We left Crooked Tree after 4 nights and went to Belize City. As the guide book says, it is not a tropical paradise. Still, there were 2 notable events there. We saw the Swing Bridge in operation. It was amazing. The bridge is an historic structure, maybe the only like it in the world. It is supported by a cylinder under the middle of the bridge. Sail boats can’t get under the bridge, so they line up until someone decides there are enough boats to warrant stopping the car and foot traffic on the bridge so the bridge can be swung parallel to the river and the boats can get through. This is accomplished by putting chains across the road on both sides of the bridge to stop the traffic on the bridge. Then 5 or 10 minutes go by while the bridge operators try to get people to stop running and biking across the bridge. Finally they give up on trying to stop the human stream and about 10 men and a few small boys go to the middle of the bridge, where they have a gigantic, 2 armed key. Half push on one side of the key, half push on the other, and the bridge swings 90 degrees. Still people are running across the bridge as it moves, and squealing as they jump through the quickly narrowing gap between the bridge side walk and the bridge support on the bank. It was pretty cool.
We then saw hundreds of starlings noisily congregating in Battlefield Park for the night. Their almost-deafening, cacophonous whistling and shrieking as they jockeyed for space in the trees and wires was delightful.
We met the members of the guided tour we will be with for the rest of our trip, and took a public bus to San Ignacio. The local busses are old Blue Bird school busses from the US. I may have ridden on one of these as a little girl. Now they are crammed with humanity, luggage and live chickens carried in bags. Fortunately, we didn’t take the chicken bus; we took a somewhat nicer express bus with a luggage compartment underneath. The express only stopped once, at the fruit and vegetable market in the capital city, Belmopan.
There we saw Mennonites, conspicuous among the black and brown faces with their white skin, beards, straw hats and overalls. The Mennonites have been inbreeding since they arrived in the 1950s from Mexico, and their gene pool has gotten too shallow. We are told that a few years ago they took out ads in the paper looking for light skinned mestizos to breed with their young women. We couldn’t find out whether the mestizos were invited to join the community, or were they strictly intended to reduce the incidence of birth defects among the Mennonites.
Once we got to San Ignacio, we were eating lunch on the front porch of Eva’s, and who should drive by but Sam Tillet and two of the birders we met during our stay in Crooked Tree. Talk about a small country.
From there, 12 guests, plus driver and guide were packed like sardines into a small Toyota van. The driver said the van was designed for little Japanese people, not the overgrown Americans and Europeans.
We are pleased that the group is not just Americans. There are also people from Switzerland, France, Belgium, Finland and Canada. The Americans are from NC, NV and of course AZ.
We crossed the border from Belize to Guatemala, and left behind English, miles, roads strewn with trash, Belize dollars and dogs with intact tails and entered the land of Spanish, kilometers, people who take more pride in their country, Quetzales and bob-tailed dogs.
I like Flores, the island city where we are now, a lot. But we are leaving at 5 AM to see the sunrise from the top of the Mayan pyramid at Tikal, so enough for now.
Hasta luego
