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.