Well a whole nother revolution of the earth around the sun had occurred since my last travels with Erin to the Dominican Republic. Work was on the mind for the new year, but a callous producer who cut me from the crew of a TV pilot at the last minute left me feeling like it was actually travel time.
Sometimes one of the hardest things is figuring out where you want to go. Having a slew of websites (that's on the internet, for those of you without computers) that are dedicated to finding you the cheapest flights currently available in the universe was a big help. We decided it was important to go somewhere not too far away, and not too expensive since we only had a week-n-a-half (that's a metric week for those of you readers in Europe). I was still mezmorized by fantasies of Africa, initiated by going with Abhi to Cuba and Brazil three years earlier, so wedecided to go to Belize.... a very unusual country in Central America. Since I don't have any photos to upload from here in the Hunter College library in NYC, I will do a textual drawing of the island on which we stayed for the entire time.
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Depending on the default font that your web browser is set to, the sketch above may actually be to scale or LARGER than the island itself. Notice the dock that juts out into the water. That is were the boat dropped us off and picked us up. Did you ever notice that if you take the word "island" and split it in two you get the sentence fragment "is land". While grammatically flawed, it is infact true (although not entirely so of the island where we stayed which was quite mushy in parts where the swamp and mangrove forests took over). You bicycle tires would be prone to sink in and cause a potential spill, which could in turn lead to having loose or bent handlebars, which requires repair.
Another sketch now of our friend, Rojo, whom we met at his "bicycle repair shop". (You are not allowed to know what actually goes down there.) Let's just say that he works hard, while hardly working and remaining chilled out all the time. Needless to say, the bike I rented never got properly fixed. Here is Rojo:
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Rojo had a little pet parrot named Bonito who took a strong liking to Erin. I have a nice picture of him, but could not get Bonito to sign the release form, so we are stuck with a stock photo of chicken that I got offline:
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It is a baked chicken. And royalty free at communitychickenbake.org.
We met some nice tourists on the island, too, like Brad Andrews, a singer-songwriter from Washington State. You can check out a clip of his concert at the Coco Plum Cafe at:
www.bentmarble.com/bradandrews/He is definitely another still-in-transit troubador. Which brings me to my conclusion, that it sure was great to travel again, even if just for a metric week. You know, many of the sand flies in Belize don't even live that long, so before you go complaining about not enough vacation, just keep that in mind. And when they bite you in the legs at night as you're sipping your One Barrel Rum (from the bottle) or enjoying a chocobanana (no connotations there, although there does seem to be a small sex vacation trade for middle-aged European and American women there), you need to just be greatful that there remain such simple, warm, and friendly cultures in hidden enclaves throughout the earth.
It was a wonderful time on Caye Caulker.
