Motorcycles, Mountaintops, and Drumming

Yesterday my mom informed me that my dad Will come to Belize with me! Now I am looking for a place to rent that will accommodate dads and dogs and Christmas Guests. I also will need a vehicle. There's a jeep Cherokee Laredo 1998 that I looked at last night. I like it because the doors squeak and one doesn't close properly and that brings the cost of a car right down. Who needs the fourth door? Pups don't use the doors and elders sit up front.

I went to see Alice yesterday, we had not Adventured in awhile. We chatted and I told her and David about my life in town - Thursday night open-air movies, my second-story balcony wi-fi location where I can people watch, and the Rastafarian drummaker who found me in the back at Greedy's Pizza one night asking if I would like to buy a drum .

"Chris told me I could find you here," he said.

Hmph. That Chris. I sensed a sales pitch coming on.

He turned out to be *Mahkey" (Mark), as they call him, Chris had pointed him out to me before. One of the local kids who had painted a door for Chris when he was 12. Now he is 30-some.

"I can sell you this drum for $50US" he said, offering me a drum he had made which would be too big to take back on the plane. But it sounded nice.

He was very persuasive. The price started coming down, started being quoted in Belize dollars instead of U.S. And, what I was not understanding, he said, was that the drum came with Lessons.

By now Chris himself had joined us, having come from the post office to rescue me from torrential rain on the street, which I and my iPad have been thankful for more than once. (Someday maybe there will be a post of the list of Chris' rescues. They are quite frequent. Remember the rescue on our jaguar hunt when the wheel fell off the car in the middle of nowhere? There have been more. Chris is the friend to have when you are a few wayfaring women set loose in a small country. Below I will write about my adventures with Alice in The Bajo yesterday when her motorcycle fell apart piece by piece. Guess who we called?)

So Chris was there to hear the negotiations. Mark was offering now to create a whole party of it at Chris' house. Invite a few people. Do a little drumming. How I miss my days in Minneapolis when there was a constant flow of guests and parties and uncommon assortments of people at my house regularly. My life in Asheville or Eau Claire never accommodated that in the same way. But Belize.... Life in Belize is still a blank slate. I could still become the Gringa with the most eclectic assortment of people at her parties. Mark started me thinking.

Friday is my birthday. Originally I was to spend my birthday in the Caribbean Sea (remember my Swimming with the Sharks idea?) But when you have an unusual appreciation for having a birthday - do you spend it alone with your Maker and the wildlife of the sea? Or do you spend it with the friends around you who have made your stay in Belize Most Extraordinary and bless them by throwing a party to celebrate...?

I was still deliberating. (What if no one comes?)

So I told these stories to Alice and David, including the drumming party idea.

Then Alice and I took to the back roads on her two motorcycles. We were looking for a place for me to rent in the country. Then it Rained. We stopped to put Alice's cell phone under my bike seat beneath the vinyl packet of bike wrenches so they wouldn't get wet. I put mine in the small leather purse I had slung over my neck that was a gift from Italy. I hoped the leather would keep the phone dry and I hoped the rain wouldn't ruin the leather. There were not other options. As for the pad of paper tucked into the side pocket below the knee in my pants, I could see the words blurring already through the tan cotton fabric. Ah well, it was recipes and places to rent that had come up empty. There are sacrifices to be made for a good bike ride in the tropics.

We filled up the bikes with gas and I checked on the cost of tires for the Jeep I am interested to buy..

We headed back into Spanish Lookout to look for postings about rentals and put up Wanted to Rent signs ourselves.

The post office led us to our next adventure. A man named Jacob had an index card tacked up about selling his 40 acre farm with a 4-bedroom house ready to move into. The price was $125,000 Belize. This is $63,000 US. Seriously. A 40 acre farm. "Nice view." he wrote on the card. Jacob has no idea.

"Maybe he wants to rent a house he can't sell..." I suggested to Alice.

Old world mennonites don't have cell phones, so there was no number to call.

"I know where it is Susan," Alice said. "I know Jacob's place."

I looked interested.

"Right now." she said.

"Right now" in creole means "let's go," it means "yes," it means "in a little while". Very versatile. This time Alice meant "let's go."

We stopped to put up my ads at every store bulletin board along Center Street, the main road through town. "Two bedroom house wanted to rent with yard for gardens and dogs."

"You better say you want electricity," Alice advised. These things are not assumed. I added water too, just in case.

We headed to "The Bajo" where Jacob's house awaited us. I had been on the ride once before with Alice. The Bajo has the most beautiful vistas in Belize that I've seen. Acres of jungle forest and farmland ending with ridge after ridge of mountains on the horizon. Maybe Guatemala, maybe Belize, depending on where you're standing.

We came to the road that leads up to David-The-Mennonite's house. We call him this to differentiate between Alice's David and this one. He is single, looking for a blue-eyed wife. He went all the way to Bolivia to find one but it was not the hotbed of blue eyes that he expected. (I can't explain why he expected this. Alice only laughed when I asked.) He came home empty-armed. Alice wants me to meet him. By the grace of God, he was not home when we stopped on our first visit to The Bajo.

Alice pulled her bike over, off the road. We were at the bottom of a great hill that hosts several Mennonite farms, including David's, and at a corner leading to more farms in each direction.

"Something smells hot," Alice said. Luckily she has a good sense of smell. I do not. Her back wheel was smoking. She put the bike on it's center stand.

"I need to throw water on it," she announced, and went to the ditch to find some. I took the plastic bag from the pepitos I had purchased earlier for the ride. Now they found a convenient home in my low front pocket.

Alice filled the bag with water from the ditch and headed toward the bike. I am not familiar with this approach of dousing the rear wheel, but Alice is extremely knowledgeable. Chris has said more than once Alice can do anything a woman can do and anything a man can do. She is a Resourceful woman. I trusted her about the bag of water. Then she brought two more.

I looked at the chain on her bike. It had a lot of play.

"That chain is dangerous," I observed. "it needs to be tightened." I do know that much.

"I will do it," Alice said. "I need my wrenches from that bike." She pointed to the one I was riding.

To open the seat meant I had to turn off the bike, which I dreaded because it has trouble kick starting. Or I have a wimpy kick. And it doesn't have a clutch so you can't "bump" start it by rolling down a hill and kicking it into gear, as I learned to do when I had my own bike in my hallowed Minneapolis years.

I complied and cut the engine and used the key to open the seat and found the vinyl case of wrenches with Alice's cell phones.

They were the wrong size.

"I don't know how to tighten this one," she said examining the chain.

I can't even remember how I used to tighten a bike chain so I offered valuable advice instead.

"If there's a mechanic nearby, they would know how to adjust a chain." I said this becauauto lot of auto repair places here are just in someone's yard. Almost all of them are. But I forgot where I was. The Bajo, old world mennonite country where they use horse and buggy, not machines. Ay, Susan, I said to myself like Alice would if she'd thought of it.

"David can help us!" Alice announced, referring to the Mennonite up the hill. I smiled. I was going to meet that bearded young Mennonite no matter what, it seemed. Yet, no. We made our way up and around the hill (really, it must be a mountain, I'll have to ask) to David's place. On our last visit, his black dog tried to stave us off. Alice does not like big dogs so it is my job to befriend any big dogs and keep them focused on me and away from Alice. Dogs know who is afraid, so it's no good letting anyone's fear escalate in your party...

This time, no black dog and no David. He has a white wooden stick house on stilts that is tidy and bare. His shed houses a second wagon and a pile of wagon accessories and such. Down the road, his greenhouses grow every kind of produce for market. Next to the house is a small outhouse painted white to match.

Alice needed to use it. She stepped toward the gate and erupted in a gale of laughter and showed me her foot - covered in mud from the ditch. I kept my bike running. I will have to pay Alice for the gas, I thought, I just don't have the umph to kickstart it, it seems. (In my defense, it takes anyone else 3-5 kicks to start it as well...)

Then I heard shrieking. Was she still laughing about the mud? I couldn't hear over the rumble of the bike.

What?! I called to her.

She is calling my name, shrieking. I can't imagine what in an outhouse would make Alice shriek. Me, that's another story. Anything unexpected in an outhouse would make me scream. I tried to hurry and fumbled off my bike to go to see what was wrong. By the time I got to the muddy gate, Alice had already emerged, her pants not quite intact and jumping and squealing "Ants!!"

Oh, ants. Ants are quite an event here. They are tiny, they move about in families of thousands, and they bite. So running into a mass of them could ruin anyone's outhouse experience for some time. She danced and jumped and wrenched off her shoes and wiped her feet free of ants. Alice did not go back into the outhouse or even go back to close the door.

We made it to the next farm and met Nathan, another single Mennonite looking for a wife, Alice informed me. (For the record, I am (specifically) not looking for a Mennonite husband, this is all Alice's concoction and, frankly, her joy to tell me about these opportunities.)

He pointed up to Jacob's farm, which we could see on the very top of the hill, and to another one below it that was also empty, waiting to be sold. Jacob's house looked big. I was intrigued, but we had already come about 10 miles on gravel roads. It would be remote to live out here.

The last mile or two of the road was overgrown since Jacob abandoned the house when he and his family moved to Springfield (the community you read about in " Truck Driving, Mennonites, Hitchhikers and Vanities") and it's steep, and (as you are used to hearing) impassable with rock.

So 40 acres of farmland with a house on a hilltop. You can't imagine it. Not the house, that is nothing, just a wooden structure, sturdily made with only one layer of boards for the outside walls and the same separating the rooms inside. It's two stories with an open attic. Imagine a framed in, unfinished house. That is what you have, but 1x4s hung horizontally for siding. The boards have space between them here and there - airtight is not a tropical advantage.

It's the hilltop that matters. A hilltop in beautiful Bajo. To say the view from the house is breathtaking just sounds trite. The only thing more beautiful would be if you could see the ocean too. The panorama is about 200 degrees of a 25-mile (50?) horizon of tropical farmland, pastures, horses, cattle and then mountains.

So I stood near the edge of the flat top of the hill, mindful of the grass and the beautiful black snake with neon yellow zig zags that we saw slither off the road when we first left Alice's house. (His Mennonite cousin could be living in Jacob's grass, we don't know.) So I didn't venture too far.

The thing about a tropical snake is that everything here is big. Frogs are the size of my hand. Even moths are the size of my hand. I could step into a "safe" spot on the grass that happens to be amid a few of the coils of one lounging snake before I ever have the chance to see whether he is round headed or triangle headed. And that makes all of difference of whether I have to cry out for Alice to grab the rusty saw from beneath Jacob's rain barrel, which I saw on my walk around the house, to slice open the bite and suck out the venom. This I have seen in movies, not in Belize. Here they go for an "anti venom", something you take that neutralizes the poison. I have never heard of that it sounds like a Star Trek cure to me.

"Spock I have the Belizean Viper anti-venom that will save Jim's life!" cries Dr. McCoy. (This references the Old version of Star Trek that people over 40 remember...)

So I stayed away from the thick camouflaging grasses in Jacob's yard. Meanwhile, Alice opened a door to the house and went right in. It was the same layout inside as a house we'd been in in Springfield when the rain pelted down and only the women were home and they invited our non-Mennonite-clad bodies in out of the rain. Their house had been as bare as any I've ever seen. Benches along the walls to sit on. Not even a table to eat at or chairs besides the wall benches. Bare empty rooms, swept clean. No apparent worldly possessions.

Don't let me mislead you, it's not that Mennonites here don't Own stuff. David's shed is chock full of wagon parts and bits. Isaac, the dentist in Springfield could rightfully be called a hoarder of things metal. He has a disorganized acre of every type of scrap. But the houses seem to be Spare.

So the floor plan of Jacobs house.. You walk into a long shallow room that stretches left and right. In front of you, across this entryway, is a wide steep stairway that goes up to the bedrooms. Left of the stair is a first floor bedroom that stretches to the back of the house. Further left in the entryway is a window. To the right in the entryway opens into what at my house would be a dining room. And the dining room wraps around into what could be a kitchen area, but is not because all of their cookery goes on outside. That room reaches around to the wall of the first floor bedroom. Up the stairs we find four bedrooms, one hidden inside the other, looking like a closet door but leading into a full room. Another steeper deeper staircase leads up to an open attic where it appears that boards are laid over rafters as needed for storage and the like. It is clear that this is where the mice live so I turn around without any need to explore empty rafters.

"OK, Susan, right now," Alice says. She is ready to go.

We close up the house and mount our bikes. I speed off ahead of her down the rocky grassy road because I am in Belize and exhilarated by the view and I want to go fast. Fast being relative - 15 mph (a treacherous road). Alice roars behind me on her bike which moves fastest when pointed downhill, but seems to go uphill at about 5 mph wherever we are. These are what we call mopeds, by the way. Engines of 150cc or 200cc. We were not, in case you are wondering, riding Harleys.

I decided if we were doing self appointed open houses that I would explore the next vacant Mennonite house too. I turned in and looked in the windows. They left stuff - an antique treadle sewing machine and two apparently antique bedroom dressers. I didn't try to go in. I strode once around the yard and Alice caught up with me.

We were about to go when I saw The Bird.

A beautiful, small, slender-beaked yellow tropical bird, bigger than a hummingbird but smaller than a robin was trapped in an upstairs window between the screen and the partially opened slats of glass.

"That bird is stuck," I pointed out.

"Let's open the window and let him out," Alice said. She wrenched open the back door below the window with the bird. It led up a stairway to only an attic. This intrigued me coming from the practical Mennonites. A separate outside door leading only to an attic.

I climbed up.

"There is no floor, Alice," I reported back, "Only rafters. I can't get to the window."

She came up and assessed the floorless situation. The rafters seemed to be 1x4 boards doubled into 2x4s. Giving you at most a 2-inch balance beam to walk along to the window.

Alice thought we could do it.

I climbed onto the top edge of the stairway wall and reached to the roof for handholds. The skinny slats could possibly drop me into the living room below but it seemed unlikely. I reached the slatted glass and opened it wide so it was at a right angle with the screen, the bird flopped around but could not get out. And he was tired. His claws and his beak alternately became stuck in the screen. He was lodged in the bottom corner of the window. I thought he was injured.

"He's not coming out." I told Alice.

"Can't you pick him up?" she spurred me on. "He will die."

Alice loves animals. She keeps chickens and cows just for fun. She doesn't eat them. (she does eat other chickens and animals, but not her own...)

I thought of childhood lessons of not touching wild birds because you put your human scent on them, and then they are rejected by their own. I also thought of avian flu and a long pointed beak good for pecking at people who try to Touch Feathers.

"Is there a cloth?" I asked. Alice handed me a white bedspread conveniently near a bed stored in the rafters. I covered my hand with a corner of it and picked up the little bird. I had experience in this because I had just raised 8 guinea hens for my dad before I left. This full grown yellow bird was the size of one of the chicks. You have to wrap your fingers around the wings, not the body. It can squeeze out of your hand if you don't have its wings. His head was poking out of the circle made by my thumb and forefinger as I held him. He didnt protest a lot. I worked my way back to the stairway on the rafters and climbed back down the stairs and out the door. Alice followed.

I was going to loft the bird into the air to help him have a head start, in case he was injured or stunned and couldn't flap. I had no chance. As soon as my thumb loosened he was out of my hand like a shot out of a cannon. A beautiful flight, faster than we would have thought, straight as an arrow until he disappeared from view. A powerful little creature.

I think he knew in the window that his time was up. He didn't struggle or flap like a crazy bird when I went to pick him up. Just a little bit. He was tired from trying to escape. Who knows how long he'd been there? Maybe all day.

Funny how our energy soars with a new lease on life. He thought he had met his end between the screen and the glass. For him, moment now is bonus time. All of the glorious soaring, all of the sun shining off his green and yellow feathers, all of the glory to God that a beautiful creature brings. He has more than he expected. Live little bird, live! Even if there's just a day left, it's a day you didn't know you had. Soar like your freedom is everything!

It was exhilarating to save the bird. Alice and I were happy. I threw the bedspread back up over the rafters, leaving the mystery of how it was moved for the homeowners to figure out.

Alice and I headed down the great hill and we rode along the most stunning panoramic view of the whole ride. Somewhere near the bottom of the hill/mountain,the chain fell off Alice's bike.

"We should leave it here," I said. "Let's go home and ask David to come back for it. "

"Someone will take it," she thought.

So we worked the chain back on and Alice planned to drive even more slowly. I drove fast (20 mph) and slow (5 mph) alternately, keeping an eye on Alice behind me.

We rounded a corner and one cow was out of the fence. I looked at Alice as she approached. She pointed with her chin and her bottom lip for me to continue on. I pointed - with my chin and my bottom lip - to the cow out of the pen. She lip-pointed me on. I lip-pointed the cow. The lip pointing is very Belizean and comes with a slight up-nod.

"They probably let him out, Susan," Alice laughed at me as she came in ear shot. "He is fine."

So we continued on. I going slow and fast, keeping an eye back for Alice. Alice going slow. At one long stretch I raced ahead at 20 mph. Then I stopped to secure my sunglasses in my pocket and wait for Alice. It was too late in the day for sunglasses. I was going to have to bear the dust of the gravel road in my eyes unguarded.

My phone rang.

What are the chances, I thought, just as I've stopped the bike?

It was Alice.

I went a mile back down the road and there was Alice with a spark plug hanging out of the front of the engine. It was too hot to touch. Hmm.

We couldn't get through to David. The network was busy even for the Jaguar Phone. (You will have to read the post "Jaguar Week" to know about the Jaguar Phone.)

We did reach Chris.

"We are riding motorcycles in the Bajo and we have one bike down, one to go," I told him. He didn't understand my silly description. "Can you come to get us by the airstrip?" I asked him, following Alice's instructions. They sorted out which airstrip with me as the go between. The airstrip by Country Garden, a place festivals and fairs are held. He was on his way.

Alice was able to manhandle the bike and run it down the road to the Country Garden gatehouse to leave it in a safe place. We ended up going back on the second bike and meeting Chris at the house. He gave me a ride back to Cayo - Santa Elena, where I am staying. We crossed on the ferry that holds three cars and is moved by a hand crank along a cable, and Jasmine and I went through the 903 photos on my iPad for possibly the fourth time, just for entertainment.

Tonight I have decided there will indeed be a drumming party on Friday. We've picked The Snooty Fox for the venue. It is right on the River (where evidently many foxes run) and the big open porch on the river side has hammock chairs. TV Tom, as he introduced himself, is the owner. He wondered if I wanted a cake. Ah, cake. I remember the days of cake. They are no more. Mahky will bring his friends and drum and play flute and sing. The little white stand across the street with an American-Belizean couple runniing it will make finger foods for us - garnaches and panadas and tostadas plus cut up burritos and lots of salsa.

Now...I hope people will come!

I hear drums now and a flute down the street. I'm sitting on steps along the street across the alley from my morning internet place. I have learned they leave the signal on all night. Nice. I will head toward the music. Good Wednesday night from Belize

Love, Susan

Fighting Cancer

The other night my friend Chris and I walked to town so I could use internet and look up websites about swimming with sharks at Caye Kauker. As we walked across the metal grid walkway on the suspension bridge, a great population of moths surrounded every street light, creating an odd moving glow - like a Thomas Kinkade painting (but better). (The effect is like a Kinkade painting, not the moths. Don't go looking for moths in your Thomas Kinkade streetlights.) As we approached, the thousands of moths dissipated. No, actually, they died. The concrete below the street light was 1/2 inch deep in moth bodies. When we had started across the bridge, every street lamp had great assembly of them. By the time we crossed, all were gone. On the ground. A mass exodus.

I don't know what the lifespan of a moth is, but at a butterfly farm in San Miguel (the Mayan village by Punta Gorda) an American told us the butterflies had a 48 day incubation as a pupae and then some only a 7-day life. Can you imagine? I don't know when these moths had been born, but they all seemed to congregate and die at once. Who could explain it? And why was I there to see it? That one moment in time when they all came to die and did so before my eyes. I was appropriately awed, and also a little ponderous...

* * *

Part of me feels like it must be wrong to be living it up with adventures in Belize when I am supposed to be Fighting Cancer. Even though the adventures are exactly part of the fighting cancer plan. It would be more helpful if the fight could be with a sword (or a machete - I have two of them). Something very clear cut, I either win or lose, it's a tangible fight, you can see where you go wrong and it's done and there's no uncertainty. With this I live in ongoing uncertainty.

I'm planning to Extend My Stay in Belize. I have not given the natural approach to cancer long enough, I think. (You are rolling your eyes about my earlier reference to swimming with the sharks - oh yes, there wasn't enough time for that yet, you say...)

But really, I am not ready to return home to life that will pull me back into its craziness and away from the ground I've gained here - health-wise / balance-wise / every-wise.

I want to stay in Belize through the winter.

But the dogs....

The pup dogs must come down to stay with me. So either I must go up and fetch them, or convince one of you to come this way for a little tropical vacation and bring them by aircraft with you. (Volunteers please apply at susanbrill@mac.com. I may even have miles to fly you down....)

I will keep you posted on my travel / not-travel plan (and snorkeling with the sharks and other items of interest)...

As for now, torrential rain is falling in the street and we patrons are even getting sprinkled inside from the splash. People are in every doorway down the street, under lit-up awnings to protect them from the onslaught. No one is rushing. There is no hurry. Everyone is simply watching the tireless energy of rain. I love the rain; I love Belize.

Blessings and Love,

Susan

Jaguar Week

I am living in town now. Gone is the jungle and Alice's boyfriend's truck for going about the country. Gone is the preponderance of Mennonites, old world and new world. Now we are in Belizean culture - some Caribbean, some Spanish, some African, some other.

Gial About Town
(Gial = Girl in Creole, most often heard by me from Alice: "Susan, you si-lly, si-lly gial.")

When I leave the Lowe's house, I walk down the hill, past a church for rent, down a steeper hill to the main road through Santa Elena. On the corner is an Asian market and on the opposite side is always a guy walking through an open doorway to see who is coming past. They are renovating - or cleaning up - the house. If I turn left I am only a block from the high bridge, and only a high bridge away from San Ignacio.

The bridge is a suspension one with a walkway for pedestrians like me. It is made of metal slats so you can see 80 feet below to the water. Yesterday I dropped the pit from my "way a", a tiny sweet fruit that you'd think is a key lime til you open it up and it has a big pit with sweet yummy flesh around it. All I could think of is "16 feet per second squared." The rate at which a pit free falls to a river, without taking resistance into account. I wonder if there was another lesson of a smidge more relevance to my life that I should have learned in that brain slot. What's done is done. It can't be displaced now with "Venemous snakes have triangular heads" or "Wear wader boots the first time you swing a machete."

On the other side of the bridge is a roundabout for cars with park benches in the middle for pedestrians waiting for buses or rides. I cut through the full service gas station lot on the right, and the attendants find it curious, and I begin my trek down the narrow path of non-sidewalk made of mostly store stoops and steps and then drops to the gutter. My path is only a foot and a half wide and in some places street vendors have set up their carts to sell plantain chips or pepitos (pumpkin seeds) or tomalitos (corn mash wrapped in corn husks). Their carts may be on my path and I squeeze behind them or venture into the street to continue on my way. When I see the Belize Bank on the corner, I have found my spot. I look up and see my coffee shop above a nameless Chinese restaurant with a colorful sign FreeWiFi and a sandwich board out front proclaiming coffee smoothies. I can have an espresso ($2.50 US) or coffee ($2 US) or a blended juice ($1.50 US) - fruit such as cantaloupe blended with ice. I choose the latter because coffee is off my regimen and when I cheat it makes me nervous. (In both senses - to fall off the anti-cancer diet wagon and the caffeine both.)

It's Friday and I'm glad I came downtown. The vendors are setting up the Market. Booth after booth of bananas (scads of varieties), mangoes (almost out of season), pitaya - also called dragon fruit (a florescent pink fruit with tiny black seeds and Sweet), delicious monster (that's the name!), breadfruit, plantain, most things I don't know the name of, but booths and booths of it - maybe 50 or maybe 100. I bought romaine and cilantro because the fridge is already packed. My hosts have Every tropical fruit at home.

I live in town now so the up side is that the market and all of the fresh food and the pulse of the culture is just a few blocks away. The downside is that yesterday I met my roommate Earl. I am pretty sure he is not a mouse. Bigger, longer tail. AAaaaaaaaaaaah. As my hosts tried to convince me that having a cat is worse than having rats (I think it was tongue in cheek, but who really knows) ....I told them I needed 24 hours to adjust and at that time would certainly not be freaked out anymore. My time is almost up. It helped when I named him. Then I could let him know I was coming in the room and he could leave so I wouldn't have to see him. I'm pretty sure I cannot keep my promise, but there's always the possibility that Earl was as freaked out by me and has moved next door.

There are many more up-sides to being in town. It's a whole new side of Belize to experience. San Ignacio is the perfect size of town - there are no throngs of people, but plenty of activity. It's small enough that my hosts seem know Every person on the street, and vice versa.

I am sitting now at Flayva's - a restaurant open to the street with more seating in a park atmosphere out back. They are playing reggae music. I can see I've come to a tourist spot because we diners and web users are all white. The owner reminds me Completely of a friend from college and I had to look twice to make sure he was actually dark skinned, not just super tan, to know if it was my old friend. But he treats me like an old friend from college and that's delightful.

I sit here realizing my scheduled flight home is two weeks from today. Most people only go somewhere for two weeks - so I still have the whole stretch ahead of me, but to me, it feels daunting as though my time is up tomorrow. (Though whether I actually take that scheduled flight is another matter.) So I eat curried rice and drink mango juice and soda water and think through all of my adventures not-yet blogged.

Coffee Beans, Calaloo, Wild Cats, and Caves
Alice and I took our country-wide drive along mountains and sea to Punta Gorda at the south of the Belize. We stayed in a Mayan village called San Miguel at a guest house called Back-A-Bush (which equates to our term for "boondocks"). At Back-A-Bush the hosts harvest all of the wild jungle food from their "yard" - even the coffee we had at breakfast was picked, roasted and brewed right there by them (in front of us!). I learned about Calaloo (Amaranth) which leaves you eat like spinach. It's a staple for the Maya people - it is Delicious and great for vegetarians because it has a huge amount of protein and minerals etc. Back-A-Bush was so great, we extended our stay by a day or two.

Day One after our leisurely breakfast, we headed, we thought, to Punta Gorda, but found a Mayan family of women in need of a ride. So we loaded them into the back of the truck. They told us about Blue Creek and a walking path and ... a cave. We let them off at a bus stop (where, as you know, no bus comes) since we were headed the other way.

As we pulled away Alice said, "It sounds like Blue Creek is nice."

Alice and I understand each other. I did a U-turn in the middle of a wide and empty, newly laid, gravel road and Alice hopped out to tell the women to get back in the truck. We were headed to Blue Creek. The other 10 people - Spanish - at the bus stop also climbed in. I think this was our fullest passenger load by far.

Blue Creek was amazing. The creek was picturesque. The hike to the cave seemed to take forever. I started wondering if we'd been duped....leaving the truck back there unattended while we walked 30 minutes into the jungle to an alleged cave. Then, a sign. A weathered length of 2x4 bore the painted words "To Cave" with an arrow pointing across the river.

We don't even pause that much anymore at unexpected or unusual instructions. We crossed. It was only ankle deep. Then more trekking hand over feet on rock and through jungle. We still didn't see the cave and the water was high so we had little rapids swirling around the rock. We saw the face of a cliff and a waterfall coming down up ahead. The cave must be there, but the way had become "impassable".

If you've read anything on this blog, you know that word has come to mean "the path you take."

We tried to climb along the rocks at the edge of the river - the water was too rapid (or deep?) to get into, and the rocks in the water weren't close enough to climb one to the other. The problem was that on the edge of the river were little caves - crevasses in the rock, too deep to see into.

Jaguar lairs, I thought.

I was going to stop. You don't want to disturb - surprise - an animal in the wild. I couldn't pass the little side caves without stretching one leg past and clinging to the rock face with my arms.

Here, Kitty kitty, here are my ankles, it felt like I was saying.

The truth is that jaguars don't live there, but we didn't know that. The other truth is that someone else could live there. Triangle-headed venomous snakes, perchance. But we didn't think of that.

You have come all of this way to Belize, I thought. You seriously are going to let fear paralyze you now?!

So I stretched my meager frame across the dark and foreboding gapes in the rock, trying to keep my footing on slippery places. At first Alice stayed back.

"I will go a little farther to take pictures," I told her.

A little farther and I still couldn't quite see, so I kept going, past more likely jaguar lairs. Finally, I made it to the rock closest to the mouth of the cave (still 100 feet or more from it) and stood there with water rushing all around the rock on which I stood and rushing down the face of the cliff to my left and rushing out of the mouth of the cave. You can't stand there amid all of the energy of the rushing and say nothing. You fill up with so much awe and exuberance and glory of God you shout whatever is in your vocabulary to shout - Yes! or Yow! or Hallelujah!

Mine was Hallelujah.

I am sure I welled up with tears. It was unexpected beauty. We tried so hard to get there even when we weren't sure if there was a cave. A great reward. I would have laid on the rock and listened to the rushing and my own pounding heart for an hour, gazing up at the waterfall if there had been any room on the rock or traction.

I looked back to Alice, and she was coming too! She wasn't going to stand and watch the foreigner have the Hallelujah moment. I didn't know she was afraid of heights until After she arrived at the rock. Go Alice! We both felt victorious.

Then we made our way back and hacked open coconuts with machetes. We had seen men in a yard with a ladder and a truck picking coconuts and bought six from them for 50 cents (25 cents US) each. They were intrigued by our interest. Coconuts grow in every yard and bear year round. Clearly I was a tourista. They were pleased to have their work appreciated I think.

When I say "we" hacked open coconuts, I mean that I hacked at one; Alice actually hacked them open. Yum. You drink out the coconut water with a straw (super healthy and especially good on my anti-cancer diet) and then you slice off a piece of the green coconut husk and use it as a spoon to scoop out the coconut flesh inside. If the coconut is just right it's soft and gelatinous. We have pictures of us in our swimming suits hacking at coconuts with machetes and drinking them down like jungle girls.

Then we drove to PG. We probably should have waited til the next day because after the Hallelujah Blue Creek Cave, PG was bound to be uneventful. It was. I had my first view of ocean of the trip and said, "Hmm, there it is." Somehow all of our jungle experiences were so much more dramatic than water as far as you can see. ?!

That night at Back A Bush, a Mayan family made us a traditional meal. She showed us the traditional way to make corn tortillas started with (raw) soaked white local corn that is ground into a paste. Then she works it with her hands and cooks it on a camal (flat tortilla pan). For my vegan life, she served me Calooloo (amaranth) with fresh corn tortillas. Alice had a soup with chicken. She cooked it all on an earth oven made of clay with a wood fire right inside her thatch hut (and next to the propane stove).

All the while she was cooking for us, a daughter of about 17 was there as well as a girl of about 2. The toddler had been given to her by a family who couldn't raise her.

"You adopted her?" I asked.

No, she shook her head. "They just gave her to me. "

This is common among Mayan families, Elsbeth at Back-A-Bush told us later. If a mother has a difficult circumstance (this one's mother had been only 15) it is passed to someone else in the village to take as her own.

The next day, we hired Miguel (the grandson of the town San Miguel's namesake - not a saint that we know of, but named his town that.) to take us to Tiger Cave.

Tiger Cave deserves a post all its own. Local people call spotted jaguars tigers and call black jaguars pumas. Though there are puma here too.

First, let me just say I have never been so muddy - even when I was five - and rubber bottomed, not plastic bottomed, hiking shoes make all the difference in spending most of your time upright in such a cave rather than sitting in ankle-deep (or higher) mud and water. My great new Merrell Barefoot running / hiking shoes were not made for this. Go for rubber soles next time....

We drove an impassable rock and mud road to the hydraulic power plant that provides all of the electricity for San Miguel by water power alone, and parked there. Then, we did not go through the gate, but climbed over and through it. This was our first unusual feat. Not everyone could do this hike, I realized. We picked our way across big rock and tropical plants into the cave - or so we thought - with a majestic lofty ceiling that opened to the sky in several places - glorious.

This is the entry way, Miguel said. We haven't gotten to the cave yet.

We were already feeling the wonderful strain of a physical feat accomplished, so I wondered a little about not being there yet. Then the path got dicey.

"Go down there," Miguel said.

It looked like a drop of 12 feet of rock without any real handholds or toe holds, and away from the light streaming in from the ceiling of the cave into dark recesses below.

"How?" I wondered. "You go first."

He did. That didn't help. He has rubber soles.

This was our first introduction to a long morning of many involuntarily sittings in the mud. It was hilarious. We could hardly climb down anything. After a few drops like this, Alice started just sliding down on her butt to start with.

Down in the Real Cave, the ceiling was high in most places. Rock rubble covered the floor in most chambers - hard to pick our way through - and a sandy / muddy bottom was in others. Spring fed streams ran through the cave. It had rained the night before and flooded the cave so we had some unexpected knee-high pools to cross to make our way deeper in. Miguel had provided us flash lights, which used up a hand that was greatly needed for climbing and crawling.

Then we heard thunder. What?

"That's the jaguar, do you hear them?" Miguel said.

What?!

Yes, through the cave wall the playful growl of a jaguar sounded like thunder in the distance. Then a higher moan. Cubs!

"We go through there to get to the chamber closest to them," Miguel told us. He pointed to where the ceiling came down about four feet above waist-high water.

"No Susan," Alice said. "We have to get out of here."

"It's safe!" I told her, having no actual idea, but assuming Miguel wasn't stupid or anything. He'd given this tour hundreds of times.

Miguel said we could go one more chamber and the jaguar were down in another chamber below that we could not get to - so it wasn't dangerous, and they have a back way out of the cave. They don't like people so they will stay away from us, not come after us. And if we get too close for their comfort, they will roar to warn us away.

Oh to hear a jaguar roar in the wild!! I thought. This is not what Alice thought.

"Susan, we have to get out of here," she insisted.

"Ok Alice, will you stay here and I will go on into the next chamber and come right back?" I bargained.

Alice was not staying there alone.

"We have to get out of here now!" she announced.

Miguel seemed surprised, but maybe shouldn't have been because of all of the high water. It would have been easier for us to slip in and out of the outer chamber in other conditions.

Before we retreated we heard another thunderous growl. Miguel perked up. He pointed the direction from which we came.

"Did you hear it? One is on the other side of us."

We simultaneously spoke and hushed each other.

I was ecstatic. I don't know why. I love wild cats. If I am ever killed by a wild cat, know that I went out in awe.

Alice was not ecstatic.

Is it safe to go out, I asked Miguel. Yes, he said. It is no problem.

Making our way out of the cave, Miguel took us to a sandy place along the spring-fed river where we had been before. We saw the tracks of our shoes and...paw prints.

Fresh jaguar tracks.

The jaguar are very curious, Elsbeth told us later at Back a Bush. The cat wanted to see who had come into the cave. "He was tracking you while you were tracking them!" she told us. I don't know if she knows, but I chose to believe her.

A jaguar was tracking me!

We also saw marks in the sand where a jaguar had slept the night before and the prints of the little cubs who slept against the rock behind her.

Oh to stay longer, but Alice was done, and we were covered head to toe in mud. And we still had a distance to hike to get out of the cave and out of the non-cave cave entrance and back over the gate to the power plant.

We were completely spent when we arrived at BackABush and jumped first into the showers and second into the hammocks.

We headed back to "Cayo" the whole region where town is, where Spanish Lookout is, where Alice lives. But we were very jaguar minded. I must see a jaguar before I leave Belize. Twice we drove out at night to places jaguar are known to be seen. Dark 'impassable' gravel roads at dusk, hoping one would saunter out across the road. It happens. Just not when we are looking.

Once Alice brought a SAT phone in the car so we could call for help if needed. We picked up Carol on the way.

"Susan I'm going to tell her this is a jaguar sensor. Don't laugh when I say it." Alice told me.

I laughed.

"You're going to ruin it. Don't laugh," she said.

Carol got in the car. She is Canadian. She bought the whole story. The antenna senses the jaguar by smell. The phone rings when one is within 20 miles. (Really, Alice? 20 miles?) I called the SAT phone to break the illusion. It rang. Even Alice was shocked. Alice and Carol looked at each other. Neither saw the phone I was clearly holding until I finally said, "I don't hear anything."

It still didn't break the spell for Carol. The next day I told her it was just a joke.

"I wondered about that!" she said. "Gary, there is no jaguar sensor," she called in to her husband.

Oh hilarious. Was he believing it too? That Alice...

More, so much more to come. Bless you for reading these long adventures.

love and adoration,
Susana