Belize interlude

Belize, a small country where people have arrived by force or fancy and made themselves at home. They include, at various points in time: British pirates who set about stripping the forests of their wood – the saying goes that Belize City is built on foundations of mahogany logs and empty rum bottles; African slaves; Mayans fleeing wars with the Spanish and now poverty in Guatemala and Honduras; Mennonites; Chinese shopkeepers; North Americans and Europeans in search of their corner of Caribbean paradise; Garífuna who were shipped from St Vincent to Honduras by the British in 1797.

P and I spent a week on holiday there in August. For the first four nights we stayed in Hopkins, two thirds down the coast. For a tiny town that’s essentially a road running along the sea with buildings on either side of it, Hopkins is home to a surprisingly diverse cast of characters. They live in relative harmony with one another yet the village dynamics are being churned and tested by the fast growth of tourism. Not long ago the majority of the villagers were subsistence farmers living off plots of land between Hopkins and the Southern Highway. Now only a few of the subsistence plots remain. And income from the banana plantations nearby has been drained by competition after the region's trade preferences were lifted. The stretches of beach to the North and South of Hopkins are now strung with expensive resorts run by foreigners (mainly South African), that at first did their best to prevent guests from venturing into the village in an attempt to keep tourism dollars within their confines. And at the Western Union in the nearby town of Dangriga winding weekend queues of people waiting for remittances from the US increase the temptation to emmigrate.

We hopped off the bus from Belize City on the Southern Highway turnoff to Hopkins at dusk and were readying ourselves for a long walk to the village when a woman pulled up in her car and offered us a lift. She was called Shona. She was excited to learn I work for a human rights organization. “Me too,” she said. She works with the Human Rights Commission of Belize on indigenous rights, land issues and awareness-raising, and said she was eagerly waiting for materials to arrive from contacts in Geneva to use for the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration. Shona has lived for periods in New York but its city-madness doesn’t appeal anymore. “It’s fun when you’re young,” she said.

We stayed in Hopkins Inn, run by an Alaskan, Greg, and his wife Rita (who wasn’t around while we were there). It consists of four cabañas in the middle of the village, on the beach-side of the street. Greg was among the first Westerners to move there. He negotiated the right to his patch of land with the village authorities by promising he’d be running accommodation only – his guests would patronise the local businesses and he didn’t want to wrinkle the fabric of the community. Greg is nostalgic for how Hopkins used to be and is even considering moving on somewhere new, somewhere that hasn’t been overrun by tourism. While his cabañas are low-impact and integrated into the village, it’s hard not to argue he was the first to push the door open for tourists and it was inevitable that crowds would follow.

Not that there were big crowds while P and I were there. It was rainy season. And hurricane season too, though we weren’t there for one, and amazingly there was only one daytime rainfall during the week of our stay. On the first morning we hired rickety bikes with back-pedal breaking from a grandmother who lived in one of the wooden houses up the road from Hopkins Inn. Her grandchildren were still on their summer break and pattered in and out of the house with friends to be served up the food she had going on a stove in the corner. I’m tired but yes it’s fun having them around, she said. We rode the bikes Northwards along a red-earth road to Sittee River village, a little inland. Bumping over the potholes, sweating from the hot sun but energised by the breeze – that kind of exercise beats a treadmill in a Manhattan gym, but the fun would no doubt diminish if that's how I journeyed to work each day. The appeal of what’s different. In Sittee Village we rented a couple of kayaks from a very stoned woman and set off down the jungle-lined river, pausing to watch turtles, iguanas and herons on the banks. The one animal we haven’t seen, I said as we paddled our way back after a couple of hours, is a crocodile. And perhaps that’s no bad thing. Just then there was a swoosh as the scaly back of a big croc rose out of the water next to us as it swam upstream. For the rest of the kayak we paddled faster, our hearts pumping with the sensation of very-dangerous-animal-somewhere-nearby-unseen. It was with a mixture of relief and disappointment that we later learnt from a man who served us cold Belikin beers (the only beer to be found in most of Belize) at an empty riverside bar near the kayak place that the Sittee River crocodiles have never been known to attack a human.

P and I being P and I we did less sitting still and relaxing than we’d planned. But there was plenty to slow my mind down and relax, including a peaceful morning I spent while P went diving, sitting on a wooden chair under a palm-leaf roof near the cabañas and not moving other than to swim in the sea. I spent the morning engrossed in tales of Greenwich Village exploits in the early 20th Century as recounted in the fabulous “Republic of Dreams” (about which more later), daydreaming, and sleepily observing. A lizard strolled over a wooden beam above me, doing a few press ups each time it paused. A group of kids came and played in the sea for a while, the big ones throwing the little ones over their heads to land with a splash. A couple of orange buoys hung like a pair of saggy breasts from a palm tree. The ground was scattered with broken coconut shells, flotsam and jetsam.

Two evenings there we ate un-beautiful but scrumptious southern Indian food cooked by a woman from Bangalore who ran a restaurant by the beach. We never learned when and why she’d come to Belize. She got the special ingredients from Belize City, imported via the States. We drank beers and checked email (just once!) at Oliver and Pam’s place – he’s a German who moved there to set up a bar and windsurf, she’s his beautiful young Belizean wife who’s apparently gone from shy to strong and assertive since taking up her new life with him. Each morning Margarita, from Honduras, slowly and methodically cleaned our cabaña, sweating profusely. Only two of the cabañas were occupied, so it was fine she took her time. We bought snacks and random essentials like flipflops from the two Hopkins stores, both run by Chinese families. Apparently one is friendlier to the locals than the other.

Next stop was Mama Noots’ “jungle resort” about forty minutes drive inland from Hopkins. Its owner, Nan, spends a lot of the summer months away so we were lucky she was there and happy to have us to stay – Greg had called her up the day before. There were no other guests. Mama Noots is a huge clearing in the rainforest turned into a tropical botanical garden with a few cabañas dotted around for guests and a square restaurant in the middle, with transparent mosquito-net walls. Nan’s family founded the second-largest rum company in Belize. After a period living in the US and working as a nurse, Nan decided to realize her dream of establishing a botanical garden and renewable energy centre in Belize that would attract people from around the world as a "sustainable living" showcase. Her Dad told her about a place surrounded by waterfalls and inaccessible by road where he and his friends used to go hunting. She bought it, built a road, and set about creating her garden. Since then, the land all around hers has been designated a national park (though Nan has concerns that illegal logging may be going on further into the jungle – why else so much more flooding every time it rains?). But the dreams have proven to be just beyond Nan’s reach. She separated from her partner a while ago and now tries to keep Mama Noots going on her own – though with help for a few months at a time from her two daughters and of a few people she employees to look after the buildings and land. But although she taps some of the waterfalls for energy, there hasn’t been the money to turn it into the internationally-recognized eco-project she had forseen. She's now looking for a wealthy environmentally-minded buyer.

We went on two walks that day, swimming at the top of each one in a cold natural pool and having a shower, Jacuzzi and pummelling massage all in one under tumbling cascades. At the first waterfall there was no-one else. At the second, there was a couple. The guy had stripped down into his trunks for a swim. The girl was sitting in her trousers, t-shirt and walking boots sulking. Perhaps she was ill from the climb up. We suggested that we leave them alone for a while and come back later but the guy told us it was fine to stay. We probably annoyed the sulky girl no end by climbing right in and swimming about enjoying ourselves. The guy tried to undo her shoelaces. She did them up again. She put her head down on her hunched knees. Eventually, somehow, he enticed her. She swam around, carefully, but looking much better.

Then back for dinner with Nan who entertained us with her stories. For example that of her second cousin, who has made a fortune selling rum to Travellers. He is setting up a rum museum in Dangriga and approached Nan’s first cousin asking to buy the huge copper drum that their grandfather had used for distilling and that they had used as a swimming pool when they were kids. Nan heard of the proposition just in time, she said. She intervened by insisting the drum is “priceless” and that 2nd cousin should pay the 1st cousin several thousand more dollars than he had offered. No doubt he will agree.

Our third and last stop in Belize was Millers Landing on the Placencia peninsula in the South, run by Annie and Gary Miller. Annie’s from Texas and first came across the peninsula when she was sailing around the Caribbean in the seventies. Gary was in the navy (just old enough to have been a Viet vet?). They met somewhere in the Pacific. They are trying to perpetuate an idyllic hippy-seventies existence at their resort but it’s tarnished by alcohol – Gary knocks back neat liquor all day long and Annie almost keeps up with her beers. Their beloved Alsatian, “Brandy”, helps keep the fragile peace. The resort, which they built themselves, has elements of creative beauty – whether the wild flowers that fill the garden, the pathways marked out by pebbles, the colourful paintings on the walls of the rooms – and elements of bedraggled abandon. Gary explained as a thinly disguised apology that there’s no point in doing annual fixing and renovations until just before the busy winter season begins, in case a hurricane comes and wreaks its havoc. That was no doubt a good reason, even if not the only one. A few years ago Hurricane Iris flattened some of the nearby resorts, including Turtle Inn that had just been bought by Francis Ford Coppola. Apparently Coppola wasn’t too fussed – the resort’s former décor was funky but tacky by his tastes and the hurricane made it easier for him to start from scratch, giving it the impeccably elegant style it has now (one evening we went in to savour a cocktail among dining honeymooners, to the sound cidadas and a Mayan band). Iris swept through Millers Landing too of course. Floodwater filled the house to the ceiling. But it remained standing.