Background
A turn-of-the-century travelogue. 19 days on the Yucatan Peninsula.
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Sunday dawned gently. A warm on-shore breeze caressed palms framing the new day's fireball as it climbed from its mantle of cloud on the horizon. Behind, hanging above the treeline like a lantern, the silver disc of a full moon faded gracefully, making final obeisance to the sun god as she slid from view. Today was to be San Pedro's Day, the Saint's Day for this island town with its white-painted wooden church, one door opening straight onto the street, the other straight onto the beach. This town with its cemetery in the sand, its tombstones lifted and cracked and left at crazy angles by some ancient hurricane; sailors' graves still tossed by storm. This town of Caribbean laughter.
After breakfast we hired bicycles and cycled to the southern end of the island, to see what was there. We cycled round Banyan Bay, past a huge white tent full of spiritual singers, clapping hands and waving arms in time to revival tunes strummed out on a steel guitar. The tent was emblazoned in square black letters: JESUS BROKEN AND SHED FOR YOU and it was shaded by the broad green leaves of the banyan tree. It took us about an hour of dedicated pedalling along potholed paths, past mangrove swamps and palm-thatched wooden houses, to complete our journey of discovery. Eventually the road ended triumphantly in a pile of litter, a hundred carrion crows, huge swarms of flies and wisps of noxious smoke - more or less what you'd expect at the town dump, I suppose.
In the afternoon Tom took the boys out on a diving expedition to the reef, Jeanette took herself off to bed, feeling poorly, and we lazed by the hotel swimming pool. The pool was a raised structure surrounded by timber decking, fringed by palm trees and overlooking the foreshore and a short wooden pier outside Gaz Cooper's Dive Belize shop. The wall of the shop was painted with a map of the caye and the reef and proclaimed loudly in capital letters: 'Ten miles on one tank of air! K-10 Hydrospeeder. Fly the Barrier Reef at up to 8 knots! Only at Gaz Cooper's Dive Belize at Sunbreeze Hotel Tel:3202'. You could tell by the four digit phone number that Belize wasn't among the more populated places in the world. I don't think that Tom and the boys tried the Hydrospeeder - I guess we'd all done enough 'flying the barrier reef' on the trip over. Now seemed like a good time to slow down. That, at any rate, was the message I was getting from my second glass of cubré libre, and bowl of soggy poolside chips. The hotel itself had a bit of a siesta air about it, too. Hacienda-style, built around a hollow square with balconies overlooking a central courtyard; whitewashed balustrades half hidden amongst bougainvillea and exotic sub-tropical creepers, yellow ochre paintwork and a red tiled roof, a hammock slung between two palm trees overlooking the swimming pool and beach and, overhead, the angular outline of frigate birds hovering and sideslipping in the afternoon breeze. As Tom would sometimes say: 'I wonder what the poor people are doing today?'
On Monday Jeanette is still sick, and Matthew not much better, so when the boat arrives at Gaz Cooper's to pick us up for a day's snorkelling and picnic, there are just the four of us. Two Belizean boys handle the boat and there are three others on board. One is a young lad who has just finished his social work degree at Washington State University. He is out here living with the family of one of our boat crew. He is doing voluntary work for the Church of the Seventh Day Adventists, helping them to build a school on the island. The others are a couple on what they describe as a trial honeymoon; a Columbian girl and her American boyfriend - both teachers. We set out down the coast to another pier further south where we pick up a surprise. Two surprises to be more precise. They come as a pigeon pair, in full length black wet suits, flippers half a yard long and an array of armament, including harpoons and spear guns big enough to subdue Moby Dick and they are very, but very, macho. Wendy says to one of them that she hopes she won't be swimming in front of him when they start shooting. He is quick to reassure her with his big grin and hairy chest that they are lifeguards with the San Diego Fire Department and that she couldn't be in safer hands, ma'am. We make one more stop to fill a large orange plastic ball full of air.
"I'm going to attach this to fifty feet of rope, explains one, and the other end to my harpoon - so when I spear a monster of the deep he'll swim round and round in a frenzy dragging this, instead of coming after me."
On the way out to the reef they make quite sure that we all understand that they are experts and that what they don't know about diving just ain't worth knowing. Oh, yeah!
