SATURDAY, MARCH 25

When Jim left us Friday night, he said he'd be back around 10 am to take us to the airport again. It was so nice of him to shuttle us around like that. Anyway, we woke up excited to be on our way, pretty certain that we'd be in Belize in a couple of hours. Fran made us a good ole' fashioned breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon (of course, no bacon for me) before hitting the road again with Jim. Upon arriving at the airport, we checked in a the under-construction Delta international area. The lady behind the counter said that we should've gone to the employee travel center to check in, but she gave us our seat requests and checked our bags in anyway. Fairly painless process. Little did we know how unhelpful and mean this same lady would be a week hence! But I'll get to that later.

We got on the flight to Belize without a hitch. Molly and Sally were in the first row (no biz or first class on that flight) and James and I were in the last. There was no movie on the flight, just the same "television" programming that we had seen the day before on our flight from SF after the hideous movie, Aeon Flux, which I quit watching about half-way through. I was really expecting better from the director of "Girlfight," Karen Kusama (sp?). Anyway.

ARRIVAL IN BELIZE

We arrived. De-planed via stairs, always makes you feel like you're really travelling, doesn't it? And headed into customs. Molly almost got us in trouble with the local customs guys by taking pix -- our customs guy said something to another customs guy about a girl taking photos in a mix of English and Creole/Spanish, we looked over, realized it was Molly, and promptly told her to quit before she could take our picture. That was kinda funny. We headed out the door and across the street to pick up our rental car. It was a tiny little "suv" that barely qualified for the name, but it fit the four of us and our luggage, so it was fine. After seemingly forever, we were finally able to hit the road. We asked the dude for a recommendation for food on the way to San Ignacio and he pointed to the menu for Amigos on the rack. We decided to head there, and got directions from the dude.

James drove the first leg. We headed north and east from the airport, and took a left just before the police checkpoint. We never really found out what they were checking for (there were a few of them we ran into across the country), but I think it was insurance and/or immigration related. We passed a prison with a gift store and snack bar, which Sally really wanted to stop at, but we pressed on. We travelled through the "towns" of Burrell Boom and Hattieville, past the zoo and finally got to Amigos about 4:45 in the afternoon. Apparently happy hour started at 5, but we tried to convince the waitress to start it early for us, not even knowing what happy hour really entailed. It turned out, 15 minutes later, that our drinks started arriving with red napkins twisted around the tops of the bottles instead of white. The drinks, by the way, were mostly Belikin beer, the one-and-only Belizean beer. Sally drank a lot of stouts through the week, Molly was half stout half regular, James was all regular, and I was mostly regular with some Lighthouse beers (a lighter brew) thrown in.

So, the red napkins -- it turned out that for each red napkin, you got a chance to shoot a basket seated at a barstool at the bar. The basket was approx. bar-level over the wastebasket on the opposite side of the bar. If you made the basket, you got a free beer. We all drank a couple of beers, but none of us ended up making a basket. By the end of our visit, the bar had gone from completely empty to slightly happening -- I guess a lot of people knew about happy hour.

I drove the next leg. It was getting toward sunset and we were slightly nervous about arriving in San Ignacio in the dark. James and Sally shot a couple of cool pix of the sunset while we were driving. The coastal area of Belize is extremely flat, so it was exciting to start getting into some hilly country, with more exotic-looking forest around. We all noticed the proliferation of kids and dogs along the road, with each house seeming to have at least three of each. Every once in a while there would be a speed bump -- but not your normal, American-style speed bump. These were often large, flat on top and marked with a sign about 50 feet ahead of time. If you hit it too fast, it could definitely damage your car. The interesting thing about the speed bumps was the variety of kinds of bumps as well as the different kinds of signage throughout Belize and Guatemala. It definitely kept the driver (and even navigator) on their toes, esp. on our first drive into the interior of the country.

SAN IGNACIO

San Ignacio is a funky, fun little town. It was intimidating at first, arriving there on a Saturday night, when the "downtown" was full of people and cars. Esp. intimidating were the taxi drivers lounging around their cars in the center of town and checking out everyone who walked by. We parked quickly and started looking for a place to stay. We headed towards Martha's, the favorite guest house of everyone who has ever been to SI, apparently. We kept hearing about Marthas in our research before the trip, and once we reached Belize a couple of people mentioned it upon hearing that we were heading to SI. Unfortunately, we already knew that it was booked up, but we thought they might have rooms in their other property, or point us towards some other decent rooms. Neither of these hopes panned out, but on our way there we were accosted (nicely) by a tour guide asking us what we wanted to do the next day. James apparently got a good vibe from the guy, because he quickly decided that we should book our excursion the next day with him. But first, we needed to find a place to stay.

After investigating a couple of places that were full, we checked out the Tropicool. The guidebook said they had cabins in their garden, which sounded great to me. We met Wally, the proprietor, an Englishman who had been in Belize for over 15 years. He showed us two cabins which were perfect, and only around $28 a night -- what a deal. They each had their own bathroom with excellent water pressure, reasonably comfortable beds, ceiling fans and little TVs with cable. We decided to stay there for at least the next two nights, and eventually decided to stay on a third night.

We went back and spoke to the guide, whose name was Everild. James wanted to do some adventurous canoing, and Everil recommended the Barton Creek Cave. It was only about a half-day trip, but we could hang out at the swimming hole after, and there was a rope swing. Rope swing?!? James was sold! And since he was the birthday boy, we were all in. We paid Everil and he made out the receipt to "James birthday boy." He told us to remind him to bring the bottle of Sorrel wine to celebrate. I think it was made from cashews...? Well, it sounded interesting, anyway. We asked Everild what we should do on our first night in Belize, and he recommended the Pigpen. No, make that the Pitpan -- a local bar/club that was basically outdoors near the river and had some music going on that night.

After freshening up, we had dinner...? I don't actually remember eating... Maybe we just considered Amigos our dinner...? Anyway, I remember going to the Pitpan (way too loud) then to another place with a really broken-down pool table and drinking lots of Belikins. I was getting sleepy, so I headed to bed around 10. James and the girls stayed out, and ended up meeting one of Everild's brothers, Eric, who is a bird guide of some sort. I heard the story the next day, but at first they didn't believe that he really was Everil's brother -- but it turned out that he was. Eric took them to an LA-style club owned by a cousin, which James said felt like a strip club without the strippers. Fun! So sorry I missed that! (No, not really.)

Oh, James just reminded me that we stopped first at Chingo's a restaurant/bar next door to the tropicool that had live music on Saturday and Sunday nights while we were there. We heard the music while we were going to check out the cottages, and the song that was playing happened to be "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps." James was thinking to himself, he told me later, of the lyrics to that song -- "If you can't make your mind up, we'll never get started," and since we were trying to decide on a place to stay and it was the start of the vacation, he decided even before seeing the cottage that we should take it. So we did. :-) Anyway, the live music turned out to be one guy on a keyboard with some pre-programmed tracks to back him up. Later he was joined by a guy drumming on a turtle shell, and other guy on a small hand drum, perhaps a kind of Garifuna drum...