Traveling too and fro

I guess every other day isn't so bad. When writing the last post, the manager of the little hotel came a' knockin' on our door and told me that we were only paid up until the night before. Coston was out diving and had talked a lot about leaving the next day, so I happily paid the man for another night and went back to exploring.

Now, at this point, I have to say that the lack of pictures is because I cannot for the life of me get the camera to connect to my computer. So I will mostly have to describe in words until I get home and access to the wealth of photographs being taken.

I ventured on foot south, past the 1/2 mile section of tourist streets and into the jungle. There was a surprising amount of open space, and a depressing amount of construction and development. At one point I passed a man building a wall out of massive conch shells. Conch just litter the bottom of the ocean out there, and he told me they used to crush them up and use them instead of gravel for the foundations of houses. In the wall, he was fitting them together like puzzle pieces and pouring concrete in between.

At one point I stopped to take a photograph and a man on a bicycle rode up behind me and started talking. Big Ben is actually from Ft. Collins and lives now on Caye Caulker working with cancer charities. I mentioned to him that I was going to be traveling to San Ignacio and planned on seeing the ATM cave, and that I was planning on going back to school for Anthropology. "Well," he said, "just so happens I know the only archaeologist who does ATM tours." He pulled out his phone, told the guy on the other end of the line when we'd be there, and scribbled a name and phone number onto a business card. "Call when you get in town, he says he's happy to take you guys."

I met Coston back at the room at 5 and told him about the manager coming to see me. He asked me what day it was and when I told him, his eyes widened. "We were supposed to be in Ambergris Caye tonight. Shit." We threw our stuff into our bags and rushed to catch the last water taxi leaving at 5:45. At 6:30 we were still sitting on the dock, cursing island time and starving. But we eventually made it onto a boat going where we wanted to go.

We only spent twelve hours in San Pedro, a much larger city on the much larger island of Ambergris Caye, where Coston took one more dive and I wandered the city looking for the tattoo parlor and fending off cat calls. We spent a few hours in a hammock on the beach, then caught a water taxi back to Belize City on the mainland. A very wonderfully air conditioned shuttle drove us two and a half hours inland, dropping people along the way until we were the only ones left in the van. San Ignacio had come and gone and we drove to the next town of Bullet Tree Falls. We turned from a bumpy dirt road onto a narrower, bumpier dirt road just as the sun was setting. The jungle canopy was already making everything dark.

We pulled into a dirt roundabout with just a sign pointing us back to Parrot Nest, further back into the trees on a dirt path. It led us to an open wood structure with dogs and cats roaming free. There were picnic tables, a book shelf, fridge and coffee/tea station all set up in the entry way. It looked like a big, covered porch. Theo (pronounced Teho) greeted us, a statuesque woman with an undefinable accent. She checked us in, explained the honor system charging of keeping your own tab, and handed us a key. "I think you guys are in the tree house, right?"

She led us back into the jungle and up some rickety stairs to literally one room situated in the trees. The door locked with a simple padlock and the room was just barely large enough to fit it's queen sized bed, with shelves on the walls. Bathrooms, sinks and showers were all located in the cabin on the ground about 20 ft away. The cacophony of birds and insects flowed in through the screen windows on every wall.

Paradise, seriously.

That night, Theo fed us and we talked with an older couple named Julie and Ken about hiking the ATM cave (which they had done that day), and about Ken's hitchhiking and backpacking the world in the 60's. Iraq and Afghanistan were very different in the 60's. We slept with the sounds of the jungle lulling us to sleep...