Adventures Abound, And there's STOUT!!!!!

Ok, for those of you that know me, you will know that i have a love affair with good dark beers. Like most love affairs its an intense relationship that usually leaves me in pain. After a week of drinking Mexican piss water i crossed the boarder into Belize and was at a restaurant in Corozal and 'Belikin Stout' caught my eye. I ordered one and was soon reveling in the sensation of a dark sweetness rolling over my tongue and down my throat to warm me at the very core of my being.

Anyway, I'll go back a bit and catch you all up. The last installment ended with me sitting at Lobo Inn. Ahnna made our first contact with MET belize (our destination) and the results were not as encouraging as we could have hoped. Arran, the manager and brother of my friend heather, had left town a few days ago to drive up to the states and pick up his parents in texas to bring them back down. The guest Ahnna talked to said she didn't know if there was room for us and told us to call back the next night at 6 when someone who knew what they were talking about would be around. This ment yet another night in Tulum, which while not an entirely unpleasant prospect was bad news for our dwindleing bank accounts. But hey, whats an adventure without a little adversity.

That afternoon Ahnna and I headed to the beach south of the ruins at Tulum. I didn't enjoy that beach as much as I enjoyed the beaches of Cancun because there was a lot more seaweed and ocean debris (Probably because there isn't a multi million dollar hotel industry paying someone to keep the beaches clean) The surf was not quite as fun either, most of the bigger waves taunted me as they broke on the reef at the edge of my view out to sea. I played in the surf for a half hour or so while ahnna attempted to sun herself on the beach. It was a somewhat cloudy day though so we headed back to the Inn pretty quickly. We met a lovely british couple named Matt and Lisa who had just arrived from Belize and swapped travel stories and good locations while they ate dinner. We spent that night polishing off 1 liter of vodka and 3 liters of juice with them and a couple of british girls whome we had met the night before named Laura and Tara. We solidified plans to catch a bus the next morning to the ruins at Coba. One of the germans had told the girls that there were some amazing caves near the ruins where you could snorkle and swim. We were not to be dissapointed.

The next morning we caught a bus in tulum town at 11 and spent the 40 minute ride to coba watching the thuroughly depressing movie 'a map of the world'. It may be a good movie, but we got nowhere near the uplifting finish and so it left me in a bit of a funky mood as we exited the bus into the ghost town that is near the ruins at coba. Mangy dogs wriggled for our attention. The dusty streets with rubble pilled up along the sides put me in the mind of africa. Parts of mexico definitly still count as the third world. On the walk to the ruins there was a lake on our right and we saw a few crocodiles. There was a litte boy throwing a peice of meat on a string to one of them to get it to move for the tourists. We paid 48 pessos to get into the ruins. This seems to be the going rate for zonas arquiologicas. The ruins were quite a bit more impressive than those in tulum, though ofcourse they lacked the attraction of being right on the ocean. There were a few of the rings still in tact from the game that they used to play in mayan times. There is alot of speculation about the rules. There is general agreement that it was played by slaves and conquered people and some think that if you didn't put the ball through the hoop in exactly the way the sun gods would you were disembouled and had your heart removed. Others beleive that if you won you were beheaded because winning proved you blood was better and therefore a more befitting sacrafice to the gods. Either way, sounds like fun. We didn't go all the way throught the ruins since we were there for the caves and you can only see so many piles of rocks before they all start looking the same.

It cost 300 pessos for us to get a taxi to the caves from the ruins since there were 6 of us and the driver had to make two trips, but that price included the return trip, so we felt 5 dollars a peice was a fair rate. The caves were everything we expected and more. We started with the last cave which was a mistake since it far outshone the first. The entrance to both was just a hole in the ground with a relatively steep set of stairs leading down into the darkness. The 10 foot wide entrances then widened into round caverns with lights illuminating stalagtites, limestone columns and beautifully blue water. The water was not that deep in the first cave but when people got into it, the light reflecting off the ripples on the surface caused similar ripples of light on the cave walls and gave a nice ambiance. The Second Cave was almost completely round and had a pizza slice of rock to stand on, the rest was beautiful blue, deep water. There were a few little fish, but the cave waters were otherwise devoid of life. Two platforms on the way down the spiral staircase that allowed us to jump into the water from heights of maybe 25 and 35 feet. Ahnna thinks i'm exagerating the height, but hey, whats a good story without a little exageration. I ofcourse was the only one to jump off of both.

We slept on the way back to Tulum and then walked the 1 or 2 miles back to Lobo Inn, stopping along the way to pick up supplies for dinner. Matt cooked. In addition to being a wakeboarding instructor and construction site supervisor he is also an excelent cook. That night I contacted MET again and talked to Allison, Arran's wife, also not an encouraging conversation, but she said to go ahead and come on down. Needless to say, i was starting to feel a bit shaky about our immediate future, but with nothing else to do.... The next day we caught a bus to Chetumal and then from there a bus across the boarder to Corozal which is where i met my new belizian love, Belikin Stout, which is locally brewed. The boarder crossing was very easy.

One little detail that i didn't mention before because i didn't understand the significance was that when we came into mexico, on our way through customs we had to press a button, at the time it didn't make any sense to me, but whatever, i pressed it. Apparently there is a light that either turns red or green when you press the button and if it had turned red they would have searched our bags. That makes so much more sense than the USA's "random" searches. There was no button for Belize, just some rosta like guards who asked us what we were bringing into their country.

Anyway, We stayed in Las Palmas, a hotel recomended by Matt and Lisa and aquired express tickets to San Ignacio from another hotel a short walk away called The Hotel Maya. If we stay in Corozal again we'll try them instead of Las Palmas for reasons i will get into in a minute. On the way back from aquiring our ticket we stopped at a great little restaurant called Cactus Plaza which is where i found my stout... did i mention there is stout in belize??? I tried two new mexican foods, tostadas and salbutes. I had unknowingly had a breakfast tostada that morning at Lobo Inn Which was an interesting affair. a flat crisp taco shell with beans, a sliced hardboiled egg, and onions topped by a red sauce that reminded me a bit of BBQ sauce only more spicy. Salbutes are a taco shell fried untill it puffs up and then stuffed with the taco stuffing... reminded me of Chalupas from Taco Bell, only MUCH better... and greasier if that is possible. We also met some more people, a retired couple who had been ministers in the church of christ. They had sold their house and most everything they owned and come down through mexico in their car. They are going to retire here in belize and they introduced us to the saying "TIB", This Is Belize, which i originally associate with "TIA" from the movie Blood Diamond, though as we would soon find out, works just as well here.

We slept that night on a matress that made the Lobo Inn seem like luxurious accomodation. I could feel each spring, and any time i rolled over, the bounce would bottom the matress out and my hip would hit the bedframe. I awoke the next morning to what i thought was a distressed belizian woman at the gates screeching HOLA... HOLA... HOLA... It turned out to be a parrot, and i then remembered Matt and Lisa warning us about it, and saying it was a good alarm to make sure we didn't miss our bus which left from The Hotel Maya at 7am. We left the Hotel and caught the bus. On the bus I noticed that I had recieved more bedbug bites in that one night than all my nights in mexico combined. I'm sure that Matt and Lisa meant well by recomending it. If anyone else decides to brave that location, just don't let them give you room 9.

We rode the bus down the coast to belize city and then inland. I got some more reading done on the bus, i've almost finished Alan Greenspans book 'The Age of Turbulence' which i highly reccomend to anyone even remotely interested in economics or the state of the world. We had the bus driver drop us off in Georgeville, which is just before San Ignacio and is the location of the Turnoff to MET Belize. As we exited the bus we noticed a convoy of british army troops were stopped there as well. Apparently they come here for jungle training. After some trouble opperating the payphone we managed to get ahold of the people at MET and a guy named Jake came down to pick us up an hour later. When we got here our reception was less than enthusiastic. Alison repeated what she had said before, she really didn't know where they would put us. So here we sat, in limbo, in the cantina of MET Belize... ... ... no return tickets... ... ... no other real prospects... ... ... Alison mentioned that MAYBE one of their neighboring resourts called Barton Creek might have need of a few volunteers... ... ... after a few hours of floating around feeling useless the guys from Barton creek happened to come by and we met the owner who's name is Jim. He seemed much more enthusiastic about some free help. So it seems we will be staying in Belize after all. Then one of the people with him, I think his name was Sebastian, asked if I had any experience canoeing. I unwittingly said yes, and before you know it I was being talked into being the third member of his team to do "La Ruta Maya" which is "a grueling multi-day canoe race traveling a perilous river route across the country of Belize" 170 miles in 4 days... ummm.... I'm going to die. For more information on my future stupidity visit the following web site. http://www.larutamayabelize.com/main/Default.aspx?tabid=54

So it seems we will have a place here after all, and i will start my stay with quite the adventure. We are staying here at MET tonight, and Jim will pick us up sometime tomarrow pre-noonish. Its been Quite the experience, but hey, TIB!