What a Difference a Day Makes...
Trip Start
Jul 12, 2010
1
49
74
Trip End
Ongoing
Orange Walk, Belize
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Peter Griffin
Family Guy
Tuesday 12th July 2011
Moving on is what travelling is all about, otherwise it'd wouldn't be called 'travelling', it would be called 'staying'. Whether I like a place or not, I'm always faced with the task of moving on sooner or later. Sometimes that sucks, like in Whistler or San Francisco, but other times it's a life-saver, like the moment I crossed from Mexico into Belize.
Some people have never even heard of Belize. The name had appeared on my radar just twice before: once back at school when my mates big sister was planning a trip there and again about three weeks ago, when I was looking at a map trying to plan my journey through the lower Americas.
Some people may think that dedicating the entire last chapter to complaining about Mexico was a waste of time. I disagree, firstly because I felt it important to put my point across but also because it's actually saved me some time. I don't have to write page after page about how cool Belize is - just take what I wrote about Mexico and the complete opposite is Belize. It's laid back like I've never seen before, the people are friendly, helpful and honest. It's beautiful, too, with lush green landscapes, undeveloped and not yet blighted by excessive concrete.
As I've stated before, I don't have a lot of time to dick around in Central or South America. My aim is to enjoy one or two places in each country and then move on. There reasons for this are various, complex and mine. Some people spend a whole month in each country, visiting a town and staying there for 5 or 6 days at a time. That just isn't for me, at least not at this point in my life.
For Belize I decided to make the Maya ruins of Lamanai the focus of my time. I organised it through the hotel, so the day after I arrived I jumped in a speed boat with a few others and we blasted up the New River towards the ruins, stopping every so often to look at nature. Our tour guide/speed boat captain spotted a crocodile submerged near the river bank at one point and then we stopped by some trees with spider monkeys swinging in the branches. I figured they were just going to stay in the trees and show us how they scratch their arses, but no, they climbed aboard to grab some food. We had to keep hold of our cameras, because they like grabbing peoples things as well. I can't say I've ever had a monkey brush past me before. Needless to say the camera was working overtime.
The ruins themselves are immense. The Maya's had a strange way of building and developing their villages. Rather than tear something down and start again when it started to look a bit shabby, they'd just build on top of it. Some of the temples have several other older temples underneath them. I can't help thinking that if we tried this in modern times, we'd do a shabby job of it and one enthusiastic jump on the floor would send you crashing down into the remains of the room your grand parents used to hump in.
Being rainy season the weather didn't disappoint and absolutely slashed it down just before we went to climb one of the temples. The steps are steep - hands are needed and one set of stairs even has a rope - not to mention ultra slippery, but getting to the top was incredible. This was the temple that the Maya used to use as a lookout, with it's 360-degree view from the top looking out across the endless forest.
A day like that was badly needed. If I had not liked Belize it wouldn't have been a good omen for the rest of Latin America. But as we wear tearing along the river with the wind blowing my hair around, I thought about how, 24 hours earlier, I'd been in Mexico having my patience and tolerance pushed to it's very limits. It felt so damn good to be somewhere else.
Next day I had to be up early to take the bus to Belize City and then another bus to Punta Gorda down in the south of the country. This is where the boat leaves for Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, which I'd be catching in the morning. Sleepy doesn't even begin to describe Punta Gorda. I don't think I've ever seen an immigration office so peaceful and unthreatening.
The one single tiny issue I had was trying to change a 50 Belizean dollar note into smaller change to pay for my hostel room. It isn't a wealthy place, so people don't really have a lot of loose cash lying around for things like changing bigger notes. Everyone was friendly enough though, apart from a Chinese woman in a bar who just stared at me and shouted "boh! boh!" (whatever that means) like she was having some kind of foreign-language tourettes fit,
English is actually the first language in Belize, which saved me from verbally torturing people with my attempts at Spanish. It is getting there, slowly, but for me it's somewhat akin to trying to inflate a bouncy castle with a bicycle pump. A shit-load of effort with not a lot of apparent gains.
I caught the boat easily enough in the morning, after swapping my remaining Belizean dollars for Guatemalan Quetzals with the exchange man who turns up at the immigration port. After the boat landed in Guatemala, I caught a bus, a taxi and then another bus and finally after what has been a very long-arse day I'm in Antigua. Antigua is a very cute little town about an hour outside Guatemala City, within throwing range of no less than three volcanoes.
As I was sitting in the hostel and dicking around on the computer, I glanced at the date and realised it's July 12th, exactly one year since I hit the road and started my travels in Toronto. In that year I've seen and done some amazing things, explored new avenues of fun in Whistler, found sublime inner peace and happiness in San Francisco, witnessed communist life in Cuba and tried desperately to hang onto my patience in Mexico. The high points outweigh the lows (like having my boots nicked in LA) by a thousand to one.
Ultimately, travel is exactly that - experience a place for a while and then move on. And sometimes that moving on can re-energise the whole trip.
Here's to a year on the road.
:-)
G.
