We had Christmas eve dinner at Martha's, an excellent restaurant in San Ignacio. I had delicious tamales made of chaya, the local spinach. One of the tour members from Switzerland brought fabulous chocolates for everyone. The tour guide brought champagne. Everyone sang a Christmas song from their country. The Swiss offered O Tannenbaum, the French offered Joyeux Noel, one of the Americans sang Jiggle Bells, but Steve and I got the biggest round of applause for Elvis' Blue Christmas. It was certainly a Christmas celebration like none I've ever experienced.
Christmas day we went to Mountain Pine Ridge Preserve, listed in a book called "1,000 Places to See Before You Die". We had been warned that pine beetles ate 80% of the trees, but we went anyway. We went swimming in a river with nice waterfalls, but I didn’t think this place had anything on West Virginia or Maine.
We spent 2 nights canoe camping on the Belize River. We saw a flock of a hundred green parrots noisily squawking in their trees, then taking flight for a few circles together, and landing in the tree again. This was repeated over and over. It seemed like a game to them. A kingfisher sings a song that sounds like a squeaky version of the canyon wren's descending trill. I also saw a wood rail and grey hawk. The first night, I went to our tent and found a 5 inch black and white spider on the zipper. Needless to say, I was very careful to keep the zipper shut tight.
The guides from Tony’s River Tours are a macho bunch who carry machetes to clear our camp sites. They are amazingly quick, and can cut grass with each stroke of the machete, even though the machete is one sided. They smoke marijuana after lunch and dinner and drink rum all night. This may explain how one guide managed to tip over a canoe in an eddy on this wide and perfectly flat river. Our cooking pot and most of the dinner plates went to the bottom of the river. One of the dunked tourists is a lawyer, and I think Tony’s River Tours hasn't heard the last of this incident.
By now we are so used to spotting green (orange) iguanas and black spiny tail iguanas lounging in the tree tops, they don’t provoke such excitement anymore. These guys fall out of the trees a lot more often than you would expect, crashing through the branches and hitting the water with a SPLAT. Fortunately, they can swim, so this is usually just an inconvenience for them.
25 miles up river from San Ignacio, a Canadian company called Fortis has constructed a hydro electric dam called Chalillo. Efrain at Crooked Tree grew up in San Ignacio, and managed a hotel there a few years ago when international celebrities like Cameron Diaz, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Kennedy Jr were trying to stop the dam. He says Cameron is not nice, but Leonardo is.
Efrain says the whole project stinks of government corruption. Fortis bought the rights to the river from the Belize government, claiming that the dam would reduce Belize’s dependence on electricity from Mexico, and lower utility bills. Local residents and international opponents of the dam point out that the dam will flood 2500 acres, including the only nesting site for a subspecies of the scarlet macaw in Belize, as well as the homes of jaguar, tapir, and unexcavated Mayan sites. It will ruin eco tourism on the Macal River. The water quality on the river has already declined, and the mercury levels in the fish in the river have increased.
The Belize government got a conscience long enough to notice that Fortis’ geological assessment of the dam site was inaccurate, and ordered an independent assessment, which was never done. The dam was completed in November 2005 on an active fault. Various sources say the dam is constructed in limestone, sandstone or shale, but everyone agrees that it is not on granite, as Fortis’ assessment states. Failure of the dam, and destruction of San Ignacio seem inevitable to some. However, very little water is accumulating behind the dam, so hydro power production is a long way off, if it ever occurs.
Nevertheless, Fortis has control of the electricity industry now. Electricity rates in Belize are now 20 cents per kw, the highest in Central America, compared to 6 cents per kw in Mexico and 4 cents per kw for Fortis’ Canadian customers. And we thought Halliburton had a monopoly on cynical exploitation of developing countries.
