the sun woke us early in the morning. At seven. Time for Cuban breakfast. The morning was cloudier than the day before. In the warmth of the morning and the haziness of recent sleep and slight hangovers, we sauntered down to CoCo’s Cantina and took a table by a large window that was open to the street. White sand dusted the tile floor. There were purses and shoes for sale. The shelves along the walls were lined with pottery, and a postcard stand stood just inside the door. The food was cheaper in Caye Caulker than in San Pedro. Coco’s charged seven dollars Belize for huevos rancheros with free coffee or tea. I was prepared to eat meat despite my supposed vegetarianism, but the huevos rancheros turned out to be vegetarian—just cheese, eggs and enchilada sauce on a disc of soft bread. The Cuban coffee slid over my tongue and warmed my esophagus all the way down to my stomach.  My eyes widened to the day as I scribbled into my notebook and watched little boys in blue school shirts and black shorts, all wearing the same black shoes, ride by on their bicycles on their way to school. Little girls passed by wearing blue school jumpers over white blouses and matching mary janes, of which I was envious. “I wonder where they get those.” Although the dogs wandered freely, they all wore collars and tags. Gilbert strolled by in shorts and a yellow dive shop t-shirt.
    Over breakfast, Jay and I discussed our plan for the day. It was time to head back for Belize City. Our goal for the day was to see some Maya pyramids. The original plan was that Tom Greenhouse would pick us up from the water taxi station and take us to see some ruins then deliver us to a decent hotel somewhere in the city so that we could catch our flight home in the morning. There were complications with this plan. Tom was busy and couldn’t accommodate us, at least not in the way we wanted to be accommodated. We resolved to figure this out on our own.
    On the main drag in Caye Caulker, several tour shops advertise snorkeling and diving trips as well as trips to the mainland to see Maya ruins. These are the only places that have touts outside, and they don’t harass you as you walk by. They’ll talk to you if you stop to have a look at the signboards. We stopped at a few places that advertised trips to the mainland, but found we were too late to schedule anything for that day. We discussed the possibility of taking buses or renting a car, but we didn’t have time for that. We paced up and down the street then walked out onto the concrete pier at the public beach. I sat down on the pier to make some notes and think on the situation. After writing for a few minutes, I put down my notebook and pen to take some photos of the beach, and when I returned I found my last working pen floating tip down in two feet of water. Jay laughed at my misfortune. Things were not going well. I pulled my pen out of the water. I thought it might still work. It did. The morning was salvageable.
    We walked back up the street and I saw a tourist shop we hadn’t tried yet. Inside, I sat in one of the wicker chairs and said hello to the girl sitting at the desk. I explained our problem. We had to go back to Belize City and needed a guide to take us to see some pyramids and then take us to a hotel. She said she thought she could arrange something and made a phone call. She knew a Tom of her own, who agreed to meet us and take us where we wanted to go for the same price offered by our previous Tom. We agreed. Jay had left his wallet back at the hotel. The girl, Almida, was anxious to solidify the arrangements with a payment. She said we could borrow her bike. I looked at Jay.
    “You wanna go?” I said.
    “No,” he said, “you can go.” He knew I wanted to go.
    “Cool,” I said,” “You got the hotel key?”
    He handed me the key and I looked at Almida. “It’s just outside,” she said, “The pink one.”
    I dashed outside and spotted Almida’s pink cruiser leaning unlocked against a tree. I rolled it into the street, threw my leg over the seat and peddled off, trying to heed the “Go Slow” signs but compelled by giddiness to race up the road, swerving between pedestrians and oncoming bicycles, grinning stupidly at anyone who would catch my eye. I arrived at the gates of the Tropical Paradise out of breath and leaned the bike against the stucco wall. I jogged across the compound, bounded up the stairs and threw open the room door. That’s when I realized I hadn’t asked Jay where I would find his wallet. I hoped I would just find it easily, which I did. I jogged back out to street and jumped on the pink cruiser again. After a few minutes of peddling I realized that I wasn’t sure where I’d come from and slowed at every tourist shop, feeling stupid for not knowing where I was going. Then I saw Jay standing in the street shaking his head.
    “I tried to call you,” he said. “You just raced off and I realized I didn’t tell you where to find my wallet. Your phone doesn’t work here I guess.”
    “I’m a smart girl,” I said, leaning Almida’s bike against the tree, still breathing hard. “I figured it out.”
    We paid the girl and thanked her and then began a swift walk back to the hotel to collect our bags. We didn’t have long before our water taxi was to leave. We legged it as hard as we could, sweat pouring down our faces and dampening our shirts. At the hotel we threw our things into our bags, dropped off the key, and scrambled back to the water-taxi station. We made it in plenty of time. We didn’t even have to ride on the top, this time. We got seats in the very back next to the outboard motors.
As we waited on the street, outside the water taxi station, taxi drivers called to us, asking if we needed a taxi. The sun beat down brutally and sweat shone on everyone’s faces. The taxi drivers seemed hurried and anxious, a contrast to leisurely humor of Caye Caulker that still hung about my limbs. “No, man. Someone’s coming,” I said over and over again. I hoped someone was coming anyway.
The guy who met us at the water taxi station was not Tom, but Albert. He couldn’t find us at first because he was expecting us to come in a different water taxi. A wooden cross dangled from the rearview mirror of his old Toyota minivan. We climbed in with our bags.
“Albert,” I said to him. “Before you take us to Altun Ha, we need to go somewhere for an ATM and also to buy some batteries. Can we do that, do you think?”
“An ATM and some batteries?” he said.
“Please, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“No, it’s no problem at all. I can take you.”
After the couple of quick stops, we left Belize City along the highway we’d come in on. Albert was a good guide. He had a lot to tell us about the history of Belize, and I wrote as quickly as I could, interrupting him to ask questions.
    According to Albert, one-third of the population of Belize lives in Belize City, which is five square miles and is populated by 300,000 people. As Tom had explained, there are four main ethnicities in Belize: African decent, Mestizo, Maya and Taiwanese. It’s the only English-speaking country in Central America and was called British Honduras until nineteen seventy-three. They officially gained their independence from Great Britain on September twenty-first, nineteen eighty one, but they are still part of the Commonwealth, which means the Queen is the official head of state and she’s on all the money, lest you should be tempted to forget that. The Queen has a representative in the government, the governor general, but the Prime Minister runs the country.
    The first airplane to land Belize was Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, which landed there in 1927. The only bowling alley in the country is inside the Princess Casino.
    As we drove out of the city, Albert explained that we were passing through King’s Park, the northern, more affluent extension of the city where the buildings were of concrete to withstand hurricanes, which Albert said is the only natural disaster in Belize. (A few days after Jay and I returned from Belize, there was an earthquake. I guess Albert forgot about earthquakes.) In 1961, Hurricane Hattie destroyed Belize City and changed the course of history. At the time, the Pan-American Highway was being built through Central America and was scheduled to run through Belize. Until that time, traffic had passed to left, in the British style. In order to become compatible with the new highway, however, the Belizians switched to passing on the right. But, after Hurricane Hattie destroyed Belize City, Belmopan because the capital, the funds that were supposed to go to the highway went to rebuilding, and the highway was rerouted through Mexico.
    The most recent hurricane to hit Belize was two years before. Dean hit the northern part of Belize, destroying the citrus, sugar and banana crops that are Belize’s major industry.
    It’s thirty miles from Belize City to Altun Ha. I was surprised they didn’t use the metric system. Albert said they tried to import it but it didn’t work. The northern extension of the city is two and half feet below sea level. The land has to be filled in to develop it, which is costly. Albert pointed out houses that were leaning and about to collapse. The builders had failed to make sure the pilings touched bedrock. I asked Albert what those birds were called, the one’s that circled over-head with pelican heads and forked tails. Frigates, he said.
    We crossed the Old Belize River outside of the city. Albert told us that one-hundred seventy miles west of the city, the Macal and Mopan rivers join together into the Belize River. The British came to Belize originally for the mahogany, floating the mahogany logs down the rivers to Belize City, where small boats hauled them to the British ships. Two-hundred years ago, the river was filled with mahogany logs. It took two weeks to get to the city from the west by boat, mainly because of the logs. We drove through Ladyville, so called because that’s where the ladies used to wait for their men to return from the log drive. The land turned to palm trees and marsh interspersed with orange mamosa trees. We passed through a police checkpoint and met an old Bluebird school bus repainted and used as an inter-city bus.
     Albert informed us that seventy percent of the land in Belize is natural vegetation. The savannah, to the north, is clay soil. The north gets six inches of rain per year. The south gets one-hundred eighty. In the north they grow sugar and tropical fruits and nuts-almond, cashews, mangos. Cashew nuts, we learned, grow at the bottom of the cashew fruit, which grows wild and from which the locals make marmalade jam, ice cream, candy and, most popular, wine. They say you get drunk twice on Cashew wine. You get drunk the first time at night, and then the next morning, after fifteen minutes in the sun, you get drunk again.
    As we were driving through Lucky Strike, Albert told us the story of this highway and why it is so crooked. The British surveyor, as the story goes, had been drunk on cashew wine the night before, and in the morning, as happens, was drunk again. He fell asleep on the mule with the people behind him clearing the trees for the highway as the mule meandered along. This road was surveyed by a mule, they say.
    We turned off the highway onto San Hill Road. The Altun Ha ruins were discovered in nineteen sixty-one when the mountains were being excavated to build the road, which has been abandoned since the main highway was built. The first thing they found was a jade necklace. A Canadian named David Pendergrass led the excavation of the ruin. A car approached from the other direction and both vehicles had to take to the shoulder to pass. The roads here, I thought, were on par with those in Romania. “They say you need a PhD. to drive in Belize,” said Albert.
    He told us about the different palm trees. The cohoon palms, whose long leaves grow as upside-down cones out of their trunks, are what the palapa roofs are made from. The Mayas could make palapa roofs that wouldn’t leak for seven to ten years. To prevent them leaking, according to the Mayas, you must harvest the cohoon plam leaves three days before and after the full moon. The nuts of the cohoon palm grow in side of a hard shell that must be cracked open with a stone. You boil the nuts to draw out the palm oil, which they use for cooking.
    We stopped on the side of the road twice. The first time was so that Jay and I could photograph a devil’s guts cactus. This vine, which for all the world looks like snakes and skulls, envelops the branches of a tree. It looks evil, but it is not a parasite. It’s an epiphyte. The tree and the cactus have a symbiotic relationship in which the cactus stores water during the rainy season that the tree uses during the dry season. The second stop was to pick a cashew fruit that Albert spotted growing on a roadside tree. Albert showed us how to eat it by eating it himself. Jay and I never learned what a cashew fruit tastes like.
    We arrived at Altun Ha. There were no other tourists there. We’d arrived in Belize just after the close of the regular tourist season. The weather was now too hot for most tourists. Being from New Orleans, Jay and I were more prepared than most people for the heat, but we felt it. We paid our entrance to the park, ten Belize each, and followed Albert to a little hut with maps and photos, one being of the huge jade head that was discovered at Altun Ha and is considered so valuable that it is kept in a secret location somewhere in Belize.
    Albert walked us around the ruins, stacks of limestone rising out of the short grass. He handed us each a piece of all-spice leaf to chew on. The sharp sweetness of it pricked my tongue. He told us about the ancient ball game in which the winning team was gratefully sacrificed for their efforts. A tree grew tall and slender with its branches concentrated at the top. It’s called a ceiba pentandra, and the Mayas believed that after your soul passed through the nine layers of hell(or not, if you were really good at ancient basketball), it was reborn through this tree. It’s the axis mundi, I thought, the axis of the world.
    Here’s a funny thing we learned about the downfall of Maya civilization. The king, in order to impress his subjects and convince them he was a god, would ascend his throne on the highest of the pyramids, gaze out over the horizon and, seeing the clouds gathering on the horizon (which the subjects could not see from the ground), predict rain in say, two hours. He was right, most of the time, and when he wasn’t he had to think fast to come up with an excuse. The subjects began to blame the king for the droughts and ensuing famine and also to figure out his little scam, which resulted in their revolt against him. Goes to show, you can fool all of the Mayas some of the time, but . . ..
    Albert taught us what to do if we get a snakebite in the rain forest. You might want to write this down. Look for a tree called a bullhorn acacia (see photo). Chew the bark and swallow the juice. Put the fiber on the wound. If you do that, Albert told us, you have six to eight hours to get to a doctor. We marveled for a few moments at the strangler figs, a parasitic plant that starts out in the branches of a palm tree as an air plant then stretches its vines down and up and around the palm, eventually killing it. After our natural history lesson, we climbed the steep limestone steps of the largest pyramid to the top. I took the king’s view over the horizon and tried to make a prediction.
    The Mayas, as you may have heard, predicted the end of the world for twenty-twelve. It’s not so simple as that, though. Their calendar ends at twenty-twelve. We asked Albert to explain. He told us that the gods had made man in three ways. The first time was from corn, the second time was from mud, and the third time, after the end of the world in twenty-twelve, would be the last time. I checked this story against the information on Maya folklore available on the Internet and found it to be a really confused version of the prevailing one, which says that the gods first created man out of mud, but they had no brains. The second batch, made of wood, had no emotions. On the third try they found the perfect material—corn maize. Realizing that Albert may not know what he is talking about makes me wary of his snakebite advice.
    After our tour of Altun Ha, we were counting on Albert to take us to a decent hotel in Belize City. He said he would take us to two, but we were satisfied with the first one, the Belcove Hotel, situated in the middle of town on the Haulover Canal. The front side of the hotel, or what appears more to be the front side, the more appealing side fronted with broad balconies overlooking the water, faces the Canal, which, before the recent building of roads, was how travelers reached Belize City. The rate was fifty dollars Belize for a room with one bed, no air-conditioning, and a shared bathroom in the hall. At the front desk, a young, friendly Meztiso woman wearing a red and white striped shirt filled out the paperwork with close guidance from an older woman. When she was finished and the older woman had disappeared into the back office, she whispered to me, “I’m new.”
    After we settled into our room at the Belcove we went out to explore Belize City and find food. We’d already had a preliminary tour by car when Tom Greenhouse picked us up from the airport three days before. It was mid-afternoon and scorching hot out. School children in different uniforms passed us on foot and on bicycles. As on the islands, small children often rode with their knees draped over handle-bars. After considering a few of the small local restaurants, we decided to get a taste of Taiwanese food in Belize at a place called Café Belize. In the balmy shade of the restaurant, we ate crispy, greasy fried rolls with hot sauce. I washed mine down with a papaya milkshake. The stereo played the worst eighties rock ballads ever recorded, and Jay and I giggled as each one started, worse than then one before. They were all love songs. “I think this is the ‘unrealistic expectations; mix,” I said.
    Jay listened for a moment to one singer crooning that his love would last forever. “Yeah, you just keep thinking that buddy,” he said.
    Across the street from the Taiwanese café was an outdoor bar. There were a few people there, but not many. I sat at one of the wooden tables while Jay went up to the bar. “Two Belikan,” he said, and in a moment he held the two brown bottles with the napkins twisted over the top.  We smoked cigarettes and listened to the dance music being piped over the speakers from a local radio station. The DJ spoke over the music, announcing parties and promotions at clubs around Belize City.
    This was our final night in Belize before returning to New Orleans, and I concluded that it was best this way. A night in Belize City would be an appropriate buffer between the tranquility of the islands and the jarring chaos of our home in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. This was more like what we were used to. Life in a dirty, dangerous city. Dirty bums and traffic. Garbage in the streets. Against the warnings of everything we’d read, we made a plan to go out that night and see just what this city had for a couple of American tourists who weren’t afraid of getting into trouble if we had to.
    “Okay, here’s the plan,” Jay said, back at the hotel. "We walk down the street, and wherever we see a Belikan beer sign, we go in, no matter what the place looks like. You in?”
    “I’m in,” I said.
    “Let’s see how far we get.”

Two Belikan - Part Three: Under the Surface

May 25, 2009

 

When we arrived in Caye Caulker, I was just starting to relax and to be convinced that I would not fall off the boat. I’d been contemplating my chances if I did. I figured the boat was going fast enough that I would come down and hit the water well behind the outboard motors, which was the worst of the danger. Assuming I didn’t lose consciousness on impact, I could probably figure out which way was up by the sunlight and just float in the calm salty water until the boat came back for me, assuming it would. So even if I did fall off, I was thinking, my chances would be pretty good.

All that was moot, of course, when the engines cut off and the boat drifted up to the dock in Caye Caulker. Jay took my hand as I leapt over the gap between the swaying boat and the pier. The man handed us our backpacks and we strode off in search of a place to stay. Caye Caulker was much quieter than San Pedro, as promised. There were no cars and only a few golf carts, most of them taxis. There are no paved streets. It’s all white sand underfoot.

Just across from the water taxi station we found a multi-colored set of buildings with a sign outside that said “Tina’s Hostel”. Inside the little wooden gate, a few Americans were lounging in hammocks in a common area space shaded by palm trees. They smiled and said hello. A young woman came out and turned down the loud music so we could talk to her. It was twelve U.S. dollars a night to stay in the dormitory, she said. The place was inviting, but we decided to see what else was available. Back on the main road, we progressed a few feet before a young black man with short dreadlocks, faded from dark roots to red to blonde tips, approached us.

“Do you have a reservation?” he asked.

“No, man, we don’t.” Jay answered.

He told us he’d take us to a nice place, all the way down at the end. He asked if we minded walking. We didn’t mind. The sun glared in the white sand. Glibert, wearing  a white t-shirt from a local dive shop, strolled with no sense of urgency, and behind him we matched his easy gait. Under his rolled-up green trousers, the white soles of Gilbert’s brown feet kicked up a light spray of sand. Island residents rolled by on bicycles, some with toddlers draped by the knees over the handlebars. Absent was the sound of motors or car horns. Signs on the side of the road said “Go Slow.”

Gilbert led us through an arched gate of yellow stucco to the Tropical Paradise Hotel—bright banana yellow cabins with coral trim standing on ten-foot stilts over the sand. He took us into the office, a small concrete building, where he spoke to the girl at the counter. On the wall above her head hung a framed diploma in Hospitality Management from International Correspondence Schools. “At least we’re in the hands of someone with some training,” I thought. She gave him a key and told us the room would be fifty Belize. No air conditioning, she said. That would be fine. Gilbert led us toward the back of the small complex, pointing toward a pier jutting out into the turquoise water. We could swim there, he said. Toward the back of the complex, a young woman on the other side of a row of pink hibiscus was hanging sheets in the mid-day sun.  The thin sheets, some plain white, some with whimsical prints, flapped dreamily in the breeze blowing off the sea. The air was tinged with the faint lemon scent of cleaning solution, the smell that seems to dominate cheap Hispanic groceries. At the top of a set of wooden stairs, the room Gilbert showed us was a bungalow set atop ten-foot stilts. Room twenty-one again. The inside was pale yellow with turquoise trim, and an orange floral curtain fluttered over the open window. A small balcony faced the water. The room was just big enough to hold the two double beds that had no sheets on the mattresses. Gilbert explained that the girl hadn’t finished cleaning yet. No problem. We’d take it. Gilbert said we could leave our bags in the room. Outside, he spoke in almost understandable Belizian English to the girl hanging fresh sheets. She would clean the room right away.

Gilbert led us back to the office, whistling and snapping his fingers as he ambled across the courtyard. He asked if we needed anything to smoke. We didn’t. We were getting used to being offered drugs. As tourists in a tourist destination, it was only natural that we should be approached by people trying to sell us something. Our interaction with Gilbert didn’t feel like a hustle. He didn’t seem desperate or anxious, like the touts I’ve encountered in other places. His manner was that of a friendly attempt to make sure we were comfortable and had what we needed. His job was simple and he seemed happy
with it.

I caught sight of a two-foot long spiky streak scurrying under a building. “Iguana!” I said. Gilbert chuckled at my surprise.

“There are a lot of those here.”

After paying for the room, we had a rest by the water to wait for the young woman to clean our room. I settled myself on the low concrete wall at the edge of the water and pulled out a cigarette and my notebook. Jay walked to the end of the pier and gazed over the azure blue Caribbean. We were far away now, as far out as we were going to get before starting to go back. We were at the end of the island. There were very few tourists on account of it being Commonwealth Day, and we saw no other guests at our hotel.  The only sound was the faint residue of voices carried from the street beyond the gates of the Tropical Paradise. When Jay returned from his stroll on the pier I told him that I normally tried to avoid staying anywhere with the word “paradise” in the name, but that this place was a notable exception to that rule.

After about twenty minutes we checked on the room and found the young woman’s white thong sandals outside the door. So, we walked back out to the street to take a look around and find a little more food to put with the tortillas, cheese, peanut butter and fruit we had carried from San Pedro. The first grocery store we came to was cleaner and better stocked than the one out by the airport in San Pedro. I was pleased to find Happy Cow, one of my favorite traveling snacks, on sale. I bought that, a postcard for my mom, and a blue Jello freezey pop. I asked the guy at the counter if he had scissors to cut it open for me. His English, unlike that of the other locals we’d spoken with so far, was functional but not fluent. He snipped the corner of the plastic tube and instructed me in broken English that I was to suck the water out and, for some reason, thought it necessary to warn me about the Jello. Back out on the street I sucked the sweet water from the package and then discoveered my first bit of Jello, a slimy, chewy morsel that I found a weird but oddly entertaining variation on the freezey pops of my childhood.

Our room was ready when we returned, pastel sheets stretched across the slightly sagging mattresses. No blankets. We sat at the plastic table on the balcony and dug into our supplies. I still had half a liter of the fresh squeezed orange pineapple banana juice I’d bought that morning in San Pedro. Jay drank a Belikan and we split Happy Cow, peanut butter and a bag of buns Jay had picked up that turned out to be dusted in cinnamon and sugar. Happy Cow goes great with anything. The peanut butter and Monterrey Jack cheese weren’t a bad combination, either. The fresh juice was warm but refreshing. I peeled the other orange and handed Jay half of it. There was a lot of rind to it, but once you got past that it was delicious. The sky was clear save a slight haze of high thin clouds like tenuous brush strokes on a blue canvas. Thin pine trees spired into the air in groups of two to five, which in my mind formed a visual rhyme with the minarets over the skyline of the tourist towns on the coast of Turkey. The mysterious birds I’d been watching since we arrived circled overhead. They were the size of falcons and glided like sea gulls but had the heads of pelicans and forked tails. I meant to ask a local what they were called but kept forgetting.

Jay offered me the other Belikan he’d bought at the grocery store, so I drank that and flicked my cigarette ashes into the conch shell that we assumed was meant to serve as an ashtray.
“Are you sure that’s an ash tray?” I asked Jay.

“It is now.”

There was a clothesline strung across the balcony with a few clothes pins provided and Jay pinned his button down shirt to it. It was time to go swimming. I put on my swimsuit and slathered my fair, freckled skin in SPF 30. The brutality of the afternoon sun was more enticement than we needed to jump off the wooden pier into the clear sapphire cool of the sea. On the way through the hotel courtyard another tourist called to us.

“Hey, do you guys know what time it is?”

Jay and I looked at each other and shrugged.

“Actually,” I said, “We have no idea.”

At the end of the pier, Jay dove right in to the water, but I stuck my foot in first to test the temperature, finding it just cool enough to be comforting but warm enough to plunge into without another moment’s hesitation.

The water came up to just beneath my shoulders, and underfoot was sand and sea grass. I tip-toed with mild trepidation, mindful of the danger of jagged surprises lodged among tufts of grass, which were mildly disconcerting, if harmless, in their own rite. I dove under the surface and kicked my body forward while pulling myself toward the bottom with my arms and then glided just above the grass with my eyes open to the murky green world until I started to run out of breath, then closed me eyes and reared upward, broke through the surface and wiped the salt water from my eyes before opening them and blinking at Jay. I flashed a smile then arched my back and jumped up, spread my arms wide and floated with no effort, closed my eyes with my ears beneath the water and lay perfectly still listening to the gurgle of the barely stirring sea around me.

I felt moved to find out might be hanging out around the pier. Nails, I realized, were a good possibility. So I swam over to the ladder and reached up to grab one of the beams between the supporting posts. There was no grass under the pier, just sand, but I knew that unfriendly things could be hiding just under the sand. I hoisted myself up for a moment and inspected the rest of the two by four I was holding on to for nails jutting up and saw that it was all clear. Dangling again with my feet just above the sand, I pulled myself to the other side and had a little fun poking the live barnacles suctioned to it. The current took my feet for a moment and my ankle brushed the post. That would leave a red mark for the rest of the day. Barnacles aren’t nice. Something moved on the post. It was a sea crab about the size of a nickel. Jay, who’d been overseeing my under-pier adventure from a slight distance, ducked under the pier and pulled himself along the beam to stalk the crab with me. The crab disappeared under the water and we crept back along the beam to the other side where we found a much bigger sea crab, this one black and white striped, which I attempted to molest, and that’s how I
found out that those things jump. I decided to leave the wild life alone for a while.

When we’d had enough of swimming, I climbed up the slimy wooden ladder and stood dripping on the pier. Jay followed. We hadn’t brought towels. We didn’t need them. By the time we walked back to the room we were dry again. I hung my swimsuit next to Jay’s shirt on the balcony and changed into shorts and a tank top. The light was getting low and we were inspired to go out photographing.
On the way out we took a walk around the cemetery just outside the gates. From one of the bleached gravestones, an iguana barked at Jay. It ran back into its hole before I could get a picture. I wondered if there might be some Belizian saying or legend regarding being barked at by an Iguana living in a grave. It might be some kind of omen. Was he trying to warn us? Was he reprimanding us? Maybe he was just saying “Welcome to Caye Caulker!”

Nearly every building in Caye Caulker is worth a photograph. Most of the structures are wooden buildings on stilts with pitched tin roofs. On some of them the paint is faded and peeling and the roof is streaked with rust. Those look just like the little fishing shacks visible from the raised highways that run through the swamps of south Louisiana. Many of the houses have been built in the simple Victorian style and painted in the motif that gives old New Orleans neighborhoods their charm. Blue with orange trim. Yellow with blue trim. Yellow and orange. Green and blue. They’re not much on air-conditioning, and white curtains flutter out of open windows. In the yards, trees and bushes of broad green leaves bloom in orange, red, and pink, and fruit dangles from the limbs of citrus trees.  Big wooden barrels next to the houses collect the rainwater that, as far as I could tell, is the only source of water on the island. Along the main road on the Caribbean side of the island, the locals run rooming houses and pensions. The local population, who all seem to make their living from the tourists, occupies all of the houses in the more residential lee side. (That was a happy contrast to the disappointment of finding the charming fishing town on the Croatian island of Susak to be completely converted to American vacation homes and occupied by a set of Americans who were not happy to see a couple of dirty backpackers wandering around town. The two Croatians we eventually found were friendly.)

In the busiest part of the island, near the beach, there was one large concrete building, obviously new construction, that advertised “luxury condos” with air conditioning. I heard the drilling and hammering of more new modern buildings going up and I sighed with regret. How soon before they started bringing in cars? How soon will Americans be buying the locals out of their beautiful Victorian houses and installing air conditioners that hum and rattle all day and night? The tourist industry was already starting to change this place, and I understood that I was part of it. The Tropical Paradise, for all its simplicity, was new construction. My American money was financing the new concrete buildings. Would it one day pave the road?

Walking along the lee side road, Jay stopped to photograph a breadfruit tree. In Belize City, Tom had told us that the British had imported the breadfruit trees to feed the slaves on the sugar plantations.  An old pick up truck rolled by, the only car we saw on the island, loaded with furniture, lumber, tools and assorted junk. When it had passed, the brake lights came on, then the white reverse lights lit up as the wrinkled Mestizo driving the truck threw it in reverse and rolled back toward us. The man stopped next to us and said, “Hey, you want to know the Maya word for that?” He pointed at the breadfruit tree. “Mazapan.”

Two little boys leaned over the seat from the back of the cab. One of them repeated the word, “Mazapan.”

“Mazapan,” Jay and I said.

“Mazapan,” said the man.

“Mazapan,” said the boy.

“Mazapan,” we said.

“Mazapan.”

“Mazapan.”

“Mazapan.”

It went on like that for a few more rounds, and then the man started talking about Captain Fry, Captain Cook and Tahiti. He told us he could tell us plenty of stories if we wanted, then drove off again in his bouncing truck of lumber and junk. I guess he realized he’d be easy to find if we went looking for him.

As we walked back toward the Tropical Paradise, we realized the sun would soon set and that we wanted to be somewhere good with beers in our hands for that moment. Near the hotel, Gilbert had pointed out and recommended a three-story reggae bar with a palapa hut on the roof. Surely, that was our destination.

We found the place empty. We found the bartender, a young Mestizo man, sweeping on the roof. Jay told him we’d like a couple of beers but to take his time. The gimmick of the place was that almost all of the seats, at the tables and along the bars, were wooden swings suspended from the ceiling. On the roof we found a hammock and two hammock chairs. At first, Jay and I each took a hammock chair, unwilling to deprive the other of the choice place in the hammock. After a moment I climbed into the hammock.

“I think we can both fit in this,” I said.

“I think you’re right,” Jay said, and climbed in with me.

We sat cross-legged facing each other and the bartender arrived with our two Belikans with the white napkins folded around the top. We clinked the bottles together, then, in the gently swaying net of the hammock, lay back in silence to watch the sunset, which was unspectacular, hidden behind low clouds and obscured on the horizon by the mainland on the other side of the sound. Still, there couldn’t have been a better place in the world to be, no two people more pleased with themselves and each other and the place we found ourselves by just going ahead leaping into the unknown.

Two Belikan -- Part Two: On the Verge

May 24 - 25, 2009

We woke up around nine o’clock in the morning at the Spind Drift Hotel, which was about half a block down the beach from the water taxi station, as we realized later. We walked by it at least six times before agreeing to the fifty dollars American for the air-conditioned double. By the time we settled there we’d been walking up and down the half-mile main drag of San Pedro for a couple of hours. My thin tight fitting jeans were sticking to my sweat damp thighs, my feet hurt, I was hungry and I was on the verge of losing hope and looking for somewhere to sleep outside. We’d arrived at seven o’clock on the Sunday before Commonwealth Day, a slow day off-season, so there weren’t many hotel owners expecting us.

We started off walking down the street looking for one of the hotels Jay’s friend back in New Orleans had recommended. A layer of white sand coated the stone-paved street. There were a few cars in San Pedro, which you can drive to by going north around the sound, but mostly people puttered by on golf carts or rode bicycles. Mestiso women in shorts and tank tops rolled by clutching staring toddlers. Bare foot black men with dreak locks rode by on bicycles. A few other tourists strolled by. As the hour got late there were fewer and fewer of them. I was unsure of how safe it was to be out on the street after dark. Someone told us to watch ourselves. The street was lined with stucco buildings. There were plenty of restaurants, shops selling thong sandals, swimsuits, sarongs and post cards, and tour agencies advertising diving and snorkeling trips. The smell of frying meet wafted from the street vendors and my stomach felt hollow. I had decided before I left that I would break my vegetarianism on this trip in order not to be fussy and to be able to better enjoy the local cuisine, and I found myself eager to eat meat. We were determined to find a hotel before we ate, though.

When we got to the end of our first pass down the main street we saw a Belikan beer sign and decided to stop in for a couple of beers and some advice. The place was small and dimly lit by the poker machines lining two walls. One of the two girls behind the bar was Taiwanese. Tom had told us there were a lot of Taiwanese in Belize. We dropped our backpacks to the floor and rested on bar stools.

“Two Belikan,” said Jay.

The bartender girls were friendly. Oddly so. They sat directly across from us on the other side of the bar and did a lot of nodding and giggling. One girl offered to take us to the restaurant next door and serve us. We said we wanted to find a hotel first. A couple of other Americans came in and they were friendly. The bartenders directed us how to get to Lily’s, one of the hotels recommended by Jay’s friend back in New Orleans. I was hungry and a little disoriented but thought I could follow their directions. Eventually we located Lily’s. It looked like a good place, right on the beach, but there was no one in the office, which was locked. There were a couple of phone numbers on the door. We could use our cell phones locally by just dialing the seven numbers, which was so simple and logical that it didn’t occur to us until Tom explained. I dialed one number and Jay dialed the other, and we could hear both phones ringing inside. But no answer. No luck. We discovered that the Conch Shell was next to Lily’s, but no one answered there, either. A few blocks down we found Ruby’s, but there was no vacancy, they said. Maybe they just didn’t like the look of us. The next place we found had someone in the office and a room but it was much too expensive. We resolved to keep going.

After walking by the sign repeatedly, we entered the doorway that led past a bookstore into the courtyard of the Spind Drift. No one in the office. Damn. As we were walking out we heard someone calling and turned around to see a man wearing a shirt that said “security.” Yes, there was a room. Fifty dollars was more than we wanted to spend on a hotel room but we took it without hesitation.
The man led us up the stairs in the pink stucco courtyard and showed us to the room. Number twenty-one. The tile-floored room was plain but clean and had air conditioning, a luxury we didn’t require, and little balcony were we could rest and smoke for a few minutes. Before Jay had finished talking to the security man I pulled a change of clothes out of my bag and went into the bathroom to splash cold water on my pink-flushed face. I peeled off my thin stretch jeans, slid into my leopard print shorts and exchanged my sleeveless camouflage thermal for a plain black tank top. I felt much better.

It was getting late—after nine o’clock. After a rest on the balcony we went in search of food. We tried the restaurant downstairs but found it too pricey. The cheapest thing on the menu was seven dollars American and that was the guacamole. I won’t pay seven dollars for guacamole in America. We were sure we could find something cheaper. We walked about a block the beachside square outside of the church and found two ladies serving up hot food under a white catering tent. For three dollars American I got a generous pile of rice and beans and a couple pieces of barbeque chicken. Yes, I do want the peppers, I told her. I bought Jay’s two beef tacos for five Belize dollars. Yes, that is two dollars and fifty cents American. That was more like it. We took our dinner over to a park bench and shoved delicious spicy mouthfuls into our growling stomachs. We hadn’t eaten since the chips and salsa at the airport in Dallas at noon, if that counts. A dog walked over and stood patiently near me without looking at me or wagging its tail. I gave it half of my chicken.

When we walked back into the hotel, the security guy flagged us down and gave us the large bottle of water that comes with the room. I commented to Jay that we must have looked like a couple of wilted plants. We realized that we hadn’t drunk any water all day. “We really have to remember to drink water from now on,” I said to Jay. He agreed.

We went out in search of a bar and found ourselves in an open-air beach side joint with loud rock music and black lights. We saw no need to look further. We drank a few rounds of Belikan and were offered drugs by a neatly dressed black man with sunglasses on his close-cropped head and a dirtier one with long dreadlocks. We were not interested in their drugs, but appreciated the offer. When we had drunk off our long day of travel, we walked back the hotel for cold showers and a night of hard-earned sleep. All was quiet but the soothing hum of the air conditioner and I slept so deeply that when I woke up I didn’t know for a few seconds where I was.

I’d like to say that we woke up in the morning refreshed, but really we woke up in the morning slightly hung over. I wanted coffee immediately, as I always do when I wake up. We went out in search of coffee and quickly found a Cuban coffee place, another open-air affair with sand on the floor and a view of the beach from the wooden tables. We each ordered an Americano, which cost two dollars each and were served to us in large white mugs. The reserved but polite man behind running the espresso machine brought out the cream and sugar on a white plate with a red napkin. It was all very pretty and civilized. We drank hot coffee in the hot sun. I pulled out my notebook and wrote for a few minutes while Jay leaned his head on his hand and tried to wake up. I had a second cup of coffee and then was ready for action.

We’d decided the night before to try to keep our food cost down by going to a grocery store and picking up a few things. As we were walking down the street a man came up along side us on a bicycle and tried to make conversation. When I came back from my trip, one of my New Orleans bar friends said to me that people from New Orleans do a lot better than normal people down there, because we are used to talking to people and having them talk to us. It occurred to me later that normal people would probably not talk to this man on a bicycle, but, naturally, we told him all about what we were doing, which was looking for a grocery store. He showed us to the one by the airport, the tiny terminal where people get on and off the water planes that shuttle better-heeled tourists than us between San Pedro and the main land in twelve minutes. Our little guide was also in the pot brokering business.

Inside the grocery store I looked for traveling snacks. The store was small and dirty and there wasn’t much on offer. I found a bag of six tortillas and a couple of granola bars. To that I added a jar of peanut butter and a block of Monetary Jack cheese. They didn’t have a small knife in there but I assumed I’d be able to find one somewhere else. I paid twenty-three Belize for all this. Cheese and peanut butter and expensive, but protein is important. I figure you can travel with unrefrigerated cheese for two to three days. Next we located the produce store, where I found the red bell peppers disappointingly expensive. Jay seemed a little off put (I might be imagining this) by the ugliness of the oranges, which were small and almost half-brown with blemishes. We Americans have been conditioned to expect our fruit look fake. I bought two of the oranges and a plantain. Jay picked up a couple of kiwis. All this for four Belize was pretty good. In the house wares store I found a set of fork, spoon and knife for six ninety-five. Now we were all set. We passed a woman cutting up fruit and putting it in plastic cups on a cart shaded by a large umbrella. I pointed at a cup of pale orange flesh.

“Melon?”

“Mango, man.” She replied.

“What’s this?” I asked, pointing to a cup of red chunks.

“Papaya.”

“How much?”

 “Three.”

We paid the lady and walked down the street digging our fingers into the cup of flesh-red papaya. I told Jay that if I got sick not to tell anyone I ate the cut papaya off the street. I learned in my food service days that cut fruit like melon, mango and papaya, if not properly handled, is one of the best ways to get salmonella. But I like to live on the edge. It’s worth it. Back at the hotel we sat on the balcony to have our breakfast, which consisted of a couple of peanut butter and cheese burritos and half an orange each. Not a bad breakfast at all.

We’d been told by Jay’s friend Billy to go to a place called Caye Caulker (pronounced “key”). It was supposed to be smaller and quieter than San Pedro. And cheaper. After I’d photographed the blue-tiled shower, which I was obsessed with for some reason (It was real tile! The whole bathroom was real tile!), we packed up our back packs and found the water taxi station half a block away. It was eleven fifteen and we were just in time to get the eleven thirty express to Caye Caulker. I’m not sure what makes the difference between the express and the not-express, since all the water taxis cross the sound at top speed, and there are no stops to make in between. Tickets were twelve dollars Belize each. I sat on the little bench to write for a few minutes and could see fish swimming in the crystal clear water through the cracks in the boardwalk. The water taxi station was a cheerful pale blue building with white doors and red trim and a bicycle rack out font where no one used locks. On the beach a couple of men were selling conch shells on white linen-draped tables under a couple of palm trees. It was hot, but a comforting breeze blew off the water.

 People began to line up for the water taxi. We questioned how they were going to get so many people on that boat. We soon learned that one strategy they had was to ask adventurous-looking people like us if we minded riding on top. On the bridge. Which is not at all intended for passengers. Riding on top sounded like a much better option than being stuffed into that cabin, so we handed the man our back packs and climbed on up. There were already two people up there and two more would follow after us. The man piled all of our luggage up in the front of the bridge and we tried to position ourselves so as not to fall off. I sat in the shade of the blue canopy where I could cling to the two-foot high ledge around the bridge. Jay opted for sitting on the ledge and hanging on to the one inch diameter canopy support. The American couple that came up after us were in a more perilous position. A stocky man from Alabama with a straw hat and a Hawaiin shirt unbuttoned to reveal the shag rug on his chest and belly sat far out on the deck. The girl with him sat in the middle under the canopy on her small black suitcase and offered me a seat on it next to her, which I accepted.

The engines revved up and we pulled away from the dock. The man in the straw hat reached back to hold onto the girl’s ankle, and I reached up to hold onto the army mail bag Jay was wearing around his shoulder. I assumed the hairy man and the girl who’s ankle he was clutching were a couple, and I’m sure they assumed the same about us. Little did they suspect that we barely knew each other, that he was going through a divorce and that I had been having my own romantic troubles with an ex-boyfriend who’d been drifting in and out of my life to upset my apple cart for two years. When my ex found out (via a Facebook update) that I was running off to Belize, he called to chastise me for being “in the moment” and accused me of not having any self-respect. The first one I could agree with, but the second was completely unfair. I may be impulsive and a little reckless, but self-respect is not an issue. Jay and I had at least taken some precautions. We’d exchanged copies of each other’s passports and emergency contacts and other instructions. Mine included calling my sister if there was a problem and my mother only as a last resort. His included calling his friend back in New Orleans if there was a problem and his wife only if he were dead.

What my ex-boyfriend couldn’t understand was that all this man wanted from me was a travel companion. Sometimes you just need someone to hold on to you and make sure you don’t fall off the boat. I’m not sure if I was holding on to keep me or him from falling off. Maybe both. Maybe I just wanted to make sure that if one of us went, the other would, too.