Playing With Fire (article from Honduras This Week*)

The intersection between Kennedy Boulevard and Plaza Bancatlan was as normal on Tuesday night; the entrance to the Miraflores Mall was bustling with shoppers, and the air was filled with the horns and sirens of hundreds of impatient drivers crawling their way home from work through the thick traffic. One man, however, stood out from the crowd.

His wiry figure, silhouetted by the headlights behind him, stood stationary in the middle of the crossroads. His body was lit periodically by arcs of orange light as the balls of fire on the end of a pair of chains swung about him as if in some kind of chaotic elliptical orbit.

Cheers erupted from the open windows of the nearest cars as his burning satellites came to rest, hanging benignly by his side. He made his way between the lines of vehicles, his cardboard cup gradually filling with Lempiras, until he reached us, standing on the sidewalk. His young, sculpted, soot-covered face noted our presence, and that of the camera around my neck. He raised an eyebrow, grinned, and held out a greasy hand. “I’m Lenin… they call me the Fire Dragon.”

Street performers are relatively few in Tegucigalpa. Apart from the Mariachi Bands that occupy the sidewalks of Boulevard Morazan during the evenings, artisans like Lenin tend to follow the tourists. “Places like Valle de Angeles, Santa Lucia, the Bay Islands, that’s where the money is made. I make handicrafts – jewellery for instance, and I’m also a tattoo artist. These things are for the tourists. But on the streets of Tegucigalpa, it’s the fire breathing that gets people excited.”

Fishing a plastic bottle of translucent orange liquid out from his bag, Lenin strolled purposefully to the front of a queue of vehicles. “Diesel,” he said, grinning again as he excused himself. Taking a swig of fuel, he waved a flaming stick at the cars opposite, before holding it up to his lips. A ball of flame five feet long roared into life, bathing Lenin in a second-long firey glow. Cue gasps of delight from the transfixed passengers.

On the face of it, it looks like a dangerous business. As children, one of our first lessons is not to play with fire; too often we learn from experience. And like the rest of us, Lenin has been burnt before. “You have to be careful, not just of the flames but of the people watching. I was pushed by a drunk once as I was throwing the flame in a bar, and was quite seriously burned.”

But for Lenin, the pros of a life working on the streets outweigh the cons. “I am a Honduran, born in Tela, but during the 16 years I’ve been doing the fire show I’ve traveled all over Latin America. Next week I go to Panamá. It’s a luxury many Hondurans never experience, but for me, traveling is living.”

And with the travel comes the opportunity to help and work with the children of the streets. It is not the flames that pour forth from the mouth of the ‘Maestro de Fuego’ that are his most striking feature, but his attitude to Honduras’ unfortunates. “I was a working child in Tela. It’s a hard life. But with a trade, they have the opportunity to make life better. So I teach them what I know. I don’t want them asking for money so they can spend it on sniffing glue.” A youth stepped forward carrying the Maestro’s smoking chains. “Tommy is my apprentice at the moment,” explained Lenin. “He’s been with me a week. He’s already spitting fire!”

Lenin has a motto, a mantra by which he lives. I reflected on it as he and his student continued to provide the evening’s entertainment for the drivers of the Miraflores Mall intersection. ‘Live humble, think high’. His dream? To travel the length of the Americas, from Tierra del Fuego at the tip of Argentina to the frozen tundra of Alaska, and everything in-between. Let’s hope his journey shows that his philosophy is as contagious as his sooty grin.

*Honduras This Week is the national English-language newspaper of Honduras. I've been writing for them for a month or so.

Tegucigalpa

The airport at Tegucigalpa was described to me by the Travel Editor at the Independent – a man whose experience of such places is surely unparalleled – as the most dangerous in the world. Not because there are hordes of balaclava-sporting, gun-toting bandits running about, waiting to make off with innocent backpackers’ maestro debit cards, but because the city is ringed by a series of mountain ridges which make the descent into the central airport somewhat treacherous.

Like many sprawling Latin American cities, the poorer districts cling to these steep mountain-sides. On calm nights, the bright lights of the pueblos create a beautiful, shimmering topographic picture. On stormy nights, lightning surrounds the city, striking the peaks and creating flashes of light so bright it seems as though some huge photographically-inclined God is taking his holiday snaps. On the worst nights, however, things become tense. When it rains, it pours; and when it pours, the city begins to fall apart. Sinkholes appear in the roads as the poorly-consolidated earth begins to give way. In the worst cases, whole areas of the city collapse as the ground liquefies and gushes downslope. Exactly this happened in 1998 when Hurricane Mitch roared its way inland from the Caribbean, killing hundreds as one of the more marginal sections of society was washed from the mountainside.

As is the case in many Latin American cities, and across the developing world, the contrast between the rich and the poor is stark. As the beggars and the windscreen-washers sweat the evening out in their corrugated hillside shacks, the affluent turn up the AC as they watch Major League Soccer on ESPN in their gated, razor-wire protected apartments. Needless to say, my accommodation – with a middle-class family in a fairly safe suburb – is at the more comfortable end of the scale. Each morning I eat breakfast in a small courtyard garden adorned with orchids and populated (staggeringly, in a place as polluted as this) by hummingbirds.

I have no real cause to go to the centre of town – I’ve been there twice, and once is enough. It’s not a pretty place, and the streets have none of the smells, sights and sounds that make Delhi or Bangkok intriguing places. Only a few of the cultural curiosities of Latin America remain. The rest, in Tegucigalpa at least, have been usurped and obscured by Subway, Burger King, Pizza Hut, KFC, and countless other US-imports. Indeed, Tegucigalpa’s glistening night-time terrain is now notable for the sheer numbers of the vast, glowing visages of Colonel Sanders that stare down the major boulevards.

Leave the city, and the landscape changes. The colour returns, as do the cobbled streets and the interesting cultural nuances that make travel rewarding. References to western culture become rare, but you come across them here and there. On one road out of the city and into the mountain villages, I was taken aback to come across what could only have been a public lynching. A group of about 15 kids holding sticks were gathered around a man wearing red and blue, who was hanging by the neck from a tree. The children were battering the body ferociously with their weapons. A group of middle-aged adults looked on, chuckling, as if happily guiding their offspring through a brutal rite of passage. I expressed concern to the mother of the family I am staying with. She broke out in a fit of hysterical laughter.

This rite of passage was one of the assailants’ birthday. The unfortunate lynchee was a dummy stuffed with sweets. Traditionally, the piñata is a pot or other container filled with jelly babies, or whatever Hondurans traditionally treat their kids with. The idea is to beat the hell out of it until it empties its load onto the street, to the delight of everyone concerned. These days the vessel takes whatever shape the child in question wants. This child, quite clearly (on reflection), was bashing the sweets out of Spiderman. I passed the mangled effigy on my way back to the city, a sorry looking red and blue heap abandoned by the side of the road. If it had been a lynching, Spiderman would have had no chance. There certainly weren’t any sweets left.

El Salvador, briefly

Chicken Buses are a ubiquitous combination of dangerous and uncomfortable, but colourful and fun. They are old US School buses, and the distance between the backs of the seats is significantly less than the length of the femur of the average 5ft 10in man. At any time of day, Guatemalans and tourists alike are packed in like sardines, such that up to four people share each two-man bench, with one person occupying the gap between benches (in a seated position, held in place by the squeeze placed on him or her from the sides). This makes for an agonizing three-hour journey. This is especially the case when somebody sits on the nozzle of your ‘platypus’ tube-attached drinking vessel, resulting in the partial flooding of the back rows. Angry looks all round.

On the other hand, there is often the opportunity of sharing the journey with a flock of chickens, as the name of the service suggests. But they’re rarely loose and flying around. No Borat-on-the-subway mayhem here. Two or three birds are placed in a plastic washing-up bowl, which is then covered by a tea-cloth or some sort of netting. These squawking packages are then neatly tucked under the seats to be kicked repeatedly throughout the journey as anyone over 5ft 10in attempts to restore circulation to their lower legs. More glares from the three traditionally-dressed, plump Mayan women sharing my bench. In these situations, you can generally rely on their attention being deflected by the driver’s attempts to manoeuvre the vehicle around crumbling switchback mountain corners at 60kmph.

Tourism is becoming more and more developed in Guatemala. Some towns, especially the World Heritage Site of the former capital, Antigua, are packed full of gringos taking their Spanish courses and glugging locally-sourced mochas in the minimalist-decorated avant-garde cafes. We could have been in Madrid. But one side of the business they haven’t quite caught up with is health and safety. This makes, without exception, for a richer and more intense touristic experience. Forget about insurance, security, or whether or not you have had any heart problems recently. If you have the cash, you’ve got your place on the tour of Central America’s most active volcano.

Halfway up the basalt cone of Volcan Pacaya, the guide crouched down at a vent. He threw a few cocktail stick-sized twigs into the crack. They ignited. We stepped over them and carried on up the razor-sharp rock until we reached a point within four feet of a tumbling flow of lava, about 40ft from the top of the mountain. The searingly hot pocket of air surrounding us was filled with a sound like breaking glass as the newly solidified bits of red-hot brittle rock fell from the edges of the flow. Someone produced a packet of marshmallows and some long twigs. The journey down was slightly more difficult than the climb for some, because the soles of their shoes had begun to melt like the marshmallows they’d cremated over the molten rock.

El Salvador, in contrast, hasn’t quite got the gist of tourism just yet. It still suffers from its reputation as a dangerous country, only recently emerged from Civil War. In fact, the war finished almost 15 years ago, but the backpackers still stay away. As a result, it’s harder to make yourself understood speaking pidgin Spanish. One or two things, however, need no translation. Such as the ‘no handgun’ signs situated at the entrances to public places in every town, or the bullet-riddled windscreens of the rusting wrecks that populate El Salvador’s vehicle graveyards. These little peculiarities do nothing to set the mind of the Lonely Planet-clutching new arrival at ease. We didn’t stay long – a matter of days. In some respects I regret not giving the country more of a chance, but once we’d climbed another volcano (the 'Lighthouse of the Pacific' until it stopped erupting 50 years ago) and wandered around the deserted streets of Santa Ana, the second city, we decided to press on back to the crystal-clear comfort of the Caribbean.

Cloud Forests, Lakes and Volcanoes

Cloud forests are just that. Well named. Jungles in the sky, with all the richness of the tropics, but none of the warmth. To begin with, it was silently ethereal; walking through the wet, cotton wool-like mist, along the slippery mud-path of a mountain ridge. You have to look where you’re going too. The visibility reached as little as four metres – if you looked at the floor, chances were your head would come into painful contact with a previously unnoticed low-hanging branch or creeper. All but one of the trekkers in our group had, sensibly, decided to take a heavy poncho. With their hoods and their cape-like folds draped over their backpacks and shoulders, they appeared from the fog and disappeared again like something out of Harry Potter (I don’t know the name of those ghost-things, and I don’t really care).

Yes, to begin with, it was ethereal. Then the thunder started; massive claps that sounded like we were sitting amidst the scattering pins at the end of some giant bowling alley. With the thunder came the rain. A small stream formed in a gully in the creases of my hood, pouring down in front of my face. My waterproof shoes quickly filled up, so that my feet were immersed, squelching with each step. I have to wear these socks tomorrow. The hostel best have a radiator.

The 'hostel' was a collection of 8x8ft concrete cells, which we shared with a group of Guatemalan road workers. They stood on the roof in the pouring rain, happily watching the women peel off their wet clothes through the corrugated plastic skylights. The floor was hard. The workers bashed out classics, such as Celine Dion’s Titanic Theme and The Winds of Change by the Scorpions, from their antiquated cassette-playing equipment. There was no radiator.


Having analysed the societies of the ancient Maya – or at least their overgrown limestone cities – the lives of the ones still about are starkly different (I assume). We trudged through their highland villages between Guatemala's second city, Quetzaltenango, and Lake Atitlan. The lucky families had one-room breeze-block dwellings built by the Red Cross. Not quite the magnificent temples and plazas of old... Today’s Maya are the poor,
down-trodden highland farmers, whose political interests are not served by the government because they can’t reach the voting stations and, in any case, the vast majority can’t read. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Mayan campaigner, Rigoberta Menchu, will try to change that. But the reality is that those who vote in Guatemala are more likely to elect the former General whose military activities were an integral part of the indigenous killings that characterized the Guatemalan ‘80s.

Despite the situation of many rural Mayans in Guatemala, they seem, on the whole, to be happy. Legions of smiling, shouting children appeared from the fields of 4ft high maize each time we walked past. “¡Buenos dias!” and “¿Como estas?” replaced the standard third world requests for sweets and pencils. I peered into a small garden as I walked past on the path above. On the line were the traditional, multicoloured, intricately woven costumes worn by the Mayan women, drying in the intermittent sun. On the floor, a small child wearing only a ragged t-shirt happily shared the dirt floor with a pair of piglets and a puppy.



Lago de Atitlan was once referred to by Aldous Huxley as the most beautiful lake in the world. Why his word should be taken as being more valid than anyone else’s, I’m not sure. But many visitors seem, justifiably, to echo his words. It is situated in a vast volcanic caldera, produced by the collapse of an ancient magma chamber. The seismic nature of the region wasn’t lost on us. Sitting in a comedor in San Pedro La Laguna, I was annoyed to find that I had been brought a bowl of vegetable soup rather than the fried chicken which I ordered. But at that moment, a 7.2 earthquake hit a region of Guatemala about 100miles away to the west, and the soup spilled out of the bowl as it rocked across the table. It’s ok, I didn’t have to pay.

San Pedro, and also the larger town of Panajachel across the lake, has been full of gringos for about 30 years. That is because it is heaven-on-earth for a hippy. A sizeable population of bohemian Americans, Israelis and Brits, all with long beards, dreadlocks, and friendship bracelets around their ankles, wander the cobbled streets in a weed-fuelled daze. The local women do a tidy business sitting outside hostels selling basket-loads of ‘pan de banano’ (banana bread) to the hypoglycemic stoners. Life is, predictably, slow-paced. But the setting for that life is beautiful.

Jungle Ruins

The Guatemalan jungle is packed full of biting insects. But, to be fair, I had no right to expect any peace. Two days into a five-day trek through the rainforest, I would be lucky to escape at least the following potentially deadly illnesses: Malaria, Yellow Fever, Tick Bite Typhus, West Nile Virus, AIDS… actually I was probably safe on the AIDS front. But they all crossed my mind as I delicately removed a large tick that was expanding on my left calf as it drank my blood. Also occupying my thoughts was the fact that if extricated incorrectly, the contents of its stomach would be flushed into my bloodstream through the hole where its head would have been ripped off.

Once the offender had been sliced in half with a penknife, ending its short reign of epidemiological terror, I scratched my newest mosquito bite, and considered for the first time the possible implications of contracting Dengue two days hard trekking from civilization.

Well, civilization is a generous term. I wasn’t likely to get any treatment more reliable than a splash of iodine in the village of Carmelita, deep in the Petén forests. I shook out my boots once I’d swung from my hammock. Tarantulas hide in boots, and if I stood on one, Dengue was the least of my worries. My guide sheathed his machete and slapped a horse-fly that had had the poor foresight to land on his shoulder, removing one of its wings in brutal but satisfying retribution. It struggled on the dirt floor of our cabaña.

The purpose of this journey was to see a much older – and more developed – civilization than Carmelita; a city which, at its peak, would have had the populous edge on almost anything in modern-day Guatemala barring the capital itself and a couple of major cities. Known to many archaeologists as the cradle of the Pre-Classic Maya, El Mirador had its zenith around 100BC. It may have been home to 100,000 people. But these days it’s tough to get to. It’s not even easy to see, having accumulated 1100 years of tropical flora.

These guys built some seriously impressive buildings, but La Danta (The Tapir) is the biggest (that archaeologists and temple-robbers have yet discovered), climbing 77m from the forest floor. Only 20m or so is visible, the rest all but obscured by a thick layer of foliage. I scrambled up the jungle-clad, crumbling steps, feeling that with every step I was eroding the fragile remnants of an important archaeological record. Even at the top there was no rest from the insects, but the view was incredible. Far across the perfectly flat canopy, perhaps 30km away, the ruins of an outpost, Nakbé, rose from the vegetation. 20km to the south, a dark storm cloud shadowed the ruins of El Tintal. The rain was visible, blurring the horizon. To the east it was clear, and to the north another pocket of rain was watering another vast part of the Peten garden.

Looking up from my hammock, later on, I met the gaze of a howler monkey. It roared, as is their wont. Doubtless its thoughts ran along the lines of: ‘this idiot isn’t going to last five minutes in this insect-infested place. His mate over there isn't even doing him the courtesy of picking the bastards from his fur and eating them’. But I was lost in thought, oblivious to the plentiful fauna whose noise filled the tranquil quiet of the jungle. If it rained tonight, our makeshift shelter wasn’t really going to stand up to it. We’d have to find something sturdier. But then, the only real man-made cover for miles was El Templo de la Muerta, excavated by archaeologists some years previously. I didn’t fancy it. It was dark, claustrophobic, and to top it off, la Muerta refers to the remains of the dead woman they found when they dug the tunnel.

Tikal, 80km south of El Mirador and much more easily accessible from the island-town of Flores, is somewhat different. The majority of the larger temples have been cleared, revealing an impressive complex of ancient limestone structures. I watched the sun rise from the top of Structure IV. The surrounding forest was bathed in a dense mist, which occasionally thinned enough to glimpse the outlines of the other gargantuan temples that protruded above the canopy. Toucans, mot-mots, howler monkeys, and various other locals provided the soundtrack.

It was easier to picture Mayan society here than around the jungle-choked mounds of El Mirador. The rocky, 60m-high stairs down which captured enemies were thrown, their legs tied to their arms behind their backs, were there for all to climb. The engraved altar, at which the Gods were honoured with the sacrifice of the most beautiful virgins, stood exposed at the foot of the tallest temple. These elements of everyday Mayan life probably exist at El Mirador. But they're buried under a millennium’s worth of soil and vegetation.

In common with Tikal, the Honduran site of Copán, which boasts the most detailed glyphic record in the ancient Mesoamerican world, is a fully excavated, tourist-friendly journey into Mayan culture. Tame Scarlet Macaw parrots patrol the wire fences which form the city’s circumference. An on-site museum houses the original carved stelae, the limestone totems on which rulers such as ‘Smoke Monkey’ and ’18 Rabbit’ commissioned the description of the city’s history. But the hordes of small Latino school-trip attendees clambering around the Mayan ball-court detracted somewhat from my attempts to mentally re-create the ancient sport, the winners of whose matches were rewarded with the honour of being sacrificed. Even with the incentive of becoming a God myself upon my ritual death, I can’t imagine I would have been the most committed of players.

The Rastafarian Kingdom

He was almost folded in half, bent double at the waist, his face creased almost beyond recognition in his mirth at some as yet unrevealed memory. He’d not said a word for laughing for several minutes, and had broken down mid-anecdote. He was stoned, having just finished, over dinner, his fourth joint of the day.

He was our guide, David, a veteran rasta with dreadlocks down to his waist and, clearly, a plentiful supply of marijuana. And he was 'out of his tree'.

Somewhat of a local legend in San Ignacio - a mountain town by the Belizean border with Guatemala - and among travellers in Belize, he was famed for his hospitality. Ed and I were at his home, a set of beautifully constructed wooden shacks atop the jungle-choked remains of an unexcavated, and jealously guarded, Mayan City. Only accessible via canoe across the Rio Frio, his was a home in quiet seclusion, twenty kilometres outside of San Ignacio, surrounded by rich forest life.

The evening was passed under the glow of candlelight. David told his stories whilst I admired the decoration in his dining shack. A display of jade and pottery artefacts uncovered at his site adorned his shelves, in front of wooden walls covered in posters of Bob Marley. In the corner, grinning inanely, was a human skull wearing a green, yellow and red Rastafarian tea-cosy. A ‘friend’. The battery-powered CD player belted out No Woman, No Cry. Indeed, none of David’s ‘many’ wives appeared to be present. He had admitted his polygamy earlier on, whilst sitting by the side of a waterfall smoking a joint. “You got a woman, you got to play by the rules. You have many wives, you make the rules”. His logic was, I thought, sound.

On the table sat the remains of the unavoidable Belizean favourite - fried chicken, rice and beans. Belizeans live almost exclusively on this stuff. The only question one is really likely to be asked on entering a small Belizean restaurant is: “you want leg or breast?” As a tall, toothless and red-eyed rasta had told me in Belize City, “I only ever eaten this, an’ I turned out arright, eh?” I had felt compelled to agree. Looking pleased, he had offered to show us around the city. I declined, suggesting we couldn’t afford his services. It was the truth; I simply couldn’t afford to be led down a dark alley and robbed of my passport, traveller’s cheques and bank card. Perhaps I do him a disservice. He did offer us ‘good’ weed at very reasonable prices. He made no sale.


“Toucans, parrots – there’s some, you see them canoodlin’…” David reeled off a list of the tropical bird species living around his little kingdom. “Mot-mots – he a bird of paradise – hummingbirds… We don’t call this birdwatching here; the birds watch you.” The rasta’s 7am tour of the flora, fauna and archaeology of his ruins was beginning to sound like a Hitchcockian nightmare. Furthermore, the fumes coming off his first stick of the morning (a large one – it looked more like a traffic cone than a joint) were giving us a headache as we followed his steps.

He looked up, gazing in admiration at a tall mahogany. “Ain’t no pirates coming to take my trees”. Back in the day – the day in question being sometime around the end of the 18th century – logging mahogany was the trade of choice for the majority of Belize’s recently unemployed British pirate population. The British had promised the soon-to-be usurped Spanish rulers that piracy behind the protective reef would be clamped down upon. It had been, but the British actively supported the pirates’ new source of income in ostensibly Spanish lands. Nowadays, there is a total ban on trade in mahogany, but it is not well-enforced. We saw many a truck hauling the orange trunks up and down Belize’s highways.

After a fruit breakfast (fresh fruit in this part of the world is incredible - the result of not having been picked two weeks before ripe and stored on a boat) we were paddled across the river and jumped into an old pick-up headed back to San Ignacio. David's city disappeared into the forest. For now, at least, his idyllic realm and all its natural and archaeological subjects remain closed off to all but those who accept his offer of a temple-top hammock for the night. He lit up a blunt for the journey.

Caye Caulker

A wide grin broke across Charlie’s bearded, black face. Even underwater, the gold filling between his front teeth glinted, flashing like a lighthouse, lit by shafts of light as they penetrated the turquoise shallows of the Caribbean.

My third day on the Belizean island of Caye Caulker had, in common with the previous two, begun at sunrise. I had lain swinging in a hammock, tripod set up beside me, as the sun broke the horizon, bathing my wooden jetty and the coconut palms behind me in a soft, orange light. Now that same sun was beating down relentlessly on my exposed back, as I struggled to counteract my own buoyancy whilst admiring my guide’s own mastery of flipper-propulsion.

A frown suddenly developed behind the mask of Charlie’s snorkel, and his eyes diverted to the vast sting-ray cradled in his forearms. The fish, which measured a good five feet across, completely obscuring his wiry body, had accidentally attached itself to his chest as it sucked water through its mouth and into its gills. I quietly wondered what degree of provocation had been required to cause Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin’s assailant to propel its fatal barb into his torso, and slowly increased the distance between my own chest and the relevant appendage on this individual.

The 48 year-old captain of our yacht extricated himself from the ray’s bite, and allowed it to glide away towards the reef from which it had been coaxed. As I watched it go, I relaxed in the knowledge that I wasn’t going to become another unfortunate – albeit less ironic – casualty of this example of nature’s more placid creations. Charlie’s grin returned, allowing a group of bubbles to escape the corners of his mouth, growing as they made their way to the surface. I went up for air.

His attention drawn to a nearby coral, Charlie swam away, leaving me to marvel at the manatee whose slumber on the sea-bed had remained uninterrupted by Charlie’s exertions. We’d kept our distance from this walrus-like mammal, whose status as a protected species prohibited any interference on our part. We shouldn’t really have been there at all, but had come across her by accident as Charlie searched for less rare, but equally stunning species along the Belizean reef.

The Belizean sense of environmental stewardship is something that is, on the whole, admirable. Despite occasional accusations that many regions are protected only nominally, and that loggers and poachers go largely unpunished, 40% of the country’s territory is set-aside as National Park land. This includes significant portions of the second-longest coral reef in the world, which forms the edge of the limestone shelf that juts out into the Caribbean from the Belizean shore. I felt comforted by the knowledge that my tourism should, on balance, be beneficial in this respect.

A few moments passed, and the manatee stirred and swam away, disappearing into the aquatic distance. Charlie returned holding, by its dorsal fin, a four or five-foot long nurse shark. I stroked the rough, sandpaper-like skin, and began to reconsider that balance.


Back on the boat, Charlie chuckled as he examined the purple bruise on his chest which marked his intimate moment with the sting-ray. “She love Charlie!” he intoned in a thick, West Indian approximation of English. Kriol, the dialect-cum-language developed by the slaves of the western Caribbean, is so gramatically departed from the Queen’s English as to make it completely unintelligible to anyone but those who speak it. Thankfully, Charlie ‘translated’ most of his comments for his passengers’ benefit. The fact that he used almost entirely the same vocabularly in each of his explanations as he had in his original anecdotes, changing only the construction of his sentences and his speed, made me feel slightly foolish.

Allowing the jib to catch the westerly wind driving the tour company-owned yacht back to Caye Caulker, Charlie steered with his feet. His happy face dropped momentarily as his mind went back in time. “I had me own boot once, buh de hurricane got her”. Tropical storms are more-or-less the only thing that rock the boat of life on the Belizean Cayes, converting as they do the idyllic chain of palm-clad islands to virtual deathtraps. Caye Caulker was itself thrown into confusion in 1961, when Hurricane Hattie tore the 600m-wide island in two, ripping through the mangroves that protected the shore. Charlie’s yacht had succumb in 2000. It was clearly an unhappy memory.

His nostalgic reverie was soon interrupted by an idea. One could tell from the reappearance of his childish grin, as he pulled a series of large conches from one of the many storage places on the yacht. Short of bashing out a Garifuna tune (without the obligatory drums), I wasn’t entirely sure what he was planning. Such an aural infusion of French-Ghanian rhythm created by this slave-derived culture would not have been unwelcome, but once he had extracted a hammer and a large knife from the recesses of his cabin, it became clear that we were expected to eat whatever was inside these shells. After unceremoniously dismantling it, Charlie fished out the most bizarre-looking organism I have ever seen. Hacking away at the unfortunate – and still very much alive – grey and white, snail-like creature, he produced a bowl of nachos and conch salsa for the return journey. I was left wondering at what point, if at all, the mollusc had finally died. Whether or not the bits that had been thrown back into the sea were still cognizant, the white bits were quite satisfying.


I spent my last night on Caye Caulker getting horribly drunk to a selection of Bob Marley tunes. Perhaps it was the cheap beer or the local rum, but it struck me that it is entirely possible that only 20 or 30 reggae songs have ever been written, mostly by the late, great rasta, because all one ever hears is ‘jammin´’, ‘stir it up’ or ‘three little birds’.

The bar at the end of the island, The Lizard, was a perfect setting at which to say my goodbyes to the Caribbean. The waves lapped against the shore, returning the carlessly discarded empties back to the beach to be collected early the next morning by a handful of Belizean children after the cash-on-return. A thoroughly efficient system.

A barbecue at the end of the bar served up chicken and freshly caught snapper, as well as the slightly more expensive barracuda. The rum flowed well into the night, as did the reggae. At about 11 o’clock, and to my slight surprise, the American baseball that was being shown on the TVs above the bar was switched off, to be replaced by some shoddy Spanish porn. I observed absolutely no consternation among the bar’s increasingly inebriated population, and I wasn’t going to make a fuss. But the motion of the camera and the rhythm of the reggae didn’t fit, so I retired to my hammock, beer in hand. When it was empty, I decided that although my last few days, which could have been measured in the higher degrees of blissful lethargy, were indeed relaxing, the way to go now was towards a bit of activity and exercise.