Belize

​BELIZE:

CHOCOLATE AND KARATE CHICKENS 
Most people I meet seem never to have heard of Belize. It’s only a small country, 400 miles long and has only seven towns. It used to be part of Guatamala, and then a bunch of British pirates (really) got their mitts on it and renamed it British Honduras and plundered it for timber and sugar. Then they bored with it for some reason and it re-gained it’s independence. The Belizeans are happy for the Brits to leave a few soldiers hanging about, just to keep the Guatemalans from trying to claim it back as theirs. In retaliation for this, I am later to discover, the Guatemalans are very keen to swamp the southern end of the country with the sounds of their very terrible radio stations crashing across the border.
Back in Mexico, Chetumal is practically on the border with Belize and seven miles on we cross; 

A black Belizean customs woman with a familiar Caribbean lilt in her voice nods her head from side to side in a ‘I’ve said this a thousand times in the last hour’ kind of way as she reels out a list of things I might want to declare, the last one being ‘more than 5000 US dollars’. ‘I wish!’ says I, 

‘Yeah, me too!’ she grins and laughs.

We pass through sugar-cane country, which bizarrely reminds me of Thetford Forest in Norfolk back home. Big flattish fields with trees in the distance. I guess I must be getting a little homesick.
The Belizeans are a smudged cultural mix of black Caribs, Mayans, Hispanics, assorted westerners and a group of Carib/Mayan mix called the Garifuna. Apart from spots of Spanish, it’s a great relief to be able to understand what folks are saying. As soon as I step off the bus in Belize City, I instinctively like the place. It’s very colourful, slightly shabby and very Caribbean with lots of calypso and reggae about the place.

Belize City is actually a medium-sized town really. No sky-scraping office blocks here. The country’s tiny and has a real sense of cosiness about it. I’m by the Caribbean Sea! That certainly isn’t anything I had in mind when I left England, but I can cope with that!
I eat bread and cheese by the harbour sitting on a jetty just watching the sea slopping about lazily round little wooden boats. Eventually I decide I’d better book into a hostel after deciding that buying a bicycle and cycling through Belize is not really something I can afford to do; though after so many buses, cycling would be great. 

I book into the Seaside Hostel which is cheap, very wooden and cosy and run by a lovely big round Caribbean woman. I go out to dinner with a couple in their early forties who are on honeymoon. They are from Colorado.

Checking my email at the hotel, I discover that both the WWOOF farms I have written to have a space for me to visit them. They both sound pretty good, the second one in the south has kids and works with ‘Green and Black’ an English chocolate maker that sources it’s chocolate from the south of Belize, which sounds pretty interesting.
I leave the warm and sunny slightly higgledy-piggledy town and take the bus to Hummingbird on the Hummingbird Highway where I am to visit Mr. Mike Scott at Hidden Falls farm. A young girl at the village accompanies me partway until she reaches the village store. It’s hot and small wooden houses speckle the tarmac highway against a background of vivid green chaos. The road follows along the bottom of a wide and spectacular winding mountain valley alongside a small river. The lower reaches are predominantly of matrices of orange groves which have a fantastic jasmine odour and contrast dramatically with the high mountain forest behind them. 
Mike Scott’s place is quite a ‘regular’ garden with ‘lawn’ and rows of cabbages. Apart from his orchard of oranges he’s focusing on growing fruit trees; breadfruit (you can fry it like chips), bananas, grapefruit and sapodilla  which has a distinctive taste a bit like papaya and cinnamon and I discover is very good.

Mike has a simple two room cabin on stilts with the most astonishing vista overlooking the length of the valley. Sunrise and sunset being particularly dramatic. I am housed in a tent with a traditional style palm-thatched roof over the top. 
There is a waterfall with a pool which we spend some time trying to get the silt out of. I see hummingbirds zooming around in a blur (they never stop!), the very occasional lizard, and fireflies in abundance at dusk.

The place is quite nice but very exposed and hot and sweaty, I get bitten lots by mosquitoes, and I’ve yet to get used to the heat: I don’t have much appetite. Mike is a single man of sixty-five who barks rather than talks, and likes to contradict most of the things I say. I find him very difficult to talk to, and leave after he decides to shout at me for cooking my very own pancake in not quite the way he wants me to. He’s had two visitors since I’ve been there, so I suppose he must get on with some people. The fact that I’m not a young impressionable woman that he can vent his ageing lusts at I suspect has something to do with it, judging from some of the remarks he had come out with regarding ‘the perks of being a WWOOF host’.

 

I pack my bag with an angry knot in my guts and get on the first bus down to Punta Gorda. Other people seem normal and friendly, which is a big relief. I spend the rest of the three hour journey on the bus fluctuating between enjoying the ride and trying to get this bully out of my head.

 

On the bus the radio is on (Love FM) and in between quirky calypso tunes there are all sorts of party political announcements telling me to vote for the Peoples United Party. It plays Rick Astley’s enthusiastic pop number ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ which does a wonderful job of cheering me up. 

Along the road various political banners in Creole: ‘Tek di money, tek di land – Dave we fi da man, so vote for Dave’. Now you know.

Memorable tunes on the radio, a typical sugar sweet calypso beat with a blistering heavy metal guitar solo slapped in the middle of it (very good) and a medley of tunes based round the ‘Hawaii 5-0’ tune played on steel drums that just seems to go on forever. (About fifteen minutes, very cheesy, beyond a joke; marvellous.) If I could only have one piece of vinyl recording in the world, it would be of this.
I don’t actually need to go right to Punta Gorda itself so I get off at a place called ‘The Dump’ which I later discover is where everyone used to come from the nearby villages to get rid of unwanted maize husks before heading off to the market in P.G.

I buy a bottle of raspberry Fanta (fantastic) and jump in the back of one of two waiting pick up trucks going to San Pedro Columbia, the Mayan village I have been instructed to go to. When I arrive, an old lady directs me to another woman called ‘Miss Connie’ and tries to sell me a basket in the process. 
Miss Connie is a grinning American woman who runs, rather incongruously, a computer lab in the middle of the village. Today it is full of young kids playing educational games and a young girl of about fourteen is reading up something about polio. 

After a pleasant chat with Connie, I get myself a computer fix and do some writing for a while and then sit out in the sun whilst an assortment of piglets cavort joyfully about the place. 

At 4 pm Connie leaves for home and drives me up to where she lives, way back into the bush, and then I walk up another track next door even further into the bush to where Chris and Dawn live.
To get to their patch I have to plough through a small field of ten foot high maize plants and towards a river. I take off my boots, getting ready to cross this wonderful waist deep sparkling flow when I hear someone coming downhill from the other side, and then a young girl about six years old with long blond hair and a guy with short cropped hair and a ZZ Top beard appear, along with a madly barking black dog. I call out ‘Hello!’ to the girl, who just looks at me dumbstruck. (Most unusual I am to discover later.) 

‘Are you Chris?’ I call over to the guy. 

‘Hi! You must be Richard! Come on over!’

We exchange hellos, the dog decides it likes me, wagging its tail like there’s no tomorrow, and as I wade across the shallow river and on up the short hill to the house, the two get into a dug-out canoe and punt off downstream looking for ‘good rocks to build a house with’. 

With my new canine friend, its nose magnetised to my legs, I walk up the path past a stand of huge bamboo, assorted jungly-type trees and a partially excavated garden patch, all disintegrated raised beds, scattered dry sticks and weed vines. 

At the end of the track is the house; another cabin on stilts. (They are popular in Belize.) It’s just like hippy farm-steading places all over, lots of bare wood and dozens of jars of edible practicality. 

Dawn is at the bottom of the stairs looking slightly shocked and confused by my presence; I never got as far as actually speaking to them on the phone to tell them I am coming cos the phone in Chris’s office in town is always engaged. Anyhow, Dawn accepts this and shows me where the WWOOFer house is, a ten minute walk through a dense jungle of wild bananas (Heliconias) which is like walking through a green tunnel. 
About two weeks after arriving here, it is March 13th and I’ve let it be known that it’s my birthday. 

The lights are out and Zoe (the previously dumbstruck girl)brings over one of Dawn’s special cakes, a big heavy duty serious thing but well appreciated all the same, decorated with some creamy stuff and candles. Everyone sings Happy Birthday and I feel really quite touched. Chris plays the fool and makes some grand speech in his typically over the top way and makes everyone laugh. He gives me a ‘Toledo Cacao Growers Association’ tee shirt, which although it is too hot to wear it out here in the bush, it becomes a treasured memento. (Even though I subsequently lost it somewhere – oops…)
You couldn’t wish for a more incongruous character to meet in the Belizean bush.

Unmistakably, Chris is from New York City; not the arty neurotic Woody Allen type, but the brash street-level kind of guy. ‘Yo, here’s a guy who’s D wid da P, he’s down with the people, knows what’s up and what’s going down, you know what I’m sayin’?’ Chris had been to school with one of the Beastie Boys, he’d bunk off school and get into mischief and he loved his ma and smoking weed.
Chris is off in Punta Gorda during the week working for the chocolate collective, but on Saturday mornings work in the garden happens to the accompaniment of Black Uhuru’s dub reggae, The Clash or maybe Saturday Night Fever. Yo! Getting kinda funky in da jungle!
There endeth my astonishingly bad New Yorker impressions.

 

Back in the day, Chris had bummed round Guatamala, picked up hippy tat and sold it at Grateful Dead tours around the States. He liked to blag his way into the gigs, saying he was with the band’s road crew, the son of the theatre owner, climb in through the toilet window… any way that was free.

It didn’t matter if you never got in – ‘Dead Tour’ as it was known was a continual circus running two seasons – Spring and Fall tours round the States. Thousands of people would follow them in their station wagons, pick-ups, buses and by thumb. Usually there would be a nice big space somewhere to have an impromptu festival, and if there wasn’t, well then I guess it would just get a little chaotic.

Chris loved the sense of family that came from getting to know so many faces that had also made Dead Tour part of their lives. As Chris says, when Jerry Garcia died, a whole other world died with him too. Lots of vendors and followers had their lifestyles and livelihoods blown sideways. The Dead carried on, but it would never be the same without Jerry.
The whole bluegrass sound is something I have come to appreciate whilst being in North America. There is a side of home grown American music culture that is ‘old timey’ and romantic about nature. Far from the popular image of America being the snotty brat of the world, this style of music and a lot of country stuff leaves a lot of English pop music I like (and still like) sounding pointlessly whingey and even infantile sometimes.
Chris inherited money and he bought a hut in the bush not far from where he’d been hanging out with the Garifuna Rastas in Punta Gorda.

If Belizeans emigrate, they tend to go to New York City and Chris had got to know one of them there. Chris was looking for somewhere to buy land now that Dead Tour had fallen apart, and this guy told him he’d love Belize.

So Chris goes off to Belize, already being familiar with the general area, and buys the land from an old guy who’s too old to farm any more and has moved back to the village to be taken care of by his family.

He hacks a trail to the hut, grows weed and smokes himself into oblivion for three years, keeping himself afloat doing a bit of wheeling and dealing; fixing up old cars and things like that. Anything that comes along.
Then one glorious sunny day whilst up country doing some business in Belmopan, he meets Dawn, a nineteen year old backpacker from Idaho. They fall in love; she sees Chris’s knackered orange trees plot and decides to turn the place into something more interesting and productive.

Chris jokes that the main reason that he and Dawn and all these backpackers are able to enjoy this piece of paradise is because Jerry Garcia had gone and died on him.
On weekdays Chris is either in Punta Gorda officiating over the Toledo Cacao Growers Association or out and about seeing how things are for the Mayan farmers out in the real world. The farmers collective pool their organic cacao (cocoa) after fermenting it for seven days until it goes just the right shade of purple (this helps get rid of bitterness) and then it is sold to the Green and Blacks organic chocolate company in England. The cacao gets roasted in Italy cos they know how to do it best.
All the other cacao grown in the area is bought by Hershey’s who of course don’t offer the local farmers much by way of a decent deal. They also make the worst chocolate I have ever tasted in all my life.
Dawn is quirky, smart, funny and intellectual. She’s fascinated by words and language (which is good connecting point for me) and sometimes likes to listen to classical music during the day. It takes me a little while to open up to her, but I like her very much. She’s a cool person to know.

There’s three kids, Zephyr a generally well-behaved baby, Esperanza, two and a half, blonde and cute, falls over and cries at the drop of a hat, and Zoe, six, who talks non-stop. She’s a very full of jumping beans kind of kid. 

There are four or three cats, I’m not sure. Two or three are skinny black Toms with white bibs and socks and a mostly have a slinky evasive ‘I just did something bad’ way about them. I think they might be clones. The other is a tiny skinny brindle cat which spookily looks and behaves just like our old cat Tiki we had when I was growing up.

Then there’s Lulu and Hoover, two lurcher type dogs, one white and brown, the other black. Lulu likes lying slap bang in the middle of the floor baring her bits to the world and grinning through sleepy eyes just to show everyone just how blissed out she is. Hoover likes to bark at the workmen whenever they walk past. 

In my heat-addled way, I have decided that they are both ‘Dogs of Doom’. Every time I see them I go ‘DOGS OF DOOM!!’ at them in a menacing voice and stroke them and play with them lots. Ahhh! I love them!

I’ve decided that there should be a story based on them. It should be called ‘Hoover the Groover and Lulu the Zulu, International Dogs of Doom.’ They should both be wearing shades and be very daring. That’s as far as my character building and plot goes. Any suggestions will be warmly received.

For meals, we generally have oatmeal with milk powder and little chopped finger bananas and pineapple in it. I like sugar in mine. You can have bilogo, which is halfway between banana and plantain and has peach coloured flesh, but it’s not sweet enough for my taste buds. Sometimes we have grapefruit too.

Lunch is the main meal and could be a combination of coco (a root, tastes like sticky potato), flying potatoes (they grow in the air on a vine), cassava (surprisingly okay to eat), cho-cho (or chayote, vegetable pear, insipid boiled green thing), nopales (young prickly pear pads, innocuous tasting, oozes sticky snot. Bit like eating aloe vera stems. Best eaten raw, less snotty), rice (grows in Belize). Calalou – amaranth – it’s a green spinachy leaf thing – I really appreciate this stuff – it’s very healthy and tastes good, and is the perfect antidote to all those weird starchy tubers. I sometimes go and eat it straight off the bush to make sure I’m getting enough nutrients.

Maize – which is very satisfying, but now it’s gone hard and is like chewing old donkeys’ teeth.

Out of everything we eat, ninety percent is from the garden, and the rest is Belizean except for milk powder, oats, occasional butter (tins of liquid from New Zealand) and bakers yeast. 

With lunch we usually have some fruit-juicy squash stuff I make with the Jamaica limes. Jamaica limes look like oranges but have a sourness that turns your head inside out. In the absence of a fridge, the Jamaica limes perform an essential role in keeping us refreshed.

Oh yeah, we have squashes too, and now the chickens have decided to start laying so there’s eggs as well. The four chickens announce the arrival of each egg as a great event with a flurry of wing flapping and loud clucking. You can hear their announcements from the kitchen; it’s very handy.
I love eating bananas! Which is handy cos there thousands of them, all hanging like fat green chandeliers all round the edge of the kitchen.
Water for the house is pumped up above the house using a surprisingly small hi-tech pump about twelve inches long which is powered by three large solar panels. We have no hot water, but that’s like wanting ice cubes in Alaska.

Supper is usually tea/coffee and some serious cake thing or other. 
Being cacao country, after having visited a couple of the local Mayan growers and being shown round what they do, it’s only right that we get a go at making our own chocolate at home. 

First we picked a couple of pods. Either green or yellow or red or a tiger-striped mixture of these colours, they crack open like a hard melon. Inside is the good stuff; about forty seeds about the size of a very fat almond and covered in a jelly-like substance that tastes like lychees. This we chew off very satisfactorily. The next step is usually to put the seeds in a sealed bag and let them ferment in their own juices for a couple of weeks until they have a purple sheen on the outside. This helps take the bitterness out, and you can bypass this stage if you want.  

Seeing as how we want to make chocolate right now this afternoon, we go onto the next stage: we throw the beans in a frying pan (no oil) and roast them until the smell of hot roasting chocolate fills the kitchen. Mmmm!

Next we feed them through an old-fashioned heavy-duty meat-mincer. Out comes the macerated beans in a heavy brown sludge. There is a small amount of time to manipulate this goo until it sets hard again.

Tasting the mashed beans on its own isn’t that great, it’s really bitter. We add a little bit of fine sugar and milk powder to it and then the taste is transformed!

I eat a truffle-sized lump of the stuff and then find myself having to run almost uncontrollably round the garden for about a quarter of an hour. I know people who think they are hardcore cos they like eighty percent cocao chocolate. This stuff is ninety-eight percent.
Theobroma Cacao (theobroma – ‘food of the gods’) has been used by the Central Americans since forever, mixing it with maize syrup to make a thick sweet chocolate drink. The name either comes from the Aztec Nahwatl word ‘xocolatl’ meaning ‘bitter water’ or it comes from ‘chocolatl’; a mixed derivation of the  Yucatec Maya word ‘chokol’ meaning hot, and the Nahuatl ‘atl’ which means ‘water’.
 There is another theory that goes that when the Spanish turned up and amongst other things decided to steal the locals’ brown stuff, they changed the name from ‘cacaoatl’ to ‘cocoatl’, due to ‘caca’ being Spanish for ‘shit’.  ‘Shit-water’ wouldn’t have gone down well in the new faddish chocolate drinking emporiums that were sprouting up all over Spain.
Apparently Montezuma the great Aztez king drank fifty cups of chocolate drink a day. He must have been speeding round like a pneumatic drill all the time. Must have been quite a scary guy.

It’s a strange thing – where I used to have the usual sexual fantasy stuff going on in my head to keep me amused has to a large extent been replaced by food fantasies, usually about chips with Heinz tomato sauce, of cool yoghurt and Marmite on toast. I really miss apples too. But hey – this is pretty darn groovy too – I just like some familiarity in my world, even if I have to imagine it – that’ll do. 

I find myself on fantasy journeys to places well-loved; along the Kennet and Avon canal in summer and winter, to Newbury, Devizes, Bath, along the Ridgeway, to Swindon, Camarthen, London, Edinburgh, Inverness, Glen Coe, Skye, Harris, Callanish, Norwich, to Helen B’s garden, Don’s house in Newbury drinking tea, visiting my dad and my sister Glynis.

Mentally tripping out to Tofino, Victoria BC, Whitehorse Yukon, Newfoundland, California. I keep meaning to write a poem of American place names I have passed through.

The sound of ants cutting leaves next our house late at night sounds like quiet tiny rain. Elsewhere, watching ants carrying small pink and yellow flower petals along their highway looks like an armada of tiny sailing ships. 

There are toads that chortle like rattling marimbas very loudly all along the river valley. They are enormous (bigger than a big man’s fist). Zoe picks one up to scare me with and it seems to be about the size of her head (and it frightens the life out of me – I really wasn’t expecting it).
Dawn laughs when I tell her about Zoe and the frog ‘Yeah she’s totally fearless!’. Dawn then goes on to tell me about the time a scorpion’s nest finally fell off the upstairs ceiling from where it had been hanging and landed on the big bed that the whole family all slept in together. ‘We’d been watching it for about a month, we knew it was gonna fall some day we just didn’t know when. When it did, hundreds of little black scorpion babies went crawling all over the bed. Zoe was fine with it but Esperanza just screamed! She was only a baby then anyway. We all had to sleep downstairs that night.’
March 18th night after full moon.

I dream I am being taught magic by an old man, along with another middle-aged man and a small girl. The small girl’s ability is better than us chaps as her mother is a witch, so naturally she will have picked up stuff from her. He says for magic to work is a question of it being directed by the heart and not by the ego, otherwise all you get is cheap conjuring tricks and not real magic.
Sunday, date unknown. 

I feel wiped out and do nothing. I have a real appetite for being on my own with some quiet, which is lovely. Prompted in part by Chris recounting how he gave up on his dreadlocks, I cut off the dread-locked ponytail thing on the back of my head. Essentially it is just annoying me anyway.

I go down to the river where the solar pump that supplies fresh water to the house is. The bank is pure clay, and I cover myself completely as an alternative to the soap that I don’t have. (The clay works wonderfully.) A curiously unanticipated effect of being covered in wet mud is the cooling effect I feel as the sun draws out the water from the mud. This in turn draws away heat too. I am my own fridge.

Then the mud is dry, and the cooling effect ends. 

Whilst I am baking the mud dry in the sun, a huge animal comes crashing through the grass about a metre from my head. I think maybe it’s a large snake but it turns out to be a large iguana about two foot long and it slaps into the water right next to me, and it freaks the bejeesus out of me. 
Tuesday.

I am still feeling a bit wiped out, so I don’t do very much but shell a load of cajunas (pigeon peas) and get a buckets worth. I drank real home-roasted cacao, which is pretty good. I try it with a little sugar and a habenero pepper ground into it. Quite uplifting and groovy.
Wednesday March 19th.

Having ‘landed’ somewhat I am starting to tentatively lay some new plans. I feel very good about the idea of going to Western Australia by boat, and am fantasising about Scotland too.
Well the knowledge that I’m staying put for a while has afforded me a number of luxuries. One is not feeling the necessity to write every day or so, which helps nurture a general feeling of slack timelessness and of just being present. 

Another is the slightly overdue and well anticipated inward reflection opportunity which anyone who’s known me for longer than a week will realise this means me being an anti-social, and largely grumpy bastard and perhaps some other kind of random dysfunction thrown in to the pot for good measure. This time it’s been a vague paranoiac self-doubt ‘people think I’m weird’ thing which goes on for about a week. It’s tedious and repetitive for me, having been there and back pretty much with every group of people that’s ever been in my life for more than two days (i.e. a lot of times). 

In another way I don’t really mind cos it’s just my old psychological blind-spots up to their old tricks again, yawn yawn: leaving a mixture of ‘Shit when will I ever get over this?’ and ‘ Oh yeah, that old bollocks again’.

I am wondering whether to press on with this epic journey which has no purpose other than I want to do it. I often feel the need to justify it. 
Aside from all this navel-gazing, it seems like I’ve been experiencing more of the fruits of very delayed gratification. Messing around with oranges and bananas and cacao (cocoa) and other tropical curiosities is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I was a kid.

Sitting at home, slightly bored probably, in our brown living room with it’s 1950s decor I would ask my mum ‘Where does all this stuff in the fruit bowl come from?’ 

My mum had lived in Durban between 1953 and 1957, and had a slightly different take on exotic fruits than a lot of people of her generation. She’d been a teenager through the Second World War and lived with all the austerities and food rationing same as pretty much everybody. Then my mum shipped out to South Africa with her ambitious accountant of a husband (not my dad) and had had the post-war excitement of experiencing real-life bananas and oranges first hand, straight off the tree. When I was a kid, the merest sight of an avocado (a real luxury in 1970s Britain –  my, how things have changed) would send my mum weak at the knees with happy memories of all sorts of weird and wonderful fruits than her children at her knee could only guess at. In her own little private bit of her universe, my mum was probably the only person on our street to have ever tasted a custard apple.

Me being a stubborn not-taking-anyone’s-it-word-for-it kind of character, I’ve eventually got round to checking it all out a quarter of a century later. Wow, I wish I hadn’t written it like that – makes me feel old. Blinky blimey – where’s the wife and kids I should have by now?!

In Belize, a ‘bakut’ is a tree that grows enormous sweet sticky pods that ooze a tasty toffee-ish goo that is good to eat, except that you have to be sharp about collecting them; They drop to the forest floor and the ants have a habit of getting to them first. You could beat them to it by climbing a hundred foot into the canopy I suppose. The ‘bakut’ is also the name that Belizeans use to refer to a man’s Old Chap, his knob, his pecker, his didgerydoo, cock, John Thomas, Peter, Dick, Percy, Willy, winkle. Bell end. Whether the Belizeans named the pod after the penis or the wedding tackle after the pod I don’t know. Only the resemblance between the two is worryingly similar; the pod is just the right shade of brown. It has curious ribbed undulations all down it’s length of the sort that a lady might find invigorating. And it’s about thirteen inches long. 
Today I am in The Bakut Bar. I have come in because there is a TV on the wall showing the CNN channel.

Blasting out Truth across the supposedly developing world, today we get to see the latest on the Bush/Blair/American fundamentalist Christian crackpots and military survivalists Vs. the stupidly misguided Almost-Everyone-Else-In-The-World thing. Tonight at 8 pm is the end of the deadline for Saddam to ‘fess up about his weapons of mass detruction. Iraq may or may not get bombed to into the ground. 

CNN flashes up fifteen seconds of footage of a ‘Stop The War’ demonstration that had been taking place in London. The footage shows Muslim marchers, waving placards and chanting. Any reasonable person would get the impression that the only people that don’t want the war are just a bunch of the usual kind of shouty Muslims. What the footage conveniently manages to miss was the other 950,000 non-Muslim British people who were also there with them, also believing the whole enterprise to be immoral. 

‘Not In My Name’ is the general slogan of the protest.
Outside in sunny Punta Gorda is a generally healthy looking kind of low level poverty and lots of chirpy Caribbean music. I sit and wonder what it must be like to be in Iraq and the Middle-East right now.
I’m also wondering what it must be like back home in England, especially after seeing the pictures on CNN of the tanks at Heathrow. I know it’s all a ploy to generate paranoia. It must be rather strange in England even so. I know what it’s like in the States; people are either sensibly concerned, rabidly foaming about ‘towelheads’ or think it’s some kind of video game going on Somewhere Else.

It seems churlish to write about what my world has in it when this nightmare is going down, but that’s what I’ve chosen to do.

I’d make a terrible DJ, my links would be rubbish. Okay smarty pants, how do you change the subject?
Out here living in the tropical bush, the nearest I get to the threat of germ warfare and suicide attacks is finding eight bot fly maggots embedded in the side of my arse. (Hey that isn’t too bad…)
Today I give birth. In fact, I have quintuplets. 

Actually, I squeeze five dead maggots out of the side of my arse. I am having a truly tropical experience, it is most gratifying. 

Unfortunately, there are seven holes in me which, having only pulled only half of one out with a pair of tweezers, means there are still one and a half of the little darlings still floating around in my butt-cheek. Maybe I can expect a pus extravaganza. Yum, I certainly hope so. They are bot fly larvae. One end is the breathing hole that stays snorkelled at the skins surface and the other end with its little black jaws munches its way inwards (which feels like being stabbed with a hooked needle and then twisting it), until the maggot is about two inches long, whereupon it leaves the body, unhappy at the taste of bone perhaps.
Next Morning:

I put ‘Marine Goop’ glue on my arse to get last hardcore bot fly out. It’s now wriggling away merrily on top of the cassette cover of Julian Cope’s ‘Floored Genius’, approximately half of my record collection.
Daily I stop in wonder at what surrounds us here. We are deep in Mayan ruins country, where most of them are left to the decays of time. (There’s so many of them.) I haven’t visited any; it doesn’t really grab my attention.

On the bottom slope from Chris and Dawns wooden house is the chicken run with its lemon, Jamaica lime, guava trees and a rooster that combines it’s ‘cock-a-doodle-do’ thing with a strange Japanese-sounding noise you might make if you’re pretending to do karate. Maybe he’s working out. I’ve never looked. Chicken Chi Gong or something.
The garden is partly raised beds with dead sticks everywhere which I am told rot down really quick. Bizarre. The fence all around this lot is held up by pollarded nitrogen-fixing acacias. All good textbook tropics stuff. Very exciting! No really it is! I can see I might be digging myself a hole here. 

Below that is a hooog stand of fantastic looking bamboo which the stems are about four inches thick and about twenty-five to thirty long. Fantastic. Surrounding all this is young cacao, bananas, grapefruit, cajunas (pigeon peas), oranges planted seemingly willy nilly. There’s pineapple planted as a ground-level erosion control. 
For the past week or so I have been hauling waterlogged hardwood tree trunks out of the river to use to rebuild the old ant-chewed raised bed system. The trunks probably weigh a quarter of a ton each. Moving them through the water is easy enough but trying to lift them out onto solid ground is a major effort. I devise an A-frame whereby I can shunt the trunks a couple of feet at a time to where we want them. The frame consists of two sturdy straight pieces of wood with a rope tied between them (hence the ‘A’ shape). Then it is eased under the trunk to roughly where the middle is and then lifting the A-frame up, it levers the front half of the trunk off the ground a foot or so, drags it forward a couple of feet and then drops it back down again. Repeating the process over and over I eventually, single-handedly move several tonnes of trunks. 

Its been over 100 degrees every day and what with the healthy bush diet, I’m losing excess flab like nobody’s business. I’ve got a six-pack! (muscly abdomen) I’ve never been so fit in all my life. If you ever feel like the drastic need to sort your body out; come here.
Sent some more emails trying to figure how to get to Australia by boat. This could take a while I think.
Above Chris and Dawn’s current home is the new house being built oh-so-slowly by three lads from the village. It has beautiful wood work that I want to take lots of arty photos of.

Right at the bottom edge of Chris and Dawn’s land is the fantastic river. You can drink directly from it and we don’t get hassled by insects down there either.
I am in the river on my own one day (very peaceful;) up to my neck in water when a white heron flew over about four foot above my head. Wow.
There are lots of wow moments:

Diving into deep blue pools accompanied by the continual crazy hootings and cacklings of various mostly invisible birds.
Sitting in the wild banana bush leading up to the WWOOFer’s house. It’s a tunnel of shade with all these long dangly bromeliad things which are strange enough, you’ll get investigated by hummingbirds, who sound like the purring of very pleased cats.

Mostly they zip about like flies, but it’s great when they stop in front of you and just hang there in mid-air going ‘Me, I’m well tiny I am. Just you watch it matey, or I’ll peck yer ears’. Actually no they don’t, they’re dead cute.
So there’s them, all two inches of them, and then there’s the Blue Morpho butterflies which are cobalt blue and five inches across. They’re real people tarts too, a bit like robins, except robins don’t flap around the dinner table and occasionally test out the food in the various bowls.
What else is wow? Ant highways. These stretch all over the place. They are the thoroughfare of ants bringing whatever chomped up bit of plant material they’ve found that they can carry back to the nest to grow into mushrooms. Usually it’s just bits of leaves, but it has frequently been whatever happens to smell edible in my rucksack. One day, I almost lost all my Californian almonds to them, but I take the bag, nuts and ants to the river and drown them and make friends with lots of tiny fish in the process by giving them a bonus free lunch.
The fish in the river are cute. There’s a few hundred of them, and there’s two sorts; little zebra-striped ones and smaller silver ones with blue eyes (but not blond hair). They are mostly an inch to two inches long, and like to hang out round us really close when we stand in the river or are going swimming, like they want to be our friends or are trying to tell us something. Makes a change from dolphins I suppose. 

I have not learned the language of these fish, but maybe they are in some mysterious way connected to ancient space travellers who popped in on Central America for a quick cup of shit-water on their way back from Egypt on a pyramid-building mission. Maybe they hold the key to special secrets only they can tell us about the real roots of human evolution.
After asking Chris about where our lovely river comes from, I learn that in this part of the world rivers can surface out of nowhere like mammoth springs, travel some distance, disappear down another hole and then re-appear somewhere else. The river at the bottom of the propery is one such river and upon their recommendation is a good way to spend a day off. I decide to swim/wade/walk up the mile or so of river through the unpopulated bush to where the river miraculously does indeed appear out of nowhere. The source is a wildly gushing pool hemmed in by a high wall of roaring reverberating rock. An incredible place to be alone in.

Most of my travelling has been great; I’ve met great characters, seen beautiful places and encountered people with interesting lifestyles. 

I shall have some fantastic memories at the end of it all, but since I’ve been on the farm in Belize, it’s allowed me room for introspection. 

In that time I’ve found myself feeling really easily rejected by the people around me and I’ve sometimes been quite snotty with the people I’m living with. In actual fact, I know a lot of it is just me having a bad attitude for some unknown reason. A couple of times I caught myself reacting in such a bad way… Maybe it’s just what happens when I finally get the chance to stop moving; I finally step out of the transient superficiality and relax into all that buried psychological crud that must have have accumulated along the way.
Sunday March 30

I have to hitch to PG to get my visa extended, it is a mercifully cool day. When the sun is up, being in the bush is not so hot as being in the open.
I really enjoy getting out of the bush every now and again; its a lot hotter though on account of there being no shade, but its great to see town life going about its business; hustling and bustling in its Carribean laid-back pace. 

Chris had been telling me about the Scottish Higlander guards that regularly come to the town to practice manoeuvres: In my head I can see them all doing their SAS-style barrel-rolls whilst clutching their machine-guns; all-blacked up faces and in their kilts, hiding behind big mamas with their fish stalls and piles of oranges.
In the Cafe in town there’s a Mennonite in his demin dungarees and his fabulous beard. ‘Sprechen Ze Deutsch?’ he grins 

‘Err? Nein!’ I reply

‘Oh! Too bad! Have yourself a nice day there!’

And that is that.

I spy a suspiciously lobstered European newcomer, a young lad about nineteen. All the new people go pink and horrible-looking until they get themselves a proper tan. It takes about a month.

‘Hello! You been out here long?’

‘No – just a couple of weeks. I’m doing Operation Raleigh, counting turtles’

Hmmm…

We have a good chat; always nice to talk to someone from back home. I tell him that next time, he could save himself 3500 quid and go wwoofing instead of what he’s doing now. Probably not the most tactful thing for me to say, but at least he’ll have an idea for next time.
Heading back home, I walk out of town at 3.30 pm passing lots of local Garifuna wading about playing volleyball at waist-depth in the warmest sea I’ve ever experienced. Very lovely. I’ve been pretty worried about various useless head-trips for a while, and this is the moment that I realise I actually really like being in Belize. 
Belize has such a tangible peace about it. There are a range of ethnicities living here, the Ketchi-Mayans, the Mennonites and the Garifuna:

In 1635, two Spanish ships carrying Nigerian slaves sank off the coast of St. Vincent. The slaves that survived and swam ashore found shelter in the existing Carib Indian settlements. Over the next century and a half, the two peoples intermixed, intermarried and eventually fused into a single culture, the Black Caribs or Garinagu.

The Garinagu people, more usually known as the Garifuna are recent arrivals to Belize, driven here by civil war and settling the southern coast of Belize in the early 19th century. 

Today the Garifuna live principally in Punta Gorda in Toledo, and two Garifuna villages – Barranco (the oldest Garifuna settlement in Belize) and tiny Punta Negra.

Today, the Garinagu struggle to keep their culture alive. It is the devotion of the Garifuna to their roots which sets them apart from the other ethnic groups in Belize. While many Garifuna are professed Catholics, they have retained many of the spiritualist traditions and rituals from their Afro-Caribbean heritage. They are famed for their arts, their music and dancing and their Independance day is a national holiday for everyone.

What a good place to be…
Whilst riding the bus on my first trip down to the south, and a few times in the Belize City and in Punta Gorda, I had noticed something of a social anomoly. In amongst all the people you would reasonably expect to find in a sweaty Carribean community were also some other peculiar looking people. Going about their business like everyone else were folks that looked like ghosts from the 19th century. Men dressed in smart stay-blue denim dungarees, collarless white farmers shirts, neat straw hats and sporting wonderful ZZ-Top beards walked hand-in-hand with their formidable-looking wives equally dressed in starchy aprons, ankle-length skirts and bonnets. Children dressed as mini-copys of their parents. And each family dressed the same. Weird.
When I mentioned to Chris about these strange-looking folk I had seen, he told me that they were Mennonites.
According to Chris, the ones I had seen were the full-on ‘orthodox’ version of them; living their version of Christianity to the letter, eschewing all modern trickery; using only horse and buggy for transport and field tillage, having no electricity and therefore no TVs, computers or phones and living simple farming lives for the most part, believing that the modern world is an infringement upon their faith. They live in two enclaves in Shipyard and Little Belize.
There are, living in Blue Creek, other Mennonites though that are halfway to being like ‘normal’ people; there are Mennonite truck drivers whose families have electricity, engines, radio and phones etc. They help to enable the other more orthodox Mennonites to do trade with the outside world at an outside world pace.
In 1959 about three thousand Mennonites relocated to Belize from Canada and Mexico, and are originally of Dutch/German descent; they still speak the dialect of Old Dutch/German that they have kept alive for over 400 years, as well as English and Spanish.
The Mennonites were welcomed to Belize with open arms to practice their religion unhindered, and have flourished, establishing their own form of local government and run their own schools, businesses and banks.

 

Mennonites are members of the Protestant religious sect that originated in Switzerland and the Netherlands at the time of the Protestant Reformation.
The Mennonites emerged in the Netherlands in the 1520s during the Radical Reformation period in Europe. The sect derives its name from the reformist Protestant leader of the movement Menno Simons. 
They are radical protestants, pacifists, condemn slavery and are against state-controlled religion. My kind of people.

One of the principal tenets of the Mennonites was that the conscience of the individual is the sole authority on matters of Biblical doctrine, and that no clergy was needed to interpret religious text or mediate between an individual and God, rather like the Quakers in the UK.

The state regarded them as subversive and so were persecuted. They left holland, germany and Switzerland and migrated into eastern Europe, Russia, Canada and the US.

They fell mostly into distinct groups who followed different leaders such as Jakob Hutter (Hutterites) and Jakob Amman (Amish or Amish Mennonites). Migrations continued throughout the 18th and 19th century and following World War I Mennonites from Russia, who were primarily of Dutch stock, migrated to Canada. More migrations occurred after World War II, particularly to Paraguay, Brazil, and Mexico.

In all cases the tendency was to take up unoccupied land in isolated outlying rural areas and as a result Mennonites have been rural farming people for much of their history.

The Mennonite migrants have customarily obeyed the civil laws of the society in which they live but many refuse to bear arms, to support violence in any form, or to take judicial oaths, or to hold public office.
So here I am, on my way back from getting my passport stamped on a sweaty sunday afternoon.

I walk about a third of the way back in-between hitching rides to San Pedro Columbia village. By the time I get there, it’s just getting dark. I have two miles of bush to get through. That’s a long way when you’ve got no torch. 

Luckily two thirds of the way is a wide track used by the Mayan corn farmers. Hopefully, cracks of moonlight through the clouds will be enough to see me through the denser bush later. The evening night life is starting up in the village. Cheesy calypso pumps from one of the bars in the village, Club Exotica. (A place the size of a shed with a kids-sized pool-table. It’s so small that everyone has to stand outside.) Further up some kids are having an electrified band practice which the entire village gets the benefit of hearing. It’s like the reggae version of scraping your fingernails down a blackboard.
The village was wrecked after Hurricane Iris in 2001. This combined with the fact that Mike Espat the politician for the PUP – the People’s United Party – lives nearby meant that the villagers received a disproportionately large amount of overseas aid money and help. Hence lots of electric household equipment, water stand pipes and pumps and nice new concrete houses.

This has given the village a text book togetherness; water pumps and stand pipes very frequently, everyone’s house looks nice, with evidence of nice new zinc roofs and tongue and groove walls in lots of places.
Out the other side of the village (I can just about remember the way) I follow the track. The rain is making the clay soil slippery and sticky. My flip flops are becoming more and more useless, slipping upside-down in my wet feet when I stand anything on a slant. I take them off and sing a ‘Bugger off snakes, bugger off spiders, bugger off scorpions too’ song to warn said creatures of my coming so I don’t stand on them, and they don’t sting me. 

The rain is getting heavier, the going more treacherous, the moonlight disappears in a dense rain-cloud and the track reaches the bush track. I can barely see a thing. I try three times to get onto the bush track but give up after getting lost after about four metres. After that it’s total darkness. I can’t even see my hands in front of my face. I’ll see more with my eyes closed probably. 

I yell for help at the top of my voice. I can’t be very far from the house; someone must hear me and bring a torch. I don’t really want to spend the night out here in the rain. (I did that already thanks back on Vancouver Island.) I get pissed off at there being no response. I guess the sound of rain on leaves is drowning out any other sound. 

After about ten minutes of feeling stuck, and it not occurring to me to walk back and stay in the village, I decide to try to get home even though I can’t see anything. 

The strap on one shoe disintegrates and I lose the use of my footwear, and this I discover is a blessing in disguise. 

I realise that what distinguishes the track from everything else is; that even though there are plenty of low branches, fat roots and fallen logs to negotiate, the mud track is mostly smoothed out from long use – everywhere else is twigs and leaves. With this invisible insight to go on, I feel my way through the muddy slippery inky blackness of foliage rain and thunder, arms outstretched feeling for branches ready to spring in my face, and inching my way along with my feet. I make surprisingly good progress, even though I don’t remember much of the tracks twisty turning route. 

I have a suspicion though that I may well have disappeared off a side track into rainforest oblivion. Where jaguars live. With sharp pointy teeth. 

I am so relieved when I come out at what I call the ‘mangrove tree’ with its distinctively snaking buttress roots. 

Thank god! I’m actually going the right way! I congratulate myself in between all the ‘bugger off snake’ singing I have to do. I’m tired. It’s been a long day. I want to be home already. Nothing for it but to keep going. I get stuck for direction as now no path is apparent underfoot. I guess lucky and come out at a cacao tree I recognise in the edge of the bush. There are silhouettes here and I can guess where I am, though I still can’t really see much. Following along the edge of a corn field is easy and flat. I get through the corn towards the river and out I pop into our small island of civilisation again. All I have to do is get across the river and up to the house.
Dawn and Chris are in ‘Sunday space’ mode where they are not to be disturbed under any circumstances whatsoever. There’s nothing to eat in the kitchen. I leave and make my way through the track to the WWOOF house, another ten minute walk which turns into half an hour of more random stumbling about as I yet again plunge into total darkness in the heliconia. I shout out for help again, with no response. This is really frustrating as I’m also really disoriented with tiredness as well being hungry. 
I get back and only Kristina is awake, and she goes to sleep pretty much immediately. I’ve had a crazy journey, and I really want somebody to sit me down with a nice cup of tea and some biscuits and get me to tell them all about it. I resort to wishing I am with my mum, something that doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s very comforting. I Imagine having a big hug with her, and end up involving my dad too. My mum died three ago, and my dads eighty-four, and a whole load of emotional stuff to do with this and the day I’ve just had overwhelms me, and I disappear off into the bush again to have conversations with them and to cry rather a lot. Afterwards it puts into perspective a lot of feelings of rejection I’ve been having.
The week following has been less heavy in my head and am having better conversations mostly.
I have enjoyed picking cajunas beans this week. Picking has been so easy and satisfying, it’s like plucking money from a tree. The bread-nut trees are pretty groovy too. They drop these spiky looking but inoffensive fruit about eight inches long shaped like spiky green giant mangoes and after we let them rot slightly you can pull out about forty seeds that we cook up just like big roast chestnuts. Very tasty and you don’t have to ruin your thumbs trying to get them out of shells.
Living with five young Germans is a new experience for me, and they are happily quick to point out that they do indeed fall into the stereotype of being super-efficient. Up at 7 am for yoga, breakfast at 7.30, busy doing clever Permaculture projects by 8. They are really a nice friendly lot to be with, and I find their straight-forwards approach to just getting on with the tasks set is really refreshing; no interpersonal dramas on their part that I can detect.
I have started making a bamboo chair using the saw on my pocket-knife. I show Frederick how to make bread, and now he makes all the bread (very good it is too), the garden beds have been cleaned up and mulched with a mixture of heliconia leaves and stems and the remains of wee-wee ant nests which have a pheromone in them that keeps other ants away.
Jana and Rosie’s solar oven now ninety-five percent successfully cooks rice (which I’m about to have for breakfast) and we are halfway through building a stone and clay bread oven. It suddenly dawns on me that we are all in the middle of a lifestyle I’ve fantasised about for years. We’re actually doing it.
We fetch clay from a huge wee-wee nest. It’s good clean stuff and perfect for making pottery things with. The stones we fetch from the river bed nearby and sand is retrieved by swimming upstream with a big bucket, filling it from a shallow where silt is deposited and swimming back downstream pushing the box in front. It seems like the river is our highway and this is our commuter route. Nice. 
I take the top out of a Madre De Cacao tree which is one of the  fast-growing pollardable fuel-wood trees; its growing habit is much like willow, but much neater looking. I have an exciting time thirty foot up the tree hacking poles out of the top with a machete. All whilst not being attacked by sticky turpentine ants a few feet below me at the main fork halfway up the tree. (They sting like hell.) 

Third time lucky; the first two times I get about fifty ants all up my legs. As soon as I swot one, they all start biting me at once like some kind of telepathic killing machine. I throw the machete out of the tree (I avoid accidentally impaling myself and fling myself down a shoddy home-made bamboo ladder as fast as I can. The ladder promptly disintegrates on my first two attempts.
Yesterday I get bitten right on the end of my jiggery-pokery by a leaf-cutter ant, much to the amusement of Dawn who is there at the time.
Another tree job, which I gather hasn’t been dealt with for years, is the removal of ‘wiss’ from the tangerine tree. I discover why. Wiss is a bit like a parasitic ivy that is growing rampantly all over the tangerine tree. Only problem is, the tangerine tree has the most horrific thorns I have ever encountered on a tree. Its covered with nasty hard spikes that get up to about six inches long before they even begin to think about actually becoming branches. Me being the stubborn type, can’t resist the challenge; ‘None of our other wwoofers has ever managed to deal with it at all’. 

After an hour or two of getting cut to pieces and getting full of thorn splinters, I cut most of the wiss out, excepting a few bits right at the top of the tree that you would only get out by using a crane or by cutting the tree down.
I’m up and down like a yo-yo, fragile like I’m on thin ice. Sometimes I feel invisible. I need to spend extra time finding out how I get to Australia, get some music sent out here (spent the last three months listening to two albums) and write a list of the plants I’ve encountered out here, print out wot I writ from Seattle onwards. More-or-less continuously wavering between depression and a sense of wonder of this fantastic place. Maybe it’s just a dumb fixation, but Australia/New Zealand has become my Mount Everest. There, how melodramatic d’ya want it?
Rosie leaves, taking her bubbliness with her and everyone has quietened down, maybe it’s coincidence, but now I’m feeling more on a level with the others. I’ve felt much more balanced the last few days; less withdrawn and more chatty. We finish the clay bread oven and now we’re waiting for it to dry out before we fire it proper and use it. The three layers of clay in the dome structure are three inches, six inches and two inches thick.
At the same time Rosie leaves, a wind licks up and brings cool air for about four days. It even gets cool enough to warrant wearing something on top of a tee-shirt in the evening. Some complain about it being cold, but I relish it. I think this has some bearing on my mood.
Walking around bare-foot in the mud is at first quite a lovely sensation, but I soon tire of continually sliding about and having no firm footing; it takes so much more effort to get anywhere. The other thing I find is the mud has without my noticing, worked its way under my toenails to such an extent that my big toenails look like they are starting to come off! By now I have completely ripped out the thermal lining of my boots, and I have to put them back on as they are the only footwear that seem to work for me in this mud.
Today is Sunday, the day off, and it’s warmed up back to normal again. The days previous are refreshing and give me renewed vigour, and a taste of climate I’m altogether better suited to. Today, just lounging around reading ‘Cold Mountain’, a variation on The Odyssey set in the American south during the Civil War.

 

I’m back to the eternal sweating. If it wasn’t for the easy access of the beautiful river, I’m pretty certain I wouldn’t be able to deal with it.

I think this has some bearing on my geographical fantasies. In place of sexual fantasies, I indulge in comfort fantasies of being in the rain on Vancouver Island, in the cold and fog in London or Wiltshire. The need for a jumper and coat and hat feels appetising. Cool wet crunchy apples. It’s funny how being in the exotic delights of the tropics has given me a keener perspective on the exotic possibilities of a dreary English winter, like coming home to a crackling fire and hot tea and soup and being outside all wrapped up from the weather. I think I’ve rediscovered a dormant beauty.
Also in the past few days, I finish making a three person seat from lengths of bamboo lashed together so that they hang like the seat of a deckchair and are supported by a couple of bamboo posts tied to a couple of trees at an angle. Very simple.

We decide to do something about a particular wee-wee nest that has just plain gotten too big. Every evening thousands of ants  come marching out of a huge thirty foot long network of tunnels and stomp off to eat random chunks of the surrounding bush. This is becoming a problem as they are starting to threaten the existence of the young cacao trees.

Chris has the wonderful idea of pouring gas (petrol) down the holes and blowing the bastards sky high. As exciting as it sounds, it doesn’t seem particularly permacultural or sensitive and Dawn successfully talks us out of actually doing it. We feel slightly crest-fallen, and so we try out an ingenious idea to build a chicken pen round the nest and (obviously) put some chickens in it, so the chickens can eat the ants out of existence.

‘What’s permaculture?!’ I hear you cry. Basically it’s common sense gardening put into a systemised concept. For a better description, go look on the internet…

I really really want this idea to work; it seems such a good idea. The theory being that as the ants march out on their nightly trek, they would all march conveyor belt style into the eagerly waiting beak of the Chicken Of Death, the ants will be eradicated and the chickens would lay lots of anty-tasting eggs. All that actually happens is that the two chickens we put in the pen freaked out big style and go ‘OHMIGODYOUBASTARDSTHISISN’TMYPENWHEREAREMYFRIENDSYOUBASTARDSPUTMEBACKWHEREIBELONGMYTINYBRAINDOESN’TKNOWWHATSGOINGON!YOUBASTARDSAAAARRGGHH!’

All in chicken speak of course. Then the chickens settle down to a nice long long miserable sulk, don’t eat anything and are generally no use whatsoever.

Ah, chickens. Such ridiculous creatures.
April 21 Belize.

I am intrigued by Jess’s ideas of not having a dark/shadow side and her being concerned not to ‘misrepresent’ herself by behaving in what she sees as ‘unacceptable’ ways.

Maybe I can still have my withdrawn moments and be still able to say to new people ‘Hello, I’m Richard, I’m actually a nice guy but I’m having a wobbly moment – I’m saying this in order to check out how you are about this’.

What if I can find more ways to say how I’m feeling? Even with people I don’t know too well? Maybe it doesn’t have to take me a month (or three) to get to know or feel comfortable with people first.  

Being continually superficial gets lonely after a while.

It would be so much better all round if I could figure out how to be more authentic more of the time. Maybe this ‘across the world’ journey is as much about giving myself new vistas on the inside as it is about seeing new geographies. Yeah. That old chestnut.

April 31st

I’ve taken two  and half months to find my feet at Dawn and Chris’s. I’ve come through some clouds and finally connected. I’ve started to settle in, got used to the food and climate (mostly). 

I know the routines and I am starting to appreciate the cycles of being here; anticipating the progress of the new house, the harvesting of mangoes, pineapples and cashews, almost seeing in the rainy season and the swelling of the river. 

Appreciating the new puppies who in no time at all will become big dogs. After I’m gone, Esperanza will grow up enough to fight back Zoe, and everyone will change somehow or another. This has become a place I would like to return to some day; bring a girlfriend maybe even some kids (my kids?) and see how everything’s progressed. I’d like to stay in touch; I could send DVD movies in exchange for cacao maybe… see how Chris and Dawn’s planned road trips turn out. (They want to drive through South America in a bio-diesel truck.)

In a strange sort of way, I’m almost glad that I’m a bit sad to go; it means that I’ve ended up really valuing the place and people here.
One of my most beautiful memories of being at Dawn and Chris’s place is the day Dawn asks me and Zoe to go and fetch some eggs and tomatoes from Maria and Bonancio’s place just upstream from us. They are a Mayan family who sell some of their produce in the market in Punta Gorda to support themselves.
It’s raining, a month before the wet season is going to arrive.
Zoe is excited about going to get eggs, and relishes the prospect of being in charge of the expedition. She decides that we should swim there even though it will take loads longer than walking. The rain is bouncing off the river, making a layer of mist above its surface.

Zoe swims off ahead of me, shouting and laughing as usual. I am in some kind of paradise with a child happy and blessed to live in such a beautiful world as hers. Walking through the maize on the other side of the river trying to find our way through, Zoe leads the way and we have a really good conversation about the things I liked to do when I was a kid and how she loves to go on adventures; to go squelching in the mud and go swimming afterwards and to ride her bike around the place if she can.

That is a gift of a day, of simple wonders; she brought out the kid in me.

I’ve had no kids so far, and I often get clucky over kids. It’s moments like these I really value.

Zoe would often come and be loud at me when I am trying to be quietly alone when I am working. One day she comes over to me when I am shelling cajunas beans and she goes off on some verbal journey about going to stay over with some young friends who live up country. It involves sleeping over, midnight feasts, bags and bags and bags of sweets, riding bicycles in impossible places and being in charge of who could join in. At first I found her excited rambling annoying; partly because I am already busy filling my head with my own nonsense, and partly because what she’s talking about is becoming increasingly unlikely and over the top.

After a while it dawns on me that Zoe is doing exactly what I often do when I’m not in a position to have the things I want – she is imagining it instead. She’s telling me about a good time she’d actually had with friends up country and then embellishing it with all kinds of wishful kid-sized fantasy. I really get the impression that Zoe misses her friends a lot and wishes she could see them more often. I guess that’s why Zoe spends almost all of her time with the visiting WWOOFers, either being a bit of a pest or just hanging out talking, depending on the readiness of the WWOOFer to engage with her whilst trying to do work and also how much bounce Zoe has at that particular point (usually lots!). Zoe demands a lot of attention like most kids do, and sometimes she bugs me, and sometimes she really surprises me with how much she knows about where she lives. She certainly is a smart kid.
Inevitably, Esperanza is frequently the butt of Zoe’s frustrations. They both vie for the attention of others and inevitably Zoe will usually win, being twice the size and twice as loud. Zoe doesn’t always win these little battles though; Being only two years old, Esperanza’s solution to this seemed to be to fall over or get the sympathy vote somehow.

Esperanza is a real cutie pie, and set off my broodiness big time. One of the cutest things I remember about her is her stripping the hibiscus bushes of their vivid pink flowers and then showing me her ‘high biscuits’ dollies that she would hold out in her hand or arrange on the dining table in a line, whilst babbling a great long toddler-shaped explanation of what her dollies are all doing.

Such is the way of regular family life…
The kids both always want to go swimming, and whenever the WWOOFers would go to rid themselves of work sweat, the kids would hassle to come too, and most of the time they would come along, though Esperanza needs to be kept a close eye on being so young. Zoe would stand on the rocks on the other side yelling ‘Look at me! Look at me everybody!’ and then she would dive off the side with a big grin on her face, loving the attention.

May 7th-8th

The journey up from Dawn and Chris’s to Merida:

I leave Dawn and Chris’s with a simple goodbye like I am just going out for the day, no big emotional speeches. I guess I am worried that I haven’t actually been such a great person to have around (cos of my eternal worriedness) and that I would be embarrassed by anything that I think might smack of insincerity. I could equally be wrong on that count, and may just have ended up snubbing everyone unintentionally. Maybe I’m just being emotionally bunged up (more likely actually).
I wish I could count on my confidence more often than I do. Well, I know for certain that I’ve definitely put a lot of physical work in – I’ve got the muscles to prove it. I had an okay time with Dawn considering I have been a bit flipped out during my time on the farm. Chris is a radically different kind of person from me; he having a big wide-open kind of personality, and me being much more inward and just observing whats going on more. I think me and Chris would have found more common ground given enough time.

I remember Chris would make his attempt at a Dick Van Dyke ‘Would you like a cup of tea Mary Poppins?’ English accent which was always hilariously wide of the mark. It makes me wonder if my attempts at American accents are as bad as his English ones. 

We have some good conversations about the stereotypes that English and American people have about each other;

The English are all ever so polite, drink tea and know the Queen personally. We all wear flat caps or bowler hats, we say ‘Do have another cup of tea won’t you?’ when we mean ‘Get out of my house’. We are all obsessed with football and despite an a dreadful history full of global dominance, wouldn’t say boo to a goose.

The Americans are all loud and over-emotional and think through the barrel of a gun and are by and large mad.

It’s good to discover some truth. It seems people everywhere often have fixed ideas about people from other countries when most of the time they have never even had any real contact with them. It’s only by meeting some real live people you get to find out what they are really about. Even though Chris and Dawn are here, evidently in the arse end of nowhere, they still manage to be great international diplomats.