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.