After Three Years: Belize
When I was in a filing cabinet for a month after an abundant but anxiety-inducing stint in London, a friend sent me an Instagram message encouraging me to apply for a job at the media company she was working for. She had dangled the dream – getting paid to travel write - like grapes over Tantalus, so, waist-high in weathered email records and newspaper clippings, I reached for them.
And yes, it wasn’t me; it was, like a lot of lifestyle content, aimed at generic broad-appeal, but it carried the promise of funded travel and the potential for deep-diving my region through research and conversation.
I ended up in Belize on assignment for that job. It was toward the end of September - Independence week – so the team there had filled my schedule with as many cultural experiences and interviews as could fit in seven days.
Take-off always makes me nervous, and sometimes I think about plunging mid-flight, so on shorter legs I always sit by the window because my mind falling into the clouds helps me forget the unlikely event of my body doing the same. The vistas en route to Belize were a write-up of all my recent sins and successes; after drink service, I folded and tucked a hastily written note – a summary of regrets and clarities – into the front pocket of my backpack. So when I arrived in Belize City on a hot early afternoon, I think I was ready to receive.
The first thing was the river – snaking, moss green and wide on the shoulder of the highway. It’s a different kind of mood than the sharp luminance of the Caribbean Sea off Cayman, with its clarity and cyan expansiveness. The river seems to ask different questions – weightier ones -something about the earthiness of the dense shoreline foliage as it meets the pathos of the water.
I spent most of that first day photographing The Expo – an annual outdoor tradeshow with everything from phone deals to skewered sausage on offer. As the mid-afternoon humidity gave way to orange sunset and amateur soca musicians took the stage, I saw myself standing in the crowd, a first Belikin and a self-satisfied smile at my lips.
I was picked up by a coworker early the next day in the kind of truck you’d find in Twisted Metal. We set off on a road trip to the South, zooming the highways and unpaved roads as far as Placencia; it was to his soundtrack of violent stories – hijackings, murders and mutilations against a backdrop of lovely mountains, howler monkeys at the roadside, jabirus wading ponds in the distance.
We would overnight in Dangriga, where his in-laws live. We ate ham and eggs and fry jacks, rice and beans and baked chicken from a creek-adjacent diner - phone books and other aged mementos stacked up behind the counters – before checking me into the Chaleanor Hotel, a burnt orange and avocado green guest house with bay windows and circular balconies wrapped, for the occasion, in the Belizean flag.
Grapevines climb the exterior walls where a pathway leads to an outdoor staircase. A moringa monopolizes the far corner of the garden, a stack of bright canoes sits racked amongst the more modest trees. It’s a three-person room on the third floor with quilted twin beds and heavy floral curtains. The bathroom light is a dulled orange, but a narrow window overlooking nearby roofs allows in the moonlight.
I interviewed the hotel owners in the morning, bleary from poor sleep – it was the tale of the gun-point caravan robbery that did it, I think. They took me up to the roof and told me their dreams –a resto-bar serviced by their farm in the nearby mountains, maybe eco-tours, after. The view stretched out beyond the town’s brick-red zinc and wooden fences to a sparkling sea beyond.
On our way out of Dangriga, we stopped at the Gulisi Garifuna Museum where, having visited too early for the November Settlement Day celebrations, I’d learn more about the Afro-Indigenous peoples whose 18th century exile from St. Vincent led them to Southern Belize, and whose rich culture has designated Dangriga the country’s “cultural capital”. The Segundo drums, bread-kind graters, calabash bowls and woven cassava flour sieves were familiar of course – iterations of them repeat around the region in a fascinating web of unique expressions of identity, Cayman no exception. The centrality of music too, the ideal of community, the ancestor veneration.
In Belmopan we circled the government buildings, rounding the high walls of gated suburban neighbourhoods before leaving down a long dirt track to a nearby ranch. A big white horse edged his chin over the fence, eyeing the truck as we slowed to park under (what I recall as) a domineering fig tree. A wrought iron gate led into a tunnel walkway, planted over with climbing vines and melodious with the twittering of hedge birds. It exited onto a jungle estate of awkwardly extravagant pale pink buildings, exteriors washed by time. At first, they were charming if not extraneous.
At the back of the property, overlooking the river, was a wooden house grown over with nature; it was the sole existing structure when the owners purchased this land. A narrow staircase leads up to an open main chamber with floor-to-ceiling slatted windows, the arms of a nearby tree reaching through. Nouveau swirls and arches, spiral staircases to oval portholes, odd angles, almost Surrealist design. I loved this.
But the longer we stayed, the more despondent I became. It was all the cages – the jaguar, the peacocks, the parrots and the monkey chained by his leg to a tree he used to visit out of love and now, may never leave.
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Maybe because my childhood was experienced in a geographically small place, and my teenage and early adult years in cramped ones, space is always surprising and thrilling to me. From the prop plane to San Pedro, the mainland had space. Before my visit in 2019, I’d read that Belize is the most sparsely populated Central American country, with an approximate population of 390,351 people across its 8, 867 square miles.
There had been a recent series of fires in San Pedro and hearing this I wondered about space; along this stretch of Front Street and its adjacent roadways, the buildings are set close together – wooden or reinforced concrete with tangled electrical chords clustered at the eaves and stretching overhead. Many people, over the length of this day trip, remind me the commodity space is here as the caye grows in popularity for expatriates and long-term visitors.
And so it reminds me of Cayman, in some ways. The water here is that same pale turquoise at the shoreline and on the back roads, mangrove swamps explain its clarity.
After a client interview, we lunch at El Fogon for Belizean classics cooked over an outdoor firewood oven. The food’s good, and homely – my hearty stew with (more) rice and beans, plantain, potato salad, could easily have come from a festival tent on Shedden Road.
After an interlude back in Belize City (Dario’s Meat Pies, historic bottles and taxidermy, lighthouses, comedic stories from the British army, Garifuna dance shows), is roadside roasted cashews and becoming food for mosquitoes after a rainfall at Altun Ha – but we had the site to ourselves, and I’ve wanted to see Mayan ruins since after-school hours in George Town Public Library, digesting all the world mythology the children’s section could offer.
In Orange Walk Town, Kes the Band’s Hello, played on repeat from the street below, becomes ironic background music to my tears. I’ve locked myself in my hotel room to catch up on reading and boy, it’s a sad one. But from the theme park down the street, erected for the festivities, is the sound of manic joy, the kind of happiness that screams from the gut. The next morning is jouvert, and with still swollen eyes, I let the soca light itself into the cocoon of my literary-induced sadness.
A year later, bodies won’t be able to fit themselves together like this in the sweaty balm of early morning. It’s still dark, and the pipes streaming water above the crowd wash down the paint and powder for more layers of the same. A man hangs off the back of the truck, eyes closed, waist unapologetic and lips stretching to ecstatic shapes – the sun rises over him, over the truck – and as the parade reaches my hotel, where I can tuck back in for more heartache on the pages, I watch his smile and his hips, liberated by carnival, fade beyond my sightlines. Flesh, farewell!